America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (36 page)

In comparison with the thinking behind other U.S. military interventions in the Islamic world undertaken during the previous two decades, this qualified as a bold proposal. Rather than promising quick results, rollback posited the need for sustained action. Rather than a time horizon measured in days or weeks, it assumed that eliminating Al Qaeda would require years of effort.

Even so, we may doubt whether any such campaign would ever have achieved genuinely decisive results. After all, destroying Al Qaeda in Afghanistan would leave intact the conditions giving rise to anti-American jihadism in the first place. But the question of whether or not rollback would have worked is moot: The proposal never made it past the memo stage. In his administration’s waning moments, President Clinton had no appetite for opening up a new fighting front. Once the November 2000 election pitting Vice President Al Gore against Texas governor George W. Bush failed to produce a clear winner, mounting a major military campaign against Al Qaeda was out of the question. With the entire country fixated by the recount of the Florida balloting, the attack on the
Cole
went unanswered. When the Supreme Court effectively declared Bush the victor, the phony war begun by Clinton gained a second life.

Every new administration arrives in office bearing its own foreign policy vision, which rarely survives the encounter with actual events. The vision of the new Bush administration, which came to power on January 20, 2001, was more ambitious and more concrete than most. It derived from specific convictions that President Clinton had willfully disregarded. Chief among those convictions was a belief in military assertiveness as the foundation of American global leadership. For the United States to fulfill its providentially assigned role as history’s indispensable nation, possessing and wielding supreme military power formed a sine qua non. Bush’s secretary of defense believed that Clinton had given the impression that the United States was “gun-shy” and “risk averse.”
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The Bush team was intent on changing that.

That said, the new president himself, like his predecessor, had acquired little relevant experience prior to assuming his responsibilities as the nation’s commander in chief. When it came to national security, he was a novice. So, again like his predecessor, George W. Bush compensated for that inexperience by surrounding himself with seasoned subordinates, known commodities whose very appointment signaled administration intentions.

For our purposes, three appointments in particular stand out. As his running mate, Bush had selected former defense secretary Dick Cheney, now vice president. To preside over the Pentagon, he appointed Donald Rumsfeld, himself a former defense secretary known to be close to Cheney. As Rumsfeld’s deputy, he chose Paul Wolfowitz, a key Cheney lieutenant during the administration of the elder Bush who in Washington circles had by now acquired a reputation for being a broad-gauged thinker.

Although Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz did not see eye to eye on everything, all three subscribed to this proposition: For those with the wit and will to tap its potential, military power is eminently usable. When America’s War for the Greater Middle East kicked into high gear—a development that neither Bush nor any of his chief subordinates had anticipated—these three officials seized the opportunity to put that proposition to the test. In doing so they left an indelible mark on U.S. policy. Unfortunately, their achievements proved negligible, their blunders monumental and enduring.

The events of September 11, 2001, occurred on the 234th day of George W. Bush’s presidency. Little of what happened on Bush’s watch prior to that date merits our attention. Up to that point, the War for the Greater Middle East had continued on autopilot. American warplanes patrolling the northern and southern no-fly zones kept up their occasional bombing of Iraqi targets. The Clinton administration’s “dual containment” of both Iraq and Iran remained in effect. While not ignoring bin Laden, Bush’s national security team moved with great deliberation as it assessed how to deal with him.
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Deliberation in this case implied inaction. Al Qaeda ranked as one problem among many. Of somewhat more pressing concern than Fidel Castro’s Cuba, it trailed behind the urgent need to field ballistic missile defenses and respond to the strategic challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China.

As far as the Greater Middle East was concerned, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict defined the principal point of discontinuity between the outgoing and incoming administrations. President Bush made clear his lack of interest in replicating his predecessor’s enthusiasm for trying to settle that dispute. On his watch, brokering peace in the Middle East did not qualify as a priority. As to the larger constellation of problems that had induced one U.S. intervention after another in various quarters of the Islamic world, they received no consideration whatsoever. The new team of old hands had neither the time nor the inclination for any fresh thinking. They arrived knowing everything they needed to know.

They just didn’t know enough to avert a horrific attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed several thousand innocents and caused an estimated $178 billion in physical damage and lost economic activity.
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Success in any surreptitious undertaking, be it bank heist or terrorist attack, requires careful planning, audacious implementation, and a fair dose of plain luck. It also requires a permissive environment, with flimsy defenses and guards asleep at their posts. Although observers may differ over the relative proportions, all of these factors were present on 9/11.

That nineteen young men armed with nothing more than box cutters should so easily hijack four commercial airliners and convert them into devastatingly lethal missiles shook Americans to their core. A people accustomed to taking their own collective safety as a given now experienced a sense of naked vulnerability.

