Ben Carson’s Ridiculous 9/11 Answer

18 Sep, 2015 by Dick Morris

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I couldn’t believe my eyes or ears when Ben Carson was asked about what his response would have been had he been president on 9/11. I couldn’t believe his answer. He said that a better response than sending troops to Afghanistan to hunt down al-Qaida would have been to make an all-out effort to achieve energy independence.

Carson was only echoing what he wrote in his book “America the Beautiful”:

“After the 9/11 crisis almost everyone united behind President George W. Bush for a reason. Whether America’s ensuing steps into war in Afghanistan and Iraq will be seen as positive remains to be seen, but I can’t help thinking there may have been a better way to react that would not have cost us so many lives and financial capital. I believe that if the president had seized the moment and declared that we would become petroleum independent within the next 10 years as part of our efforts to strip terrorism of its resources, that business, industry, academia, & everyone else would have been foursquare behind him, and we would have been much further ahead in the fight against terrorism than we are today.”

So we are on notice. If terrorists attack America on our soil and kill 3,000 people, a President Ben Carson would not send in the troops. And our enemies are on notice, too.

This remarkable remark should rule him out as a presidential candidate. We needed to send in troops to keep al-Qaida on its heels — to keep the terrorists hopping from cave to cave, lest they be caught in the open and killed.

In the days after 9/11, nobody would have predicted that there would be no more attacks of that magnitude. It was our presence in Afghanistan that stopped al-Qaida from getting its act together sufficiently to pull off a sequel.

Energy independence is well and good. And it is now within our grasp. But it took the new technology of fracking and a great deal of energy conservation to achieve it. (We are using over 1 million fewer barrels of oil per day now than we did in 2000.) It took us more than a decade to get where we are. To see this as an adequate response to such an attack is absurd.

No more Ben Carson for me!

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