Killing Machine (3 page)

If al Qaeda had lost half its leadership, had been deprived of its sanctuary in Afghanistan, and was on the run—“permanently”—what was left of this “unprecedented” challenge? She had no good answer even as events in Iraq constantly called into question the decision to invade. As General Omar Bradley had once said about Korea, Iraq was the wrong war against the wrong enemy.

To reclaim the world’s respect, George Bush also used a London audience to sell the war as but a prelude to the great things that would materialize in the near future. Noting the protesters on the streets outside Whitehall Palace, he began his speech with a clever reference to the Anglo-American tradition of free speech. The protesters were exercising that right “with enthusiasm,” he said, and, after being interrupted by laughter, he suddenly switched to Iraq, noting that now Iraqis “have that right in Baghdad as well.”

There was his theme. Baghdad was only the beginning, despite all the “stuff” that was happening there, as Rumsfeld had described the looting and fighting that seemed to grow worse by the day. The president then proceeded to describe what made up the American character and determined its sense of mission to the world.

We’re sometimes faulted for a naive faith that liberty can change the world. If that’s an error, it began with reading too much John Locke and Adam Smith.

Americans have on occasion been called moralists, who often speak in terms of right and wrong. That zeal has been inspired by examples on this island, by the tireless compassion of Lord Shaftesbury, the righteous courage of Wilberforce and the firm determination of the Royal Navy over the decades to fight and end the trade in slaves.

It’s rightly said that Americans are a religious people. That’s in part because of the good news that was translated by Tyndale, preached by Wesley, lived out in the example of William Booth.

At times Americans are even said to have a Puritan streak. And where might that have come from?

The quip brought more laughter. Turning to the immediate situation in November 2003, Bush blamed the troubles in Iraq on the neglect of the very Anglo-American traditions he described and the failure to fulfill the principles championed by those ancestors he had invoked.

We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine in the past have been willing to make a bargain to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites.

Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

In their own way, Bush’s remarks were as radical—if not actually more so—than Obama’s antiwar speech seemed to be. Did he really mean to cast off policies that went back to the end of World War I, when the British and French took over the Ottoman Empire and carved out new nations to suit the geopolitical and economic interests of the victors? Here was the president of the United States seemingly criticizing as well America’s post-World War II policies in the Middle East, including interventions in Iran and Iraq, to overthrow regimes that threatened American “interests” in controlling cheap oil supplies for the West, and building military alliances with other regimes that had little interest in free speech.

As he spoke about the dangers of overlooking the faults of “local elites,” however, the CIA was sending suspected terrorists to some of those countries, including Syria and Egypt, where they could be “interrogated” using practices that went beyond “enhanced interrogation” methods like waterboarding. At the same time, American military police were assisting CIA interrogators in softening up detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, a situation that
began to come to light in April 2004. When pictures of what was happening appeared on the web, the Pentagon sent Major General Antonio M. Taguba, the first Philippine American to reach that rank, to conduct an investigation. Among the abuses he found:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
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The story of how America’s mission in Iraq fit into the grand narrative Bush outlined had been interrupted—and in the most damning way imaginable.

The 2004 Convention

When Democratic Party leaders looked around for someone to keynote their 2004 convention, there was Obama, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate. It could be assumed that had he already been in the Senate he would have voted no on the key resolution that turned the question of war or peace over to the White House. He was a creditable if untested new figure. The speech he gave at the convention scored well again with peace Democrats and with all those looking for a new face for the party. Richard Lowry, editor of the conservative
National Review
, reported in his column that he received a “rapturous” outburst from the convention. But Lowry was impressed with several things Obama said about “faith” and community that seemed to him out of the ordinary for a Democrat to say in such a setting. Lowry asserted the speech was actually not a dove’s cri de coeur but a critique of how an inept White House had mishandled the way America went to war. “He made this week’s
best, most trenchant criticism of the Iraq war, saying we should ‘never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect the world.’ The criticism reflects a hawkish attitude: We need more troops. It invokes the opinion of the world but also with a hawkish tinge: The world should respect us, because when we confront an enemy we do it right.” Lowry went on, “By the end, when Obama said ‘the people will rise up in November,’ and ‘this country will reclaim its promise, and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come,’ it seemed more than garden-variety political rhetoric. Because it was.”
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Perhaps such comments merely reflected conservative disillusion with George Bush’s failure to plan a war of liberation beyond a staged landing on an aircraft carrier, the USS
Abraham Lincoln
, the first president to jump out of a fighter jet in a flight suit to proclaim “mission accomplished.”
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Certainly listeners heard in Obama’s speech what they wanted to hear, not least because the prospect of Obama as a possible future presidential candidate represented a dramatic breakthrough. Above all the cheering for a rousing speech, however, many Democrats feared a rerun of the McGovern debacle in 1972, when during another war their candidate called out, “Come home, America,” yet voters instead went to the polls to reelect Richard Nixon. The only way for John Kerry to win, Democratic regulars thought, was to turn the tables on the White House and portray Iraq as an obstacle to a successful war on terrorism. With the outrages of the Abu Ghraib scandal and the misuse of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay on the front pages, it should have been easy for the Kerry campaign to argue that the Bush administration had accomplished the unimaginable in just one year of the Iraq War: it had forfeited moral leadership abroad and at home. Stuck with the feckless “mission accomplished” boast President Bush had made as he posed next to the fighter jet, moreover, the administration could not deal with Osama bin Laden’s taunts from his hideout in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Obama had obviously designed the speech to show the nation that neither the Democrats nor he personally was a proponent of a
weak America. But that task proved not easy at all. The classic dilemma facing both members of Congress and presidential candidates came down to the problem of opposing a war without being blamed for failing to support American soldiers on the front—the White House’s ultimate weapon. Presidential candidate John Kerry got caught up in this dilemma. Famous as a U.S. Navy veteran who came to oppose the Vietnam War, as a senator from Massachusetts Kerry had a difficult time with the Iraq issue. In October 2003, a year after voting to support the use of force in Iraq, Kerry voted against an $87 billion supplemental funding bill for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He did support an alternative bill that funded the $87 billion by eliminating some of the 2001 Bush tax cuts, but when that failed he voted against the appropriation. Kerry complicated matters beyond repair by saying, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it”—an explanation that he eventually characterized as “one of those inarticulate moments.”

Maybe it was this lapse that doomed Kerry’s presidential hopes—or maybe not. On November 1, the Al Jazeera network released a “message” from Osama bin Laden to the United States that accused Bush of lying about the reasons for the 9/11 attack: “Despite entering the fourth year after September 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened.” There were speