A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (23 page)

The London plot against civil aviation confirmed a theme of an illuminating new book, Lawrence Wright’s
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.
The theme is that better law enforcement, which probably could have prevented Sept. 11, is central to combating terrorism. F-16s are not useful tools against terrorism that issues from places such as Hamburg (where Mohamed Atta lived before dying in the North Tower of the World Trade Center) and High Wycombe, England.

Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement (the British draw upon useful experience combating IRA terrorism) has validated John Kerry’s belief (as paraphrased by the
New York Times Magazine
of Oct. 10, 2004) that “many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror.”

The Bush administration and/or its supporters unabashedly exploit terrorist threats for political gain every time a new plot is revealed—no matter how serious or frivolous, how advanced or preliminary, the particular plot might be. Bush followers squeeze such events for every last drop of political gain they can. As the president stated when the U.K. conspiracy was revealed, this was “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.” Put another way, the president’s use of terrorist plots such as this one is designed to convey this message: Those who oppose my policies forget that there are Evil people in the world and these plots therefore show that I have been right all along.

But that argument is as incoherent as it is manipulative. Nobody doubts that there are Muslim extremists who would like to commit acts of violence against the United States and the West. No political disputes are premised, nor have they ever been premised, on a conflict over whether terrorism
exists
or whether it ought to be taken seriously. Nor does anyone of consequence doubt that terrorists are malicious and dangerous. Thus, events such as the U.K. plot reveal
what everyone already knows,
and do nothing to vindicate the Bush administration’s militaristic foreign policy or its radical lawlessness at home.

Above all, the existence of Evil terrorists and the fact that some want to attack the United States certainly does nothing to vindicate the president’s invasion of Iraq. Opposition to the war in Iraq is not and never was based upon the premise that no terrorist threat exists. Among other arguments, it was based on the premise that the invasion of Iraq
undermines,
rather than
strengthens,
the American campaign to protect itself against terrorism.

Most of the participants in the U.K. bomb conspiracy were British citizens, born in England. They had nothing to do with Iraq or Saddam Hussein or Iranian mullahs or the ruling Assad family in Syria. They were motivated by hatred for the United States, hatred which could not possibly be anything other than
inflamed
, and certainly not diffused, as a result of watching the U.S. attack a sovereign oil-rich country filled with Muslim holy sites. The ongoing occupation of Iraq spawns daily video of corpses of Muslim children, pictures of bombed marketplaces, and tales of American abuses against Muslims inside torture prisons formerly used by Saddam Hussein. All of that is continuously broadcast by Al Jazeera and other Middle East media outlets. That such conduct by the U.S. would heighten the risk of terrorism and spread Islamic radicalism is self-evident.

The president and his supporters love to speak of Osama bin Laden and his terrorist allies as hiding in fear of the president’s militarism—or even hoping that Democrats win elections because terrorists so dislike George Bush’s war-making. Yet the exact opposite is true. Nothing has aided the cause of Islamic terrorism more than George Bush’s brutal and endless acts of aggression in the Middle East; nothing has ignited the fuel of terrorism—anti-American anger—more than that. And it is hard to imagine a more ardent fan of the president’s embrace of a Manichean worldview than Osama bin Laden, who shares that Manichean mentality and expressly sought, with the 9/11 attacks, to provoke exactly the split between the U.S. and the Muslim world that the Bush policies have wrought. As James Fallows reported in a 2006 article in
The Atlantic Monthly:

Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.

Bin Laden also hoped that such an entrapment would drain the United States financially. Many al-Qaeda documents refer to the importance of sapping American economic strength as a step toward reducing America’s ability to throw its weight around in the Middle East.

The more military and intelligence resources we are forced to pour into waging wars against countries that have not attacked us—Iraq has consumed the vast bulk of American military force, intelligence resources, and political attention, to say nothing of its financial drain—the weaker we become, the
less able
we are to track and combat Al Qaeda and the other terrorist groups that actually seek to harm us. Turning Iraq into a chaotic caldron of anarchy and violence filled with seething anger toward the United States is exactly the environment in which Al Qaeda thrives.

Other than the very rare circumstance where there is a state that is actively aiding a terrorist group devoted to attacks on the U.S.—as the Taliban government in Afghanistan was aiding Al Qaeda—conventional war-making as a tool to combat terrorism is entirely
counterproductive
. War cannot possibly have any effect on anti-American Islamic fanaticism other than to
inflame, increase, and strengthen
it.

And, indeed, by the beginning of January 2007, it became almost universally recognized that the threat posed by the terrorists was
not
a justification for invading Iraq; rather, that threat was an argument
against
doing so. In January 2007,
Newsweek
’s Mike Isikoff reported:

Intel director John Negroponte gave Congress a sobering assessment last week of the continued threats from groups like Al Qaeda and Hizbullah. But even gloomier comments came from Henry Crumpton, the outgoing State Department terror coordinator. An ex-CIA operative, Crumpton told
Newsweek
that a worldwide surge in Islamic radicalism has worsened recently, increasing the number of potential terrorists and setting back U.S. efforts in the terror war. “Certainly, we haven’t made any progress,” said Crumpton. “In fact, we’ve lost ground.” He cites Iraq as a factor; the war has fueled resentment against the United States.

