Former President George W. Bush gave rare remarks Wednesday as Americans commemorate 25 years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, warning that the country is failing to absorb what he sees as one of the day’s central lessons.
“Our nation occasionally goes through isolationist periods, where the attitude is, ‘Well, we’ve got too many problems at home. Therefore, who cares about what happens overseas?'” said Bush, who had been in office for nine months when the attacks unfolded. “Which really means to me they just don’t pay attention to the lessons of 9/11, because what happens overseas matters to our national security at home.”
Bush made the comments during an appearance at his presidential library in Dallas alongside Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as national security adviser on Sept. 11 and later became secretary of state.
The former president said that when people are “struggling against tyranny,” there is a meaningful role for the United States to play.
“We don’t have to send troops,” Bush said. “We ought to at least stand with them and stand beside them because this is what we went through 250 years ago. And again, it’s a belief that everybody wants to be free and we saw that in Afghanistan.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush launched the war in Afghanistan and later backed efforts to build a democratic government following years of humanitarian abuses under the Taliban. The conflict ultimately lasted two decades, becoming America’s longest war, before the U.S. withdrawal and Afghanistan came under Taliban rule again in 2021.
Bush also pushed back on the argument made by some Americans that people in Afghanistan “don’t know the difference” between life under freedom and life without it.
“Of course they know the difference,” Bush said. “Young girls going to school for the first time in their lives know the difference. Women becoming doctors and professors know the difference between a free society and a tyrannical society. And sadly, these women who begin to realize their full potential no longer have a chance to realize their full potential.”
Bush recalled on Wednesday that he had been visiting an elementary school on Sept. 11, 2001, when his then-chief of staff Andy Card told him about the attacks.
In that moment, “I became a wartime president,” Bush said. “This was a war, and that the job of the president and the country and his team is to rally the nation and to do what’s necessary to protect our people.”
Bush and Rice recalled that on 9/11, “every plane had become a missile,” so there were orders for all planes to land or they could be shot down. Then-Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, they said, was “trying to land planes on a legal pad” and they worried about whether Flight 93 had been shot down by the U.S. military — though that did not turn out to be the case. The plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers tried to wrest control from the hijackers.
“There was this horrible moment where the vice president kept trying to get confirmation as to what had happened, and for about 10 minutes, we thought we’d shot down a civilian aircraft,” Rice said. “And that always to me represented just how hard the decisions that you had to take under a lot of pressure.”
Bush said that in the aftermath of the attacks, he “had a sense there was a lot of trauma” but didn’t realize “how bad it was ’till I went there.”
He visited and gave a speech at Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center, on Sept. 14, 2001 — standing amid the wreckage with first responders. He said Wednesday that helping the country returning to normal was his highest priority.
Eric Draper / White House / Getty Images / The White House
“I didn’t want us to lose our soul,” Bush said. “I wanted, as we defended our freedoms, I wanted people to remember how precious they are.”
He also also recalled how he visited a mosque shortly after the attacks “because I was deeply concerned about stories of women of color being harassed at shopping centers, particularly in Michigan.”
“It became clear to me that this is an ideological struggle, which is what I viewed it as, and we forego one of the most important parts of our ideology, which is the freedom to worship the way you want to worship,” he said. “All of a sudden, the enemy has won a victory, and so that was part of my thinking.”
Bush and Rice also recalled how they had to shift to a “Sept. 12” mentality because “we needed to go on the offense” to prevent another attack.
“People now don’t understand the heaviness of the days after 9/11 in trying to protect the country,” Rice said.
