All the President's Men

Why the BBC's ‘War Room’ conceals more than it reveals

                     

Watching the BBC documentary 9/11:Inside the President’s War Room is a dispiriting and demoralising experience.  Even after two decades, the footage that we have seen so often is still shocking and also distancing: the deceptive softness as the second plane hits the south tower and disappears into the building; the Independence Day vaporising of the two towers; the clouds of dust and screaming crowds that seemed even then to reference so many science fiction and disaster films.

In Michael Mann’s film Manhunter, the serial killer tells one of his victims ‘I want you to feel awe.’ The perpetrators of 9/11 had a similar objective, in forcing their spectators to witness a global media event that has been endlessly replaced with each anniversary.

Inside the President’s War Room references all the ingredients of the ‘day that changed the world’ narrative that we have come to expect: the clear blue skies; the faces with hands on their mouths; the gradual realisation that what seemed at first to be an accident was actually deliberate.  As if this was not enough, the filmmakers have provided dramatic thrilleresque music to enhance the spectacle.

An ‘act of war’

All this has been seen before, but what is new is the documentary’s blow-by--blow account of how the US government perceived and responded to the attacks, in which George W. Bush and leading members of his administration speak for themselves about what they did and saw that day.

This is not without interest.  Unless you believe that Dick Cheney had facilitated the attacks from a secret hiding place, that the planes had missiles attached to them, or that the people who died on flights 93 and 77 were ‘crisis actors’, it is compelling to see Bush, Cheney, Karl Rove, Condoleeza Rice and other officials recounting what they saw and felt.

After six years of Trumpism, these politicians and officials almost seem normal and even human by comparison.  Age has withered these once-familiar faces, and age always confers a certain vulnerability and humanity even on politicians who were not known for these qualities in their prime. It’s interesting to hear their thought processes, behind the familiar scenes of Bush speaking at a Florida school or standing in the ruins of the Twin Towers.

At the same time the mostly unchallenged ‘witness to history’ format allows these participants to construct a narrative that suits them.  Bush and his officials clearly sense that this documentary is also part of the history that they were once part of, they have an obvious political and personal interest in representing themselves in the best possible light.

Even as they describe the confusion and chaos of that day, and the prevailing fear that other attacks were imminent, Bush and his team are providing a retrospective vindication of the decisions they took in response to these events.  The clue is in the title.  Bush and his team were in a ‘war room’ even though no one knew that day who they were at war with or what this war might entail.

Again and again officials describe how they instantly recognised the attacks as an act of war or a declaration of war, even when they had no idea who war responsible for them.  In looking back, Bush also appears to be simultaneously looking forward at his own place in history. He talks about ‘the president’ in the third person, and it’s clear that both he and his aides regarded the crisis as a test of character and presidential leadership that he passed with flying colours.

This is clearly how Bush wants to be seen – as a wartime leader who rallied his country in a historic crisis.  This may well be how he genuinely saw himself that day, but twenty years later this emphasis on ‘character’ and presidentiality leaves out a great deal.

Even in constructing this self-interested narrative, however, War Room inadvertently casts light on the flawed assumptions that led the Bush administration to declare an open-ended ‘war on terror’ with no coherent goals or exit strategy.  There is no indication that either Bush or his team questioned whether it might be dignifying these atrocities by categorising them as ‘war’, or the strategic implications of a global war on ‘terror’.

‘The continuous exhaustion of his own strength’

It is a fundamental tenet of military strategy to understand the aims of one’s enemies, and their strengths and weaknesses. In their haste to respond to al-Qaeda’s ‘act of war’, Bush ignored the fact the attacks were more precisely an act of ‘asymmetric warfare’, carried out by a non-state group.

In attacking symbols of American economic, political and military power, al-Qaeda offered no commensurate target in return, and no way that America could recover its lost aura of inviolability. Though the attacks caused no lasting ‘military’ damage, they were clearly intended as an act of provocation, intended to draw America into a debilitating conflict in which, as the nineteenth century Russian anarchist Sergei Kravchinsky once outlined ‘the strong is vanquished, not by the arms of his adversary, but by the continuous exhaustion of his own strength.’

Would a more calibrated and longterm combination of diplomacy, limited and targeted military action, law enforcement, and counterterrorism have been more effective in eliminating the network responsible than ‘war’?

There is no evidence of any such discussion in this documentary.  At one point Bush talks about his desire that day to bring the perpetrators ‘to justice’, but again and again he returns to war, not just against ‘the terrorists’ but against ‘those who harbour them’ – a prescription that amounted to a blank cheque not just for war in Afghanistan but against any state that allegedly ‘harboured’ al-Qaeda.

It’s not necessary to argue that the attacks were an ‘inside job’ to observe that there were members of the Bush administration who saw them as an opportunity. At one point Bush talks about the ‘very smart people’ he took advice from.  One would like to know who these people were and what they advised, and whether he took advice from anyone whose views didn’t reflect his own instincts.   One suspects that he didn’t.

Because even though Bush seems to be reflective and thoughtful, he is still crass enough to boast to his interviewer ‘I’m not much of a navel gazer, I guess you could say I’m a man of action’ as if these were the only two options available.  At the end of the programme, Bush remains absolutely unrepentant and even proud of his actions:

I made some big decisions, starting with the big thought of America being in war, and those decisions were mot made out of anger, they were made with a goal in mind, which was to protect the American people. I think I was right.

When the interviewer asks him if his actions made the world safer, the vulnerability and the humanity gives way to the old Bush smirk, and he replies ‘There wasn’t any other attacks on America.  We’ll let historians sort all that out.  Let’s just say I’m comfortable with the decisions I made.’

We don’t have to wait for historians to tell us that hundreds of thousands of people died in the wars of terror and in the explosion of terrorist attacks across the world that followed these wars, most of whom were not Americans.

The interviewer might have pointed out that there was no need for al-Qaeda to attack America again, because Bush had essentially given it the ‘war’ it wanted. And even if Bush is comfortable with the decisions he made, the grim history of the last twenty years demands a closer scrutiny than this documentary was willing to provide.