That assessment merely confirmed a prior, definitive report
from the Bush administration
, described by the
New York Times
in September 2006:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate [NIE] attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in

Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the

Iraq war began, and represents
a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government
[emphasis added]. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

Numerous sources had told the
Times
about the contents of the NIE, which “are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence.” Thus, these conclusions emanated from the Bush administration, and are the consensus of the same intelligence community that the administration had spent the last several years purging of all dissidents.

FUELING THE ENGINE OF TERRORISM

T
he most effective weapon wielded by George Bush for bludgeoning any possibility of rational debate has been the all-purpose, all-justifying label
terrorist
. Despite the ongoing existence of a serious terrorist threat, that term has been so crassly and transparently manipulated for political purposes by the president and his supporters that it has become virtually impoverished of real meaning.

Throughout the 2004 presidential election, the Bush campaign endlessly wielded this rhetorical tactic by defining the Iraqi insurgents not as Iraqis resisting foreign occupation but as “terrorists.” With that premise in place, those who favored the war in Iraq
by definition
favored fighting the terrorists, while those who opposed the war
by definition
wanted to “surrender” to the terrorists—and as a result, real debate over the war, as intended, became impossible. After all, terrorists are the people who flew those planes into our buildings. Who could oppose waging war on them—the terrorists?

But once safely re-elected, the president in 2005 gave one of the types of speeches he delivers periodically that seems designed to pass along to Americans the tutorial he received about what is going on in Iraq. In doing so, he clearly acknowledged that the vast, vast majority of people whom we are fighting in Iraq are not terrorists at all, but merely Sunni “rejectionists” who favor a system of government that preserves long-standing Sunni privileges:

A clear strategy begins with a clear understanding of the enemy we face. The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists. The rejectionists are by far the largest group. These are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, who miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein—and they reject an Iraq in which they are no longer the dominant group.

The president is right, of course, that “a clear strategy begins with a clear understanding of the enemy we face.” That is precisely why the constant invocation of “fighting terrorists” as a justification for invading Iraq was such a deceitful rhetorical tool, and it is why America was led so astray. Astonishingly, even into 2007, war supporters continue to manipulate the terrorist threat in brazenly dishonest ways in order to justify their conduct. Joe Lieberman appeared on
Meet the Press
after the president’s January 2007 “surge” speech, looked into the cameras, and told Americans:

I think the consequences for the Middle East, which has been so important to our international stability over the years, and to the American people,
who have been attacked on 9/11 by the same enemy that we’re fighting in Iraq today,
supported by a rising Islamist radical super-powered government in Iran, the consequences for us, for—I want to be personal—for my children and grandchildren, I fear will be disastrous. That’s why I want to do everything I can to win in Iraq [emphasis added].

By January 2007, it was unfathomable to hear anyone telling Americans that in Iraq we were fighting “the same enemy” who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. As the president himself acknowledged two years earlier, the anti-U.S. insurgency is composed predominantly of Iraqis who want to eject the United States from their country. And the civil war that has been raging in Iraq has been a sectarian conflict between Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis. Yet Senator Lieberman knows that this sort of deceitful rhetoric has successfully precluded rational debate about our country’s most pressing issues, and he thus continues to cling to the hope that Manichean invocations of the terrorists will obscure the catastrophe that he and his Bush-supporting comrades have unleashed.

But there is, at long last, a growing recognition that waging more wars does not make us stronger or more secure. It does exactly the opposite. Those who want to pursue our failed policy in Iraq indefinitely or who want to attack more countries are not people who are “strong on security.” They are gradually, though inexorably, destroying our security through a mindless militarism that becomes more reckless and crazed the more it fails. And this bloodthirsty militarism becomes more desperate as the sense of weakness and humiliation felt by its proponents—including those in the White House—intensifies.

If George Will can announce that John Kerry was right about how best to deal with terrorism and that the Bush approach does nothing but exacerbate it, then perhaps we can soon reach the point where national journalists will understand that there is nothing “strong” or “serious” about clamoring for more and more wars. Nor is there anything “weak” about opposing warmongering and instead advocating more substantive, rational, and responsible methods for combating terrorism.

Anyone rational can see that our invasion of Iraq did not make us more secure. Nor will attacking Syria and/or Iran or fueling more proxy wars in the Middle East make us any safer. Quite plainly, those measures have had, and will continue to have, the opposite effect. Meanwhile, we neglect the genuinely effective methods for protecting against terrorism because those methods are boring and unappealing and unexciting to the increasingly crazed neoconservative warriors looking for militaristic glory and slaughter for its own sake. Untold benefits will accrue if journalists can finally understand that whatever adjectives accurately describe such individuals, “strong” is not one of them.