Here is the first paragraph that I read:

The terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, killed all 266 passengers and crewmembers on the four hijacked planes. Another 125 people died in the Pentagon. In New York City, nearly 3,000 people died. More Americans were killed in the attacks than died at Pearl Harbor or on D-Day in World War II.



That's a confusing way to compare the events for any student whose touchstone is Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. It makes it seem as though 9/11 cost more lives than the invasion of Normandy. It's true that an estimated 2,499 Americans died on June 6, 1944 itself, a slightly lesser figure than the victims who died on September 11, 2001. But add up all Allied deaths on D-Day and the figure reaches 4,414 killed. American casualties were around 6,600 that day. Total Allied casualties were roughly 10,000. And "over 425,000 Allied and German troops were killed, wounded or went missing during the Battle of Normandy. This figure includes over 209,000 Allied casualties, with nearly 37,000 dead amongst the ground forces and a further 16,714 deaths amongst the Allied air forces. Of the Allied casualties, 83,045 were from 21st Army Group (British, Canadian and Polish ground forces), 125,847 from the US ground forces."

But as I said, the book was published in 2003, and soon I began to fully realize what that meant. The textbook would serve as a time-capsule for prevailing attitudes right after the attacks. And those attitudes would be frozen in print to inform students for some years to come.

With that in mind, what followed was fascinating. In the space of a few pages it conveyed the mindset that got us from the rubble of the WTC to Bush's invasion of Iraq, which wasn't a culprit.

The textbook moves quickly from a description of 9/11 to a general definition of terrorism: "Terrorism is the use of violence by nongovernmental groups against civilians to achieve a political goal." On the very next page, a graphic called "Major Terrorist Attacks Affecting Americans, 1970 - 2001" labels the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole terrorist attacks, though neither fit the definition the authors just offered.

What follows is an account of the early War on Terrorism told from the perspective of the Bush Administration, often using paraphrased or direct quotes from government officials rather than exercising judgment. "President Bush decided the time had come to end the threat of terrorism in the world," the authors say, as if discussing a plausible proposal that might well end up succeeding.

Isn't that the sort of myopia historical study is supposed to gird us against?

Those of us who lived through 9/11 recall the controversy over George W. Bush's domestic response to it, especially the PATRIOT Act. Circa 2003, here is how the authors described its adoption:

As part of his efforts to protect the American people from further terrorist attacks, President Bush created the Office of Homeland Security to coordinate the dozens of federal agencies working to prevent terrorism. He then appointed Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge to serve as the agency's director. The President also asked Congress to pass legislation to help law enforcement agencies track down terrorist suspects. Drafting the legislation took time. Congress had to balance Americans' Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure with the need to increase security. President Bush signed the new antiterrorist bill - known as the USA Patriot Act - into law in October 2001. The new law allowed secret searches to avoid tipping off suspects in terrorism cases. It also allowed authorities to obtain a single nationwide search warrant that could be used anywhere. The law also made it easier to wiretap suspects, and it allowed authorities to track e-mail and seize voicemail.



There are a lot of obvious flaws and omissions in that passage. For a more subtle criticism, see Julian Sanchez's astute post about why 4th Amendment "balance" metaphors are problematic. The book next mentions anthrax, includes a few paragraphs on the Afghanistan War, and begins its final section with a boldfaced title that doesn't bode well for the content that follows:

Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction



The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 showed that terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda were determined to kill as many Americans as possible. President Bush and his advisers were deeply worried that terrorist groups might acquire weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction can kill tens of thousands of people all at once... During the Cold War, very few nations had weapons of mass destruction, and the United States relied on a policy of deterrence to prevent the use of such weapons. Under the deterrence policy, the United States vowed that if a nation used weapons of mass destruction against the U.S., the U.S. would counterattack by using its own weapons of mass destruction. Deterrence worked during the Cold War, but it could not stop state sponsored terrorism. If a nation secretly gave weapons of mass destruction to terrorists who then used them against the United States, the American military would not know where the weapons came from or whom to attack in response.



In his state of the union message to the American people in January 2002, President Bush warned that an "axis of evil," made up of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, posed a grave threat to the world. All three nations actively sponsored terrorism and were developing weapons of mass destruction. "I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer," the president promised. "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most dangerous weapons." Of the three nations in the "axis of evil," President Bush and his advisers believed Iraq to be the most immediate threat. After the Gulf War ended in 1991, UN weapons inspectors found evidence that Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, had developed biological weapons and nearly succeeded in building a nuclear bomb... In the summer of 2002, President Bush decided the time had come to deal with Iraq. On September 12, he asked the UN to pass a new resolution against Iraq. If Saddam Hussein wanted peace, he had to give up Iraq's weapons of mass destruction...



The style of writing here is remarkable. It's often difficult to tell if President Bush is being paraphrased of if the authors are stating historical fact. The two things blend together until it's as though history itself is synonymous with the narrative that the Bush Administration told Americans.