George W. Bush used the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to argue that Americans have not absorbed the lesson he thinks came out of that day. Speaking Wednesday at his presidential library in Dallas with Condoleezza Rice beside him, Bush said the country still goes through isolationist periods even though what happens overseas can shape security at home.
He was not yet eight months into his first term when the attacks hit. That day, Bush said, he was visiting an elementary school when Andy Card told him what had happened, and he said the moment turned him into a wartime president. Rice, who was serving as national security adviser at the time, said the response moved in minutes from uncertainty to the fear that the United States might have shot down a civilian aircraft.
Bush said Americans “don't pay attention to the lesson of 9/11,” then tied that warning to the war in Afghanistan and to the decision to stand with people fighting tyranny abroad. He said the United States launched the war after the attacks, fought there for 20 years, and withdrew in 2021, when Afghanistan came under Taliban rule again. He also argued that young girls going to school for the first time, and women becoming doctors and professors, know the difference between a free society and a tyrannical one.
The former president’s case was sharper than a memorial recollection. He said the country should not shrug at overseas violence because “what happens overseas matters to our national security at home,” even as he framed America’s role as one of support rather than occupation. That is the contradiction at the heart of his remarks: a president who cast 9/11 as proof that distant events can reach home, then warned that the public has grown too willing to look away from that lesson.
Bush and Rice also revisited the confusion of that morning, when every plane was treated as a potential missile and orders went out for aircraft to land or be shot down. They said Norman Mineta was trying to track the planes on a legal pad, and both recalled fearing that Flight 93 had been downed by the military. Rice said there was a “horrible moment” when they thought a civilian aircraft had been shot down for about 10 minutes, a memory that underscored how quickly the day turned into a crisis of seconds and guesses.
For Bush, the anniversary speech was also a return to the beginning of the story he has told for years: Ground Zero, where he spoke on Sept. 14, 2001, after the attacks had already remade his presidency and the country’s foreign policy. Twenty-five years later, he is still making the same argument, but with the added weight of Afghanistan’s end state. The unresolved question is not what happened on 9/11. It is whether the country has any appetite left for the warning Bush says came with it.
