(Part of UPI's Special Package on Sept. 11)
WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The attacks on that September morning startled him, perhaps even shook him for a time and history may never know the truth.
But very quickly George W. Bush, an inexperienced president, just finishing the eighth month of what the media had already decided was an inauspicious presidency, knew his moment had come.
As brutal and devastating the attacks were, he could understand them. They were as clear as an old Texas story. The terrorists, bandits really, bearded and evil incarnate, had come out of dark mountain caves, swooped down on New York and Washington and killed innocent people.
In old time Texas when the murdering, pillaging bandits came out of the hills, you formed a posse and you went after them. If the townsfolk were scared or reluctant, the sheriff went after them alone. It was the generic movie plot of the American West and this president wanted nothing more than to be a Western man.
He had eschewed the advantages of an Andover, Yale and Harvard education, struck out in his car a quarter century before to the Texas oil fields. He liked the simple world of man-to-man, handshake deals, where you measured your man by looking him in the eye.
The awful action of Sept. 11 came then as almost a relief for Bush. There would no more complex briefings about NATO expansion or tricky estimations of the economy's future. No more snooty diplomatic meetings in Europe, where he felt like a country bumpkin, with the news media always waiting for him to stumble over a word or butcher syntax.
Where Bush's bluntness and sharp gibe had been criticized, he now found his pledge to "hunt down" Osama bin Laden and bring the al Qaida in "dead or alive" was applauded. He could dispense with what he calls the "nuanced" talk of Washington and the diplomatic world and say what he thought.
The fight would be goodness doing battle with evil, a simple and as easy to understand as a Sunday school lesson. In the wake of those awful deaths, the firm "God bless you" with which Bush ends virtually every address did not ring false and public prayer did not seem out of place.
George Bush is a man who can feel great personal empathy for other human beings. He is good with children, his and others, and he is good with people in crisis.
Both he and Laura quickly recognized that in those first days that people came together the way Americans had not done in decades. The selflessness of the rescue workers had touched something in the nation and this middle class couple from Midland, Texas, was perhaps better equipped to recognize it then most.
"We have been living in an age of self-absorption and self-indulgence," Laura told a National Press Club audience, "but the amazing thing is in the last weeks it has stopped. And we started to rethink things. We began to think not about what is wrong, but what is right in our towns and in our states and in this country."
On Sept. 20, barely nine days after the attack, Bush gave the most effective public address he had ever delivered to a joint session of Congress. British Prime Minister Tony Blair was in the balcony. From cynicism and partisanship, the world and Washington seemed to be coming together.
Republicans and Democrats had joined together on the steps of the Capitol earlier in the week holding candles and singing "God Bless America." The U.S. national anthem had been played at Buckingham Palace, on the streets of Paris, and at Berlin's Brandenberg Gate, and Bush had received calls of condolence from most of the world's leaders.
Bush declared his war on terrorism that night, not just in Afghanistan, not just against the perpetrators of Sept. 11, but across the world, committing U.S. power to fighting terrorists wherever they could be found.
"Those terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life," Bush said. "We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th Century."
He pledged the war against terrorism would be the sole priority of his administration, not some tentative, indecisive struggle like Vietnam, but a crusade as he viewed World War II. It would be the old allies again, the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes, leading a coalition.
The World War II analogy was appealing to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. They felt the threat they faced was on a scale of World War II. Couldn't an attack like Sept. 11 "decapitate" the government, Cheney anguished? The plots of novelist Tom Clancy suddenly seemed very real. Terrorists could destroy the Capitol, level the White House and plunge the military leadership into chaos.
The campaign in Afghanistan at first went easily, perhaps too easily. Bush put into action a plan devised under the Clinton administration. Special operations experts, at first CIA men and later the military, using amazing new munitions and reconnaissance technology, led a ragtag force of the Northern Alliance into swift victory over the Taliban.
By late fall, he had some of the most amazing approval ratings in recent presidential history. Bush was lauded by Americans, cheered by many world leaders who previously had opposed his go-it-alone foreign policy style, and even had formed a war friendship with Russia's Vladimir Putin that gave Bush an arms reduction deal and the ability to discard the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with impunity.
