The events of 9/11 and what followed could have been framed any number of ways, but the president chose to call it a “war on terrorism”—a global clash between mighty forces that can end only in victory or destruction—and his administration has stuck with that frame ever since. “The civilized world faces unprecedented dangers,” he declared in the January 2002 State of the Union address. “Unless we act to prevent it, a new wave of terrorism, potentially involving the world’s most destructive weapons, looms in America’s future,” the president’s National Strategy for Homeland Security warned in 2002. “It is a challenge as formidable as any ever faced by our Nation. . . . Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.”
In the 2003 State of the Union address, the president said the fight against terrorism was the latest in a succession of struggles against “Hitlerism, militarism, and communism,” and that, “once again, this nation and all our friends are all that stand between a world at peace, and a world of chaos and constant alarm.”
In 2006, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff said in a speech commemorating the fifth anniversary of 9/11 that the United States had emerged “from the Cold War and the struggles of World War Two” only to “face a new challenge that has every bit as much danger as the challenges we have faced in prior decades.”
In 2007, the White House Web site called the 9/11 attacks “acts of war against the United States, peaceful people throughout the world, and the very principles of liberty and human dignity.”
The Bush administration hammered these themes month after month, year after year. Tens of millions of Americans had a powerful, psychologically grounded sense that terrorism was a grave personal threat. That’s what Gut told them. Head could have intervened, but it didn’t. Why would it? The administration said Gut was right. The nation—even civilization—was in jeopardy.
The failure of the administration to put the risk in perspective was total. The president never said that, as serious as terrorism is, it does not pose a significant risk to any one person. He never said, “Calm down.” He never said, “You’ve got a better chance of being killed by lightning.” Neither did any other major politician, Republican or Democrat. In June 2007, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg came close. “There are a lot of threats to you in the world,” he told the New York Times. He rattled off a few, including heart attacks and lightning strikes. “You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life!” The sentiment is noble, but Bloomberg essentially ignored probability by lumping together heart attacks—a significant risk for most people—with the extreme improbability of death by lightning strike and terrorist attack. Only John McCain specifically instructed Americans to pay attention to probability: “Get on the damn elevator! Fly on the damn plane! Calculate the odds of being harmed by a terrorist! It’s still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal wave.” Unfortunately, McCain made this daring statement only in a 2004 book. His public statements, before and after, stuck to the standard script of American politics: We are at war against a mighty enemy.
The United States was in a literal war within a year and a half of 9/11, but the enemy in that war was Saddam Hussein, not Osama bin Laden. There is no credible evidence that the Iraqi dictator had anything to do with 9/11, but there are indications that top figures in the Bush administration were looking for an opportunity to depose the Iraqi dictator when they entered the White House in January 2001, and it is well established—not least by Richard Clarke, the White House’s terrorism chief—that the administration launched efforts to pin 9/11 on Hussein even before the smoke had cleared at Ground Zero. The key to accomplishing both those objectives was the threat of terrorists getting hold of weapons of mass destruction.
The narrative was already clear by the time the president delivered his first State of the Union address, on January 29, 2002. “As we gather tonight, our nation is at war. Our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers,” Bush began. “Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. ” Bush also singled out Iran and North Korea. “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”
The same theme appeared in the infamous “Downing Street Memo,” a secret British document prepared in July 2002 that was leaked after the war. In the memo, the head of MI6, Britain’s external intelligence service, reported on his discussions in Washington: “There was a perceptible shift in attitude,” he noted. “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
By the time of the next State of the Union address, in January 2003, the administration was preparing to invade Iraq and the president’s tone was as intense as a Tom Clancy novel. “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own. Before September 11, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses, and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those nineteen hijackers with other weapons and other plans—this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. . . . We will do everything in our power to make sure that day never comes.”
For Gut, the scenario sketched by the White House was frightening on two levels. First, there was the complexity of the story. Saddam Hussein could develop weapons of mass destruction; he could give them to terrorists; they could use them to attack the United States. As we saw earlier, every link in a chain of events has to happen for the final disaster to occur, and for that reason the more complex a scenario is the less likely it is to come to pass. But that’s not how Gut judges stories like these. If one of the links in the chain strikes us as typical—in the sense that an earthquake is typical of California or an invasion of Poland is typical of the Soviet Union—it will trigger the Rule of Typical Things and Gut will conclude that the whole scenario is more likely to happen than logic would suggest. The “typical” element in the story told by the administration was obvious. “Can anyone doubt that had Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda possessed weapons of mass destruction, they would have been used on September 11 instead of hijacked airliners?” wrote Richard Lessner, the executive director of the American Conservative Union, in the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine. Yes, Gut would say, that fits. And so the scenario felt more plausible than it should: Gut is always a sucker for a good story.