During a visit to Israel, President Biden mixed expressions of sympathy and support with advice not to repeat the American post-9/11 mistake of making bad decisions in the heat of anger.
Fox News, in a casting decision not unlike bringing the captain of the Titanic to explain why you should never warn ship captains to steer away from icebergs, brought on Ari Fleischer to express indignation.
Fleischer, George W. Bush’s former press secretary, used to commemorate 9/11 annually by livetweeting the day’s events. He stopped only after signing a deal to represent Saudi Arabia last year. (Fleischer insisted the timing was coincidental). But it is important to understand that Fleischer continues to see the aftermath of 9/11 as a high point of bold leadership rather than the prelude to catastrophic mismanagement. And as one of the leading minds in this inspiring episode, he felt the need to smack down Biden for invoking the sacred day as something other than a model of geopolitical wisdom and strategery.
Biden’s suggestion that Israelis should not make big decisions when angry seemed to make Fleischer visibly enraged.
“When he said that Israelis should not be consumed by rage? Who the hell does he think he is?” he demanded. Fleischer pointed to the actions of American allies after 9/11 as the proper course.
“I sat in on every summit meeting with foreign leaders when they came to the U.S. after 9/11 and met with Bush,” he recounted. “Not one said to Bush the Americans shouldn’t be consumed with rage. Instead they just came to support us.”
Now, a viewer who understood the disastrous outcome of that episode might be wondering if the American allies should have done more to warn us away from letting our grief drive us into a world-historical blunder. But to Ari Fleischer, the post-9/11 atmosphere — which coincides with the period in American life when his power and prestige were at an apogee — is perfection itself, and any deviation from it is presumptively wrong and immoral.
