On a day reserved for celebrating the heroes of one of America’s darkest chapters, the man charged with leading the nation’s defense apparatus did the only thing he seems capable of doing in public — praising his boss and bashing Iran.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had a simple task at Friday’s Pentagon ceremony commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the Pentagon as well as the World Trade Center and United Flight 93: Remember the dead, honor the survivors, re-tell the story of that horrific day. It’s an assignment that should have been easy for a man who spent years reading from a teleprompter while hosting a weekend morning show on Fox News. But for reasons known only to him (and perhaps his speechwriters) the self-styled “Secretary of War” chose instead to deliver a screed against “Islamic terrorists” and an “Islamist threat” while rhetorically linking the country’s righteous response to the 9/11 attacks to the ill-fated war of choice he and President Donald Trump have spent the last half-year waging against Iran. He pivoted from honoring the 184 people killed at the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the building’s limestone wall to boasting about how the U.S. has “laid waste to the world's most prolific state sponsor of terrorism” and praising “warriors” for having “fought an Islamic theocracy ... that cheered on 9/11.”It was both wildly inappropriate and historically ignorant. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a speech at the Pentagon on 9/11 that largely served to justify his and Trump’s war in Iran (Getty)In his rush to justify the disastrous war he helped start by linking it to the attacks a quarter-century ago on the building he now runs, he left out the fact that the Iranian government at the time not only condemned the 9/11 attacks in harsh terms but Tehran actually offered assistance to America’s efforts to overthrow the Taliban in the weeks and months that followed. But Hegseth didn’t stop there. He moved on to praising Trump for waging war against Iran, telling the audience of 9/11 survivors and family members how Trump has “killed their leaders” and “destroyed their Air Force” and sent the Iranian navy “to the bottom of the sea.”His bellicose remarks were a stark contrast from those delivered just before him by Condoleezza Rice, the former Secretary of State who was then-President George W. Bush’s national security adviser in the months leading up to 9/11. Rice all but apologized for the Bush administration's failure to properly run down leads that might have prevented the attacks had intelligence and law enforcement agencies shared information more freely in the months before the hijackers took to the skies.Former Bush NSA and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking before Hegseth, delivered a thinly veiled apology, for not having done more to prevent 9/11 (Getty)As she closed her remarks commemorating the heroism of those who were at the Pentagon that fateful day, Rice told the crowd she wanted to say something “deeply personal.”“Those of us in authority on that day did not see the nature of the danger in time to prevent the attack of 9/11,” she said.“We did what we knew to do, but by definition, it was not enough.”Rice also said that she was “grateful” that there hadn’t been a follow-up attack and called that fact a “miracle” for which Americans owe “a deep debt of gratitude to our armed forces and to the intelligence community.”President Donald Trump and first lady Melania during the commemoration of those who died in the Pentagon attack on 9/11 (AFP/Getty)“But I will always carry deep personal remorse for the pain that you, the families of the fallen, still feel, and for the trauma that our country endured,” Rice said. Even more surprisingly, it fell to Trump, after Hegseth’s introduction of him, to stay on message and properly honor the victims and survivors of the Pentagon attack — and he largely stuck to the script for once. The president, who insisted on attending the Pentagon’s annual commemoration on 9/11, reportedly because he would not have been permitted to give a speech at the World Trade Center site, delivered a by-the-numbers address recounting the stories of people who died in the quartet of hijackings — a man who was on the phone with his wife from his office as the towers collapsed around him, a United Airlines flight attendant who boiled water to use as a weapon as passengers fought back against the hijackers aboard Flight 93 — which they forced down in a Shanksville, Penn. field before it could be crashed into the Capitol — and a pregnant woman who watched in horror as the second plane to hit the World Trade Center slammed into the place where she knew her husband’s office to be. Trump greets Hegseth during an observance ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon (Reuters)“Free people must never avert their eyes from such hideous cruelty. We cannot forget that moment of immense and horrible evil that took place in this world, bent on the destruction of all that is good,” said Trump, who contrasted the “terrible power of hate” exhibited by the attacks to the “even greater power of the American spirit to endure and prevail and to win” shown over the quarter-century that has passed. Hegseth, who reportedly harbors presidential ambitions now that he’s spent nearly two years leading the Pentagon, might want to follow the example of his fellow former television performer. Trump knows people come to his rallies to hear him “weave” and ignore his prepared remarks in favor of free-associating and offering insults against his enemies. But he also knows when to tone things down and act as normal as he can manage to be while just reading a normal script.