I suppose I should say something new about That Day. For the big anniversary, everyone else is giving it a try. But perhaps it’s more instructive to break open the 2001 time capsule and revisit what I wrote in the heat of the moment – admittedly numb and dumb, as was everyone else, about what was to come.

My Philadelphia Inquirer piece was labeled “news analysis.” It was designed to be a lofty freeze frame of a new presidency in crisis. In hindsight, however, it’s oh so very quaint. To bring this piece up to speed, it needs footnotes. You’ll find them at the bottom:

SEPT. 12, 2001 – This morning, George W. Bush begins the first full day of his new presidency, because yesterday terrorists blasted his old one to rubble.

Forget the tax cut (1), and the inspirational speeches on values (2) he was planning to give this fall. Forget his abiding interest in improving children’s literacy. Forget the whole domestic agenda, because, in the sobering months ahead, this president, a novice (3) at foreign policy, will be judged by the American people on how well he answers this question:

Can he make us feel safe again? (4)

Few of Bush’s predecessors ever faced such a daunting challenge. Pearl Harbor shocked the nation, but Americans knew in an instant who the enemy was – and where to find him. The Cuban missile crisis brought us to the brink of war, but, in the end, John F. Kennedy was dealing with a world leader who did not view suicide as a higher calling.

Americans always back their president when a crisis hits; even Jimmy Carter posted high poll ratings at the start of the Iranian hostage standoff. And Bush struck the predictable chords last night when he said, “These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of America’s resolve.”

But Bush has been pulled into the murkiest waters of foreign policy, a place where slogans such as “compassionate conservatism”(5) have no meaning. Americans will turn to him for reassurance; many will demand vengeance. The challenges that await him would test even the most seasoned national leader.

Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian who fled the U.S. Capitol building when the Pentagon was hit, said yesterday: “The terrorists attacked our safety, our economy, and our sense of mobility – a perfect strike against what it means to be an American. And this will require, from Bush, an incredible balancing act.

“He has to be resolute, but not precipitous (6). Americans like to believe in quick-fix remedies, but he can’t simply give in to people who have blood in their eyes. He has to somehow respond to what is, in effect, warfare against the United States, but he can’t turn us into a garrison state that poisons (7) what is good about our liberties.”

This also is a president who, as a candidate, assured journalists that if he didn’t know much about a foreign topic, he would simply ask his advisers (8). But, Lichtman said: “He has to communicate effectively with the people, in the weeks ahead, and his advisers can’t do that for him. Only a president is supposed to have a mystical bond with the people. He has to get it from within himself.”

Stephen Hess, an aide in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, said yesterday: “Bush has to show a greater presence, the situation requires it, and until now, he didn’t seem prepared to do that. That was deliberate, actually, out of a conviction that Bill Clinton was in everybody’s face too often.

“But now he needs to step up, because this is a nation that had always felt protected by oceans east and west, and friendly nations north and south. Now we realize how easy it is for professionals to pierce that ‘armor.’ And what will he do about that, in the long run?”

That question will dominate our politics after the rubble has been removed and the deaths have been tabulated. As California political analyst Bruce Cain said yesterday: “That goes right to the top of the list, and dwarfs everything else. That’s where the scrutiny of Bush will really get intense.

“From now on, everybody will become obsessed with terrorism, and the politicians will respond to that. People will demand heightened security. They’ll demand more money for beefed-up intelligence services (9). All this money has to come from the federal budget. Will Bush dip into the Social Security surplus” – as he hinted last month, when he said that such a move would be justified by war or a recession?

Analysts cite other complicating issues. Would a public demand for more antiterrorist measures diminish political support for Bush’s outer-space missile-shield proposal – an expensive project that would do nothing to combat the kinds of horrors inflicted upon the nation yesterday? Is there enough money to do both?

And while all that is happening, Bush will be expected to fashion some kind of acceptable response to attackers who are not easily deterred by American force. Assuming he finds the attackers (10).

His predecessors often struggled for the right response. Ronald Reagan, generally lauded today as a strong foreign-policy president, bombed five targets in Libya, including Moammar Gadhafi’s palace, after concluding in 1986 that Libya had backed the bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by GIs. Yet in 1982, after terrorists killed 239 Marines in Beirut, Reagan didn’t hit back. He responded by withdrawing all U.S. forces from Lebanon.

