Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
Again; attention, national energy, time was wasted by looking outward at a distant and pretty marginal (yet inflated) problem instead of bundling that for a domestic breakthrough effort.
It was difficult to argue in Sept 2001 that the problem was marginal or inflated. It looked more like what it was: a serious problem that had been swept under the rug for too long. Possibly the reaction was excessive and misdirected, but there's little doubt that the problem tself had been ignored for way too long.

The same can be said of the economic issues, many of which were stretched to near breaking in the dysfunctional economic policy environment of the 1990s, a time relatively free of jingoism and external entanglements. By the time Bush took office the economy was in such a marginal state that it's difficult to see how a "domestic breakthrough effort" could have been managed. Bush's economic and foreign policies were dominated by attempts to deal with a horde of chickens coming home to roost. Those problems were undoubtedly mismanaged in many ways, but there was little opportunity for proactive policy, and it's hard to say what that administration would have done if given the opportunity for proactive rather than reactive policies.