George W. Bush used the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to deliver a blunt warning: Americans, he said, do not pay attention to the lesson of 9/11. Speaking Wednesday at his presidential library in Dallas with Condoleezza Rice, the former president argued that the country still cycles through isolationist moods and forgets that what happens overseas can reach home.
The timing gave the remarks their weight. With Americans marking 25 years since the attacks, Bush revisited the worldview that shaped his presidency and said the United States ought to stand with people struggling against tyranny, even if it does not send troops. He said he saw freedom in Afghanistan and rejected the idea that people there could not tell the difference between liberty and repression, pointing to young girls going to school for the first time and women becoming doctors and professors.
His warning was not abstract. Bush said, “We don’t have to send troops,” but added that the United States should “stand with them and stand beside them” because people want to be free. That argument reaches back to the aftermath of 9/11, when Bush said he was visiting an elementary school and heard from Andy Card that the attacks were unfolding. “I became a wartime president,” he said, a line that still frames how he sees the link between danger abroad and security at home.
Rice helped pull the audience back into that day. She and Bush recalled that every plane became a missile in those hours and that all aircraft were ordered to land or could be shot down. Rice said there was a moment when they thought they had shot down a civilian aircraft, and for about 10 minutes they believed Flight 93 may have been hit by the U.S. military. Bush and Rice also recalled Norman Mineta trying to land planes on a legal pad, a detail that captured how improvised the response was.
The friction in Bush’s message is plain. He still argues that events overseas matter to national security at home, yet the war he launched in Afghanistan lasted 20 years and ended with U.S. withdrawal in 2021 and Taliban rule returning. Bush said he had sensed trauma after the attacks, but he did not realize how deep it ran until he went to Ground Zero and gave a speech there on Sept. 14, 2001. That is the burden hanging over his warning now: the lesson he says Americans missed is the same one the last 25 years have made harder to defend.
For Bush, the anniversary was not a look back so much as a claim that the old warning still applies. The unanswered question is whether a country that has lived through Afghanistan, withdrawal and the return of Taliban rule is more likely to hear it this time.
