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Bush and Bin Laden's virtual war
By Mark Danner
(This essay was adapted from an address first delivered in February at the Tenth
Asia Security Conference at the Institute for Security and Defense Analysis in
New Delhi.)
To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad - as I do the one before me, with
sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow - is to look back
on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a
rather neutral yellow, indicating the "mixed" neighborhoods of the city,
predominant just five years ago.
To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of
bright color: Shi'ite blue has moved in irrevocably from the east of the Tigris
River; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shi'ite
militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar
province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the
pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and
years of sectarian war.
I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope about
in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to "take
stock" of the "war on terror"? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those
mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a
moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look closely at its
misshapen contours, we can see in the "war on terror":
Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan.
Part shooting-war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq.
Part intelligence, spy v spy covert struggle, fought quietly - "on the dark
side", as US Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after September 11,
2002, - in a vast territory stretching from the southern Philippines to the
Maghreb and the Strait of Gibraltar.
And finally the "war on terror" is part, perhaps its largest part, virtual war
- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political utility not
wholly unlike author George Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East
Asia and Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always
expanding.
Snowflakes drifting down
President George W Bush announced this virtual war three days after September
11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when
he told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to
answer these attacks and rid the world of evil".
Astonishing words from a world leader - declaring that he would "rid the world
of evil". Just in case anyone thought they might have misheard the sweep of the
president's ambition, his national security strategy, issued a few months
later, was careful to specify that "the enemy is not a single political regime
or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism - premeditated,
politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents".
Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out;
for declaring war on "terrorism" - a technique of war, not an identifiable
group or target - was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its
implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, "Declaring
war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power."
Six-and-a-half years later, evil is still with us and so is terrorism. In my
search for a starting point in taking stock of those years, I find myself in
the sad position of pondering fondly what have become two of the saddest words
in the English language: Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary.
Remember him? In late October 2003, when I was in Baghdad watching the launch
of the so-called Ramadan Offensive - five simultaneous suicide bombings,
beginning with one at the headquarters of the Red Cross, the fiery aftermath of
which I witnessed - Rumsfeld was in Washington still denying that an insurgency
was underway in Iraq. He was also drafting one of his famous "snowflakes",
those late-night memoranda that he used to rain down on his terrorized Pentagon
employees.
This particular snowflake, dated October 16, 2003, and entitled "Global war on
terrorism", reads almost poignantly now, as the defense secretary gropes to
define the war that it has become his lot to fight: "Today we lack metrics to
know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he wrote. "Are we
capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than
the madrassas [seminaries] and the radical clerics are recruiting,
training and deploying against us?"
Rumsfeld asks the right question, for beyond the obvious metrics like the
number of terrorist attacks worldwide - which have gone up steadily and
precipitously since 9/11 (for 2006, the last year for which US State Department
figures are available, by nearly 29%, to 14,338); and the somewhat subtler ones
like the percentage of those in the Middle East and the broader Muslim world
who hold unfavorable opinions of the United States (which soared in the wake of
the invasion of Iraq and have fallen back just a bit since) - apart from these
sorts of numbers which, for various and obvious reasons, are problematic in
themselves, the key question is: How do you "take stock" of the "war on
terror"?
Ultimately, as Rumsfeld perceived, this is a political judgment, for in its
essence it has to do with the evolution of public opinion and the readiness of
those with certain political sympathies to move from holding those opinions to
taking action in support of them.
What "metrics" do we have to take account of the progress of this "evolution"?
Well, none really - but we do have the guarded opinions of intelligence
agencies, notably this rather explicit statement from the US government's
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of April 2006, entitled "Trends in Global
Terrorism: Implications for the United States", which reads in part: "Although
we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision" - those metrics
again - "a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists
identifying themselves as jihadists, although still a small percentage of
Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic distribution. If this
trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more
diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide."
Dark words, and yet that 2006 report looks positively sanguine when set beside
two reports from a year later, both leaked in July 2007. A National
Intelligence Estimate entitled "The Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland" noted
that al-Qaeda had managed - in the summary in the Washington Post - to
reestablish "its central organization, training infrastructure and lines of
global communication" over the previous two years and had placed the United
States in a "heightened threat environment ... The US Homeland will face a
persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years."
This NIE - the combined opinion of the country's major intelligence agencies -
only confirmed a report that had been leaked a couple days before from the
National Counterterrorism Center, grimly entitled "Al-Qaeda Better Positioned
to Strike the West". This report concluded that al-Qaeda, in the words of one
official who briefed its contents to a reporter for the Christian Science
Monitor, was "considerably operationally stronger than a year ago", "has
regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001", and has managed to create "the
most robust training program since 2001, with an interest in using European
operatives".
Another intelligence official, summarizing the report to the Associated Press,
offered a blunt and bleak conclusion: al-Qaeda, he said, is "showing greater
and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States".
Given these grim results, one must return to one of the more poignant passages
in Rumsfeld's "snowflake" released to flutter down on his poor Pentagon
subordinates back in those blinkered days of October 2003. Having wondered
about the metrics, and what could and could not be measured in the "war on
terror", the secretary of defense posed a critical question: "Does the US need
to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?"
For me, the poignancy comes from Rumsfeld's failure to see that, in effect, he
and his boss had already "fashioned" the "broad, integrated plan" he was asking
for. It was called the Iraq war.