Putin had recognized that Bush's attack on Muslim extremists in Afghanistan could help him in Chechnya, where Russian troops been criticized for their violent repression of Chechnyan rebels, many of whom had trained or drawn support from Osama bin Laden. Quietly Putin had made available his country's contacts with the Northern Alliance that had helped the U.S. manage the warring tribal groups.
But even then there were dark political clouds on Bush's horizon. Sometime in late 2001 Osama bin Laden disappeared. Here was Bush knee-deep in a worldwide war and no talking head for the opposition. Damnably it wasn't clear whether bin Laden was dead or in hiding and the few al Qaida prisoners did not support the notion this was a threatening adversary. Once the Taliban had collapsed, who and where were the al Qaida?
Costly and relentless searches in the Afghan mountains by allied forces had netted little and by the spring the United States' biggest problem in Afghanistan was keeping the warring factions among the victors from killing each other and ending the new government.
At home the war was no less frustrating. A massive investigation by 4,000 FBI agents and scores of other federal cops had netted 131 arrests, only one a suspect in the actual Sept. 11 attack, and thousands of Star Chamber deportations where Muslim men were scooped off the street, held virtually incommunicado and deported.
The sometimes drastic proposals to protect the United States against terrorist attack flowing out of the Bush administration faced heavy resistance from liberal and civil rights groups. Bush won passage of the Patriot Act in the fall, which gave the Department of Justice increased electronic surveillance powers, but later ideas like "TIPS" -- which would have made mail carriers and other public servants who went into neighborhoods report to police on anything out of the ordinary -- were stopped by congressional resistance. In the case of TIPS, it was Texas Congressman Dick Armey, a loyal Bush supporter on all other fronts, who thought the idea too much like secret police informers.
Other plans like secret military tribunal trials were prepared, but quietly the administration has stepped back from using them.
In defending some of these proposals last month, a senior Justice Department official in a background session likened the war on terror to the American Civil War or World War II. In both those wars, the United States faced an adversary that like the terrorists could strike at Washington or another major city, but those adversaries had the power and the armed force to follow up a terror attack and invade the United States and destroy it.
Many around the country began to feel the danger of the terrorists was being overblown by the administration. A group of think tank experts in late summer issued a report saying that the administration had overblown the terrorism threat, but agreed that it was driven by a desire not to be blamed for a further attack.
Week after week, either the Justice Department or the White House office of Homeland Security issued warnings of terrorist plots, but at this writing, none of these plots had materialized.
Even as the national attention to terrorism dangers diminished and with it some of Bush's support, the president was faced with two other growing and connected problems: corporate wrongdoing and a shaken economy. The first corporate collapse hit the Bush White House in the fall when Enron Corp., headed by his largest single contributor, Ken Lay, collapsed.
Though the administration has established it provided Enron no favoritism, Bush was unable to reassure anxious investors.
It was in this atmosphere in January that the president made his stunning rhetorical attack on what he called the "axis of evil," Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
What ever else it did, the "axis of evil" gave the White House new villains, particularly Saddam Hussein, and new justifications for the giant homeland security program and increased intelligence and military operations, which Bush proposed.
Over the summer, Bush has kept a major rhetorical campaign to preserve support for the war on terror, but now, on the even of the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the vista before him is in many ways bleak.
At the beginning of the war on terror, Bush's approval ratings were so high that the Republicans felt it would help them sustain the control of the house and perhaps even retake the senate. Now the Republicans talk about how if Bush lost the House and the Senate, it would help him in win in 2004 because he could against the Democratic mishandling.
Bush has been unable to persuade Americans that his attack on corporate malfeasance is for real and even his blunt threat to "hunt down" and prosecute erring executives has not changed that. He found himself in summer defending his own corporate history and that of Cheney.
As Bush began to consider a unilateral attack against Iraq over the summer, he found himself as criticized abroad and in the Congress as heatedly as he had often been in the weeks before Sept. 11, 2001. The idea of the president ordering an attack on Iraq without United Nations or congressional approval found Bush openly challenged by German President Gerhardt Schroeder, one of the United States' strongest allies, opposed by many in his own party and even chided by the three most powerful foreign policy figures in his father's cabinet, former Secretaries of State James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger and retired Air Force Gen. Brent Scowcroft.
The president on Sept. 12 planned to go before the United Nations to try to gets its backing to pressure Saddam.
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(This analysis is part of UPI's Special Package on the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks).
