All it took was a morning, less than that really, to alter world events for the decade, or probably even the century. The morning, of course, was September 11, 2001, when followers of Osama bin Laden hijacked four airplanes and managed to crash two of them into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. Had the hijacking of the fourth plane not been interrupted by its heroic passengers, it might have been flown into the White House or the Capitol Building. By the time the hijackers had completed their tasks, more than 3,000 people were dead. Hundreds of thousands would follow over the next six years as a direct result of 9/11.
The World Trade Center towers on Sep. 11 2001
The new decade was greeted with intrepidation unless you had been in the business of preparing for Y2K; there were fortunes to be made in frightening people into Y2K-ready schemes, all of which proved absolutely useless when midnight rolled around and nothing out of the ordinary occurred.
Once the Y2K fright became history, the country got down to the business of the presidential election. On the GOP side, Texas Governor George W. Bush earned the nod over John McCain. He chose Washington insider Dick Cheney as his running mate. The Democrats chose Vice President Al Gore. He picked Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman as his VP. The general election was one of the tightest in history. It came down to which candidate would win Florida. A divided Supreme Court ultimately handed the state toBush. The Texas governor became the forty-third President, despite losing the popular vote to Gore and despite widespread evidence of fraud on his behalf.
The Clinton Administration was still in office until January 2001, however, and the President's lame-duck status didn't prevent him from trying to bring peace to the Middle East. A second Camp David conference was held, but this time Yasser Arafat and Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak failed to reach an agreement. The Administration also did battle with anti-Castro Floridians after a Cuban refugee family refused to surrender custody of 8-year-old Elin Gonzalez to his Cuban father. The standoff ended following a government raid on the family's home that freed the child. The Administration then arranged to return him to Cuba.
Soon after Bush's inauguration, the dot-com crash put an end to the runaway bull market. The new Administration also began receiving reports about mysterious goings-on among terrorist elements loyal to Osama bin Laden. For the most part, the warnings were ignored.
Within weeks of the attacks, President Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan with the intention of toppling the Taliban and capturing bin Laden. The Taliban were pushed out of the capital, but they remain a presence in Afghanistan, using the mountains of Pakistan to hide as they plan their attacks.
The Administration also targeted Iraq, one of three nations (the others being Iran and North Korea) that he called the "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address. The President said Iraq's President Saddam Hussein supported world terrorism and was secretly building weapons of mass destruction. United Nations arms inspectors, headed by Hans Blix, found no evidence to support the charge, but Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated it during an influential address before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. On March 20, American troops began the invasion with help from Great Britain (whose Prime Minister Tony Blair was a close ally of President Bush) and several other nations. The forces reached Baghdad within weeks. On May 1, President Bush stood on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln before a sign that declared "Mission Accomplished" and stated that the major combat stage of the war had ended. He was wrong. While a heavily bearded Hussein was captured in December 2003 and was executed on December 20, 2006, the insurgency involving both Sunni and Shiite forces became a full-scale civil war.
The attacks of 9/11, though centered on New York and Washington, were felt around the country. In the weeks after the event, additional fears were fanned when the poison anthrax was sent anonymously to several offices around the country. The perpetrators were never caught. After Richard Reid was found with explosives in his shoe aboard an aircraft, airline passengers have since been asked to remove their shoes for examination prior to boarding. In the wake of the attacks, the President pushed through Congress the Patriot Act, which curtailed civil liberties in favor of the "war on terror." Portions of the act were later modified.
Scandal began to surround the Bush Administration almost as soon as it began. One of the earliest involved some of the President's closest personal and political allies, who were employees of the Houston-based Enron Corporation. Enron was found to have manipulated the energy market in California, causing a political crisis for Governor Gray Davis that resulted in his recall and replacement by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then it was found that top Enron employees had cooked the company's books. By 2006, most of them were in jail, and the company was bankrupt.
A scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff ended the political career of another close Bush associate -- House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, founder of the K Street Project. There were also questions raised about contracts given to Halliburton -- whose CEO had been Dick Cheney -- for work in Iraq.
The fingerprints of Cheney and political operative Karl Rove could be found in another scandal involving the Administration's outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Plame was the wife of Joseph Wilson, an early critic of the President's claim that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed over her refusal to turn over her notes regarding the leak. Eventually, Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libbey was charged with obstruction of justice in connection with the investigation of the leak. He was convicted early in 2007.
A crisis of a different nature developed in 2003 when photos of American soldiers abusing prisoners held at Abu Ghraib were leaked to the press. Similar charges were raised about the treatment of prisoners being held by the United States at Guantnamo Bay in Cuba. The Administration, most famously in a memo by future Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, defended the treatment of prisoners at Guantnamo, arguing that they were exempt from Geneva Convention protections. While the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that military tribunals for the prisoners were illegal, in another decision early in 2007, a federal court said that the prisoners were not entitled to habeas corpus.
The scandals along with the bogging down of the war in Iraq made the 2004 presidential race a close one. Opposing the President was Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and North Carolina Senator John Edwards. Two notable incidents clouded the race. One involved a right-wing group known as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which claimed that Kerry exaggerated his war record in Vietnam. The other involved a report by CBS that suggested President Bush had lied about his service during the 1960s and had a less-than-honorable record. Complaints raised about the report caused Dan Rather his job. The race came down to the voters in Ohio. When the state went for Bush, the election was over, although many serious questions have been raised (the details are in a special report on the vote by John Conyers) about whether the vote was fair.
In December 2004, a tsunami overwhelmed portions of several countries bordering the Indian Ocean, killing an estimated 200,000. The next year, Hurricane Katrina, arguably strengthened by global warming, devasted areas of the United States off the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans and Mississippi were the hardest hit. Coverage of the hurricane's aftermath shocked the nation, as it exposed the area's poverty and racism as well as the ineptitude of local and federal authorities in both their preparation and rescue efforts.
Following the election, Secretary of State Colin Powell resigned and was replaced by Condoleezza Rice. She faced a number of major foreign policy issues, including a threat by North Korea to use nuclear weapons; the death of Yassir Arafat and an election in Palestine that gave Hamas control of the Palestinian Legislative Council; the death of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in a car bombing; worldwide protests against a Danish newspaper for printing cartoons depicting Muhammad; the ascendency of leftist leaders in South America, led by Venezuelan Hugo Chavez, who publicly and repeatedly attacked the Bush Administration and its polcies; and the increasingly bellicose statements of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. America's relationship with Iran became especially contentious; in early 2007, the Administration presented what it said was evidence of Iranian support for insurgents in Iraq, leading many to believe that the President was preparing a military operation against Iran before the year's end.
President Bush's approval ratings tumbled through 2006. He and the GOP suffered a severe setback in the fall elections, when, primarily due to unhappiness over the war and the economy (and another scandal involving Representative Mark Foley's suggestive e-mails to several House pages), Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress.
The 1990s