General bin Laden
That the Iraq war is "fueling the spread of the jidahist movement", as the 2006
National Intelligence Estimate put it, has been a truism of intelligence
reporting from the war's beginning; indeed, from before it began. "[T]he Iraq
conflict has become the cause celebre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment
of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating support for the global
jihadist movement" - this point from the 2006 NIE is truly an example of a
"chronicle of a war foretold" (to borrow from Garcia Marquez).
In fact, that NIE cites the "Iraq jihad" as the second of four factors "fueling
the jihadist movement", along with "entrenched grievances, such as corruption,
injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a
sense of powerlessness"; "the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social
and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations"; and "pervasive anti-US
sentiment among most Muslims".
Any attempt to "take stock of the war on terror" must begin with the sad fact
that the story of that war has largely become the story of the war in Iraq as
well, and the story of the Iraq war (all discussion of the so-called "surge"
aside) has been pretty much an unmitigated disaster for US security and for the
United States position in the Middle East and the world. Which means that
telling the story of the "war on terror", a half dozen years on - and "taking
stock" of that war - merges inevitably with the sad tale of how that so-called
war, strange and multiform beast that it is, became subsumed in a bold and
utterly incompetent attempt to occupy and remake a major Arab country.
That broader story comes down to a matter of two strategies and two generals:
General Osama bin Laden and General George W Bush. General bin Laden, from the
start, has been waging a campaign of indirection and provocation: that is, bin
Laden's ultimate targets are the so-called apostate regimes of the Muslim world
- foremost among them the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt and the House of Saud
on the Arabian Peninsula - which he hopes to overthrow and supplant with a new
caliphate.
For bin Laden, these are the "near enemies", which rely for their existence on
the vital support of the "far enemy", the United States. By attacking this far
enemy, beginning in the mid-1990s, bin Laden hoped both to lead vast numbers of
new Muslim recruits to join al-Qaeda and to weaken US support for the Mubarak
and Saud regimes. He hoped to succeed, through indirection, in "cutting the
strings of the puppets", eventually leading to the collapse of those regimes.
In this sense, 9/11 proved the culmination of a long-term strategy, following
on a series of attacks of increasing lethality during the mid to late 1990s in
Riyadh, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Aden. The 9/11 attackers used as their
climactic weapon not transcontinental airliners or box cutters but the
television set - for the image was the true weapon that day, the overwhelmingly
powerful image of the towers collapsing - and used it not only to "dirty the
face of imperial power" (former Israeli premier Menachim Begin's description of
what terrorists do), but also to provoke the United States to strike deep into
the Islamic world.
It is clear from various documents and from the assassination, days before
9/11, of Afghan Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, that bin Laden
expected this American counter-strike to come in Afghanistan, which would have
given al-Qaeda the opportunity to do to the remaining superpower what it had
done - so the myth went, anyway - to the Soviet Union a dozen years before:
trap its arrogant, hulking military in a quagmire and, through patient,
unrelenting guerrilla warfare, force it to withdraw in ignominious defeat.
In the event, of course, the Americans, by relying on air bombardment and on
the ground forces of their Afghan allies in the Northern Alliance, avoided the
quagmire of Afghanistan - at least in that initial phase in the autumn of 2001
- and instead offered bin Laden a much greater gift. In March 2003, they
invaded Iraq, a far more important Islamic country and one much closer to the
heart of Arab concerns.
General Bush
Why did General George W Bush do it? Lacking in legitimacy and on the political
defensive, the president and his administration moved instantly to transform
the "war on terror" into an ideological crusade, one implicitly crafted as a
new cold war.
"They hate our freedoms," Bush told Congress and the nation a few days after
the 9/11 attacks. "Our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and
disagree with one another ... We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety.
We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous
ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their
radical visions - by abandoning every value except the will to power - they
follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will
follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of
discarded lies."
Drawing a lurid picture of a new cold war, with terrorists playing the role of
communists, Bush rallied the country behind the "war on terror", obliterating
the subtleties of the struggle against al-Qaeda and with them the critique of
US Middle East policy implicit in the assault. "This is not about our
policies," as Henry Kissinger put it soon after the attack. "This is about our
existence."
In this view, the attack came not because of what the United States actually
did in the Middle East - what regimes it supported, for example - but because
of what it stood for: the universalist aspirations it symbolized. Iraq quickly
became part of this crusade, the great struggle to protect, and now to spread,
freedom and democracy.
One can argue long and hard about the roots of the Iraq war, but in the end one
must tease out a set of realist compulsions (centrally concerned with the
restoration of American credibility and American deterrent power) and idealist
aspirations (shaped around the so-called democratic domino effect). The realist
case was well summarized, once again, by Kissinger, who, when asked by a Bush
speechwriter why he supported the Iraq war, replied: "Because Afghanistan
wasn't enough." In the conflict with radical Islam, he went on, "They want to
humiliate us and we have to humiliate them." The Iraq war was essential in
order to make the point that "we're not going to live in the world that they
want for us".
Ron Suskind, in his fine book The One Percent Doctrine, puts what is
essentially the same point in "geostrategic" terms, reporting that, in meetings
of the National Security Council in the months after the 9/11 attacks, the main
concern "was to make an example of [Saddam] Hussein, to create a demonstration
model
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