Bush’s response to this attack on American soil has to be strong enough to satisfy angry citizens – and particularly the conservatives within his Republican base. They have been complaining for months that Bush has been stingy with money for defense, that he has been too easy on Yasir Arafat, and that he coddled the Chinese after they knocked a U.S. surveillance plane out of the sky.

Yesterday, some conservative commentators demanded that Bush go after the countries that harbor terrorists, and Bush responded in his TV address last night, saying he would “make no distinction” between the attackers and their hosts. Assuming he finds the hosts.

But the danger for Bush, Lichtman said, “is that a president who wants to focus on domestic issues could get dragged into a new kind of intractable war. A similar thing happened to Lyndon Johnson. He wanted to be a great domestic president – and he got Vietnam.” (11)

ANNOTATIONS

(1) The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 deepened the budget deficit and accelerated income inequality between rich and poor.

(2) This was way back when Republicans lauded “values” such as honest moral character.

(3) OK, we knew this in advance. In 1999, he’d told columnist Maureen Dowd, “I’m smart enough to know what I don’t know.” Then, on the stump, he referred to Greeks as “Grecians” and referred to Slovenia as “Slovokia.”

(4) Invading a country that had no role in 9/11 did nothing to make us safer. More on that below. And the use of torture, most notoriously at Abu Ghraib, did nothing to make us safer. A massive Senate Intelligence Committee report later concluded that torture, rebranded by the administration as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” did not produce useful intelligence.

(5) This was way back when some Republicans truly believed it was compassionate to help immigrants and people of color.

(6) Speaking of precipitous, we later learned that on the evening of Sept. 11, a Bush adviser said that the military should not be used as a tool of revenge. Bush replied, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” Nine days later, in a meeting with religious leaders, he said: “I’m having difficulty controlling my blood lust.” He was already looking at Saddam Hussein in Iraq. See footnote #8.

(7) Speaking of poisoning our civil liberties, “Domestic intelligence programs have grown inexorably since 9/11, born out of fear of terrorism and sustained by laws and policies that allow government agencies to amass more data about more Americans in an effort to ferret out the few who might do harm.” Thanks to broad interpretations of the Patriot Act, the National Security Agency “collects hundreds of millions of electronic communications each year. While the surveillance must be targeted at foreigners overseas, massive amounts of Americans’ emails, phone calls, and text messages are scooped up in the process.”

(8) He asked his advisers about the wisdom of invading Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, long fixated on ousting Saddam, said yes. So did Donald Rumsfeld. So did Dick Cheney, the key promoter of lies about Saddam’s (non existent) weapons of mass destruction. Bush went along, pulling resources from the war in Afghanistan. As author Peter Bergen later wrote, “A bigger gift to Osama bin Laden was hard to imagine.” As former Bush aide Richard Clarke later wrote, “It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-distance mind control of George Bush, chanting ‘invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.'”

(9) Actually, the pre-9/11 intelligence services were good enough to warn Bush, repeatedly, about the looming dangers of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. We know now about the Aug. 6, 2001 item in the President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” but that item was the 36th time bin Laden or Al Qaeda had been mentioned in Bush’s PDFs. Bush told his Aug. 6 briefer, “All right. You’ve covered your ass now.”

(10) He did find attackers. At the tail end of 2001, Bin Laden and his circle were in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan, but they escaped because our military didn’t fully pursue them. Republican commentator Peggy Noonan later lamented, “What a richly consequential screwup it was.” Why didn’t our military fully pursue them? Because – and this will sound familiar – we wanted friendly Afghans to carry the fight. As one report later explained, “The United States relied almost exclusively on its Afghan allies to close off possible escape routes from the Tora Bora region. It is not clear that these allies had the same incentives as the United States to conduct the effort with dogged persistence. They did not have night vision equipment or cold-weather gear. Nor did they necessarily care if bin Laden was captured or killed.”

(11) And we got a 20-year war in Afghanistan. As Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a former coordinator of Afghanistan policy, has told The Washington Post, “we didn’t have the foggiest idea of what we were undertaking.” And an Army-Marine field manual, written way back in 2006, candidly admitted that “eventually all foreign armies are seen as interlopers and occupiers.” The big question is whether we’ll be any smarter in the future.