Former President George W. Bush delivered a rare comment Wednesday as Americans marked 25 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, saying Americans “fail to heed the lesson of 9/11.” “Our nation occasionally goes through periods of isolationism, where the attitude is, ‘Well, we have too many problems at home. So who cares what happens abroad?'” said Bush, who was not yet eight months into his first term when the attacks occurred. “What it really means to me is that they simply don’t pay attention to the lessons of 9/11, because what happens abroad matters for our national security at home.” Bush discussed this at his presidential library in Dallas with Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser at the time of the attacks and later became secretary of state. He said that since people are “fighting tyranny, it makes sense” for the United States to get involved. “We don’t have to send troops,” Bush said. “We should at least support them and support them because this is what we went through 250 years ago. And again, it’s the belief that everyone wants to be free and we saw that in Afghanistan.” Bush launched the war in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and later supported the development of a democratic government after years of humanitarian abuses by the Taliban. But the conflict dragged on for 20 years, becoming America’s longest war, until the United States withdrew and Afghanistan returned to Taliban rule in 2021. Bush said he disagrees with the views of some Americans who say people there “don’t know the difference” about what it’s like to live in freedom. “Of course they know the difference,” Bush said. “Girls who go to school for the first time in their lives know the difference. Women who become doctors and teachers know the difference between a free society and a tyrannical society. And, unfortunately, these women who are beginning to realize their full potential no longer have the opportunity to realize it.” Bush recalled Wednesday that he had been visiting an elementary school on Sept. 11, 2001, when his then chief of staff, Andy Card, told him about the attacks. At that moment, “I became a wartime president,” Bush said. “This was a war, and the job of the president, the country and his team is to unite the nation and do whatever is necessary to protect our people.” Bush and Rice recalled that on 9/11, “every plane had become a missile,” so there were orders for all planes to land or they could be shot down. They said then-Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta was “trying to land planes on a notepad” and were concerned whether Flight 93 had been shot down by the U.S. military, although that did not turn out to be the case. The plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers tried to wrest control from the hijackers. “There was a horrible moment where the vice president was still trying to get confirmation of what had happened, and for about 10 minutes we thought we had shot down a civilian airliner,” Rice said. “And that to me always represented how difficult the decisions were that had to be made under a lot of pressure.” Bush said that after the attacks, he “felt like there was a lot of trauma,” but he didn’t realize “how bad it was until I got there.” He visited and gave a speech at Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center, on September 14, 2001, standing amid the rubble with first responders. He said Wednesday that helping the country return to normal was his top priority. Then-President George W. Bush speaks with rescuers, firefighters and police at the site of the World Trade Center attacks on September 14, 2001. Eric Draper / White House / Getty Images / The White House “I didn’t want us to lose our souls,” Bush said. “I wanted, as we defended our freedoms, for people to remember how valuable they are.” He also recalled how he visited a mosque shortly after the attacks “because I was deeply troubled by stories of women of color being harassed in shopping malls, particularly in Michigan.” “It became clear to me that this is an ideological struggle, which is how I saw it, and we gave up one of the most important parts of our ideology, which is the freedom to worship the way you want to worship,” he said. “Suddenly the enemy had a victory, and that was part of my thinking.” Bush and Rice also recalled how they had to adopt a “9/12” mentality because “we needed to go on the offensive” to prevent another attack. “People now don’t understand the heaviness of the days after 9/11 in trying to protect the country,” Rice said. More from CBS News Go deeper with The Free Press in:
