Politics & Power Quote by Bill Nelson

There’s an almost weary incredulity baked into Nelson’s opening: “You would have thought…” isn’t just a turn of phrase, it’s an indictment disguised as common sense. He frames the post-9/11 response as a matter of obvious priority-setting, then immediately positions the Bush administration as willfully deviating from that “obvious” course. The sentence is engineered to make the listener feel like the facts themselves are doing the accusing.

The intent is political, but not merely partisan. Nelson is pressing a narrative of strategic negligence: Afghanistan was the “job,” Bin Laden the “target,” and any diversion reads as a choice to leave the central mission unfinished. By naming “Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda deputies,” he foregrounds the human chain of accountability the public had been primed to expect the U.S. to dismantle. It’s a rhetorical move that ties policy to a visceral demand for justice and closure.

The subtext is sharper: Iraq wasn’t a tragic overreach so much as a preexisting obsession. “Original plan to invade Iraq” suggests Iraq was on the shelf before the smoke cleared in New York and Washington, turning the Iraq war from reactive defense into opportunistic agenda. In that framing, 9/11 becomes not just a national trauma but a political accelerant.

Context matters: this line echoes a broader critique that took hold as the Afghanistan war stagnated and the WMD rationale for Iraq collapsed. Nelson is staking out a moral and strategic hierarchy - and daring his audience to see the Iraq pivot as the moment America lost the plot.