Hindsight

It's striking how critics are willing to operate on hindsight, shamelessly, and apparently without feeling the slightest pangs of guilt.

The media today, for example, is full of stories about how screwed up and incompetent the response to 911 was in the first minutes of the attack. There were all kinds of problems getting fighter jets scrambled into position to shoot down the airliners before they could crash into the WTC and Pentagon.

Let's be realistic. The way history actually works is that, as a practical matter, some things first have to happen in order to make other things possible. It is only the fact that those planes caused the death and destruction they did that now makes it possible to shoot one down in a similar situation.

Who knew whether that first plane was actually going to crash into the WTC? At what point in its flight path could anyone have concluded that beyond a reasonable doubt? If it had been shot down, the impeachment of Bush would have been cranking up before the bodies of the passengers had hit the ground. Everything is different now, but only because of hindsight of how things proceeded that day.

Byron