The Butterfly Effect

If Xerxes had won at Salamis, we’d all be speaking Persian. — Pat Frank, “Alas, Babylon”*

What I don’t know about chaos theory would fill a whole library. But every time I hear about the butterfly effect, I think of an angry little man from Texarkana, Texas.

H. Ross Perot won 19 percent of the popular vote when he ran for president in 1992. Perot ran as an independent candidate on a libertarian platform. He appealed to conservatives, and siphoned off enough Republican votes to doom President George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election.

If President Bush had been re-elected and served out his second term, his son, George W. Bush, wouldn’t have run in 2000. No way, not just four years after Poppy Bush left the White House.

Bill Clinton, Al Gore or some other Democrat would have been elected president in 1996. Whoever it was, he’d have been well into a second term by the time madmen from the Middle East flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And I can’t imagine this president, whoever he turned out to be, using these attacks to justify invading Iraq. George W. Bush used logic reminiscent of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party to make his case, and Congress fell for it.

Indeed, one might even argue that the 9/11 attacks would never have happened if someone else had been president instead of George W. Bush. The CIA had warned about this attack in its President’s Daily Brief of August 6, 2001. The brief said Osama bin Laden was determined to launch terrorist strikes in the U.S.

I can’t imagine any other president, not even the feckless Clinton, ignoring that warning. But we had a smirking Dubya (and I voted for him) fidgeting through that briefing. George W. Bush was impatient to get back to clearing brush on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The rest, as they say, is history.

(*) Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1959), p. 30.