The Bush Legacy: He Kept Us Safe from Terrorists and Tigers

There seems to be a general consensus in the mainstream media that, whatever one thinks of his presidency overall, President George W. Bush indisputably kept us safe from terrorism after 9/11. There are some notable exceptions, including commentators like Keith Olbermann, who regularly points out the absurdity of giving Bush credit for keeping us safe since 9/11, while absolving him of responsibility for that horrific event, but they are essentially confined to unabashedly liberal media sources. I have heard, on more than one occasion, anchors of purportedly objective cable newscasts say, between news items, something to the effect of "whatever you think of President Bush, he has kept us safe." An opinion-piece written on behalf of the White House and printed in USA Today makes the following claim: "The primary responsibility of the president is to keep American citizens safe. By that standard alone, President Bush has achieved success." In an interview, New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman said the following:

There are many terrible handoffs the Bush administration, many many, uh, are leaving for President Obama. But there is one overriding large one -- there has been no terrorist act in this country since 9/11. And I think that is a very sobering, weighty handoff for this administration.

Whenever I hear these claims, I think of an old joke, whose details I can't recall, but which goes something like this: Two friends are walking down a city street talking. One of them stops on every corner and spins around three times. Finally, his friend asks him "Why are you doing that?" "To prevent tiger attacks" he responds. "But there are no tigers in the city!" the friend says, to which he replies "Works pretty well doesn't it?"

The joke illustrates the often blurred, but highly significant, distinction between correlation(I use the term in the common sense) and causation. It seems to be taken as a given in America that most people will fail to make this crucial distinction. For example, according to Politico, New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny said the following regarding Obama's reelection prospects: “It’s hard to imagine that he could be reelected if the economy’s in the exact same position four years from now.” Mr. Zeleny is probably right, but implicit in his remark is the assumption that people will attribute a poor economy to Obama's policies, deservedly or not.

President Bush claims to have kept America safe since 9/11, and the media has basically accepted this claim. Why wouldn't they? After all, it is undisputed that there has not been a major terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, and Bush has been President the whole time! The distinction between correlation and causation is clearer in some situations than in others. In some, like that in the joke above, the absurdity of conflating them is so apparent that an attempt to do so serves as a punchline. In contrast, carefully controlled scientific studies can justify a reasonable inference of causation from correlation, and the two are easily confused. Superficially, President Bush's claim appears more like the latter than the former.

When trying to determine whether a specific correlation justifies an inference of causation, two important factors to consider are the strength of the correlation, and the existence of a plausible connection between the correlated phenomenon. In the situation described in the tiger joke, there is apparently a perfect correlation between the two events: 100% of the days the friend spun around on every street corner there were no tiger attacks. The reaons this does not justify the friend's belief that his behavior is the reason for the lack of tiger attacks are that closer examination of the apparent correlation would reveal that before he started his strange behavior, there were also no tiger attacks, so there would be no correlation between his failures to spin around on street corners and tiger attacks; and, of course, that there is no plausible relationship between the two factors.

If this type of analysis is applied to the proposition that President Bush is the reason there have not been any terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11, it can be seen that it is not a much more plausible claim of causation than that made in the joke, even if one sets aside the obvious problems with leaving 9/11 itself out of the analysis. First, there is not a pefect correlation between Bush being President and the absence of terrorist attacks after 9/11. Recall the Anthrax attacks in October of 2001. Comparing Bush to his predecessor also undermines the purported correlation, as there were not many terrorist attacks in the United States while Bill Clinton was President. In fact, even without Bush as President, there was only one major terrorist attack on U.S. soil after the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing (it seems only fair to waive Clinton's responsibility for this if we're waiving Bush's for the 9/11 attacks). Second, as in the joke, there is no plausible connection between Bush being the President and the absence of terrorist attacks post-9/11. Undoubtedly, certain changes in law enforcement and airplane security have made us safer, but it can't be seriously argued that these largely common sense measures would not have been taken by a different president. As Paul Abrams details in the Huffington Post, there were some apparently obvious security measures which President Bush failed to take, such as inspecting shipping containers, and the actions he took which were not common sense, in particular his entire foreign policy, were actually counterproductive.

If Bush is to be given credit for keeping us safe after 9/11, why stop there? I haven't been attacked by a tiger once since he's been president, and while I don't know of anything he's done to prevent tiger attacks, I also know of nothing he's done to encourage them, so he deserves at least as much credit for this accomplishment as for keeping us safe post-9/11. I suggest that efforts to salvage his legacy focus more on his prevention of tiger attacks, Viking pillaging, and smallpox outbreaks, and less on his keeping us safe from terrorists post-9/11, as I started watching the news a lot more after 9/11, and have continued to do so, and am pretty sure that this is the real reason we haven't been attacked again.