No historical antecedent existed to provide an adequate reference point. Reflexive comparisons to Pearl Harbor did not hold up. In December 1941, Americans had learned about the Japanese attack by tuning in to radio bulletins broadcast after the assault itself had ended. In September 2001, they watched with horror events as they actually unfolded. They witnessed people leaping to their deaths. They saw buildings burn and collapse. For those living in Manhattan or Washington, D.C., the experience overwhelmed the senses. They could taste and smell the destruction.

In the performance of their most fundamental mission—defending the homeland—the Bush administration and the world’s largest and ostensibly most sophisticated national security apparatus failed utterly. Yet curiously, in the wake of that failure, not one U.S. official of any rank lost his or her job. No one was reprimanded or demoted. Rallying around the flag and getting on with the business at hand took precedence over fixing accountability.

Was it fair after December 1941 to single out Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short as personally responsible for the disaster at Pearl Harbor? Probably not. Yet firing these two senior officers and reducing them in rank served at least to acknowledge that an unacceptable failure of leadership had occurred. From the outset of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, the cabinet secretaries and four-star military officers charged with formulating and implementing national security policy had remained largely exempt from accountability—the arbitrary firing of defense secretary Aspin after Mogadishu being the exception that proved the rule. Remarkably, that practice survived the events of 9/11. So those who failed to anticipate or prevent the worst ever direct attack on American soil stayed on the job, if anything accruing even greater authority as the officials to whom the public now turned to “keep America safe.”

It fell to President Bush himself to explain what had happened, what it meant, and how he would ensure that nothing similar could ever befall Americans again.

In a series of now iconic statements, Bush conceded that the United States found itself engaged in a very large-scale conflict, which he misleadingly and unhelpfully characterized as a “global war on terrorism.” In the presidential lexicon, terrorism was interchangeable with evil, so a war to destroy terrorism, as Bush vowed to do, necessarily became a war to destroy evil.

With that in mind, Bush chose to disregard U.S. military actions undertaken pursuant to the Carter Doctrine since 1980. The United States embarked upon the global war on terrorism with a clean slate. So although fifteen of the nineteen hijackers had been Saudis, the president showed no interest in examining the potential implications of that fact. Concern for the security and well-being of Saudi Arabia had prompted the United States to issue the Carter Doctrine in the first place. What did it signify that the perpetrators of this heinous attack came from that very country? The Bush administration treated the question as off-limits.

To place the global war on terrorism in a suitable historical perspective, the president instead described it as a successor to the wars that in collective memory had defined the
prior
century. Whatever the United States may have done militarily in the Islamic world during the previous twenty years counted for less than what it had done in Eurasia from the 1930s to the 1980s. By extension, the central issue was reassuringly familiar.

“We have seen their kind before,” Bush said of America’s new enemy. “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.” As with World War II and the Cold War, freedom itself was at stake and was destined once more to prevail.
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Coming to freedom’s defense, however, was going to require wide-ranging offensive action. How specifically such a war was going to unfold was very much up for grabs. A global war on terrorism did not number among the contingencies for which the Pentagon had at hand a ready-made plan. And although the president warned Americans to expect an altogether different conflict—there were “no longer islands to conquer or beachheads to storm”—he did not spell out exactly what those differences implied.
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Others in his administration had already taken up the question. The term they devised to describe the enterprise offers a concise expression of their intentions. Not without reason, critics of the “global war on terrorism” have noted the absurdity of waging war against a tactic or, in Bush’s preferred formulation, of waging war to eliminate evil. Yet for our purposes the instructive element of that phrase is the administration’s insistence on characterizing the war as “global.”

To undertake a “global war” was to remove limits on the exercise of American power. Even before 9/11, the Bush administration had chafed against any such constraints and had sought to eradicate them. With the passing of the Cold War, “deterrence is not enough,” the president had declared in a speech at the National Defense University not long after entering office. With the world “less certain, less predictable,” anticipatory action was becoming the order of the day.
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The events of 9/11 created the opportunity to act on this perceived imperative. While any war of even modest scope is fought for multiple purposes, a principal aim of the global war on terrorism was to unshackle American military power. Doing so, Bush and his principal subordinates believed, held the key to preserving the American way of life and all that it entailed. From the outset, in other words, the war’s purposes looked beyond any immediate danger posed by Al Qaeda or even by the disordered condition of the Greater Middle East. By now, oil had become an afterthought. Ultimately, the war’s architects were seeking to perpetuate the privileged status that most Americans take as their birthright. Doing so meant laying down a new set of rules—expanding the prerogatives exercised by the world’s sole superpower and thereby extending the American Century in perpetuity.