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He blew 9/11 way out of proportion. The smart play would have been to ignore it and build the trade center back exactly how it was. That would have been the true power play. It was just a mosquito bite after all to a multi-trillion dollar economy and a country of almost 300 million. It could have been ignored. Instead, the terrorists won.
Oddly enough there was a Trump plan in the early-mid 2000's to do just that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Towers_2
Also the country basically runs on auto-pilot. You could have no president and not much would change. In fact, 8 years with no president would have been better than bush.
That is so unrealistic. No one would have stood for that. Maybe you weren't in America at the time, or maybe you weren't even born yet. But trust me it was a harrowing experience well before Bush said anything. No leader would have simply done nothing in response to an unprecedented attack of American citizens on American soil, and if he had, no one, not even most of the people on the left would have stood for him.
I was in my freshman year of college. I helped put together the google page of news as it was happening. I said this exact same thing then. I stand by it now. It was crazy and stupid to respond the way we did. I voted for Bush and was against leftist nonsense. It was just a bad way to respond.
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I was in high school in 2001, and the view espoused by @AhhhTheFrench , that we should do nothing and that Bush is playing into the hands of Al Qaeda by attacking Afghanistan (even moreso Iraq) was basically the mainstream consensus where I lived. It certainly wasn't universal, but enough that there was social pressure to conform. I recall thinking at the time that this was just another murder, scaled up by not even 3,000, and thus only criminal proceedings are justified.
Given that my environment wasn't typical, I think you're right that most leftists still would've complained if Bush took the pacifist route, but I think there would still have been quite a bit of support. Minority support, to be sure, though.
88 % of Americans supported military action against Afghanistan in October 2001.
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Just to make my point clearer, I don't necessarily think that Bush needed to parlay 9/11 into attacking Afghanistan, and definitely not Iraq, and I don't think there was universal support for those specific actions. But I think to simply ignore it, as @AhhhTheFrench said, was out of the question. Where I was (in the blueish-purple part of northeastern US), it was basically a given that he had to acknowledge the loss and try to coach the country through it in some way, swear vengeance, and at least try to go after Al Qaeda in some fashion.
It was so far out of proportion or balance. They killed a few thousand people, they were not a nation state. It was an immune reaction almost killing the host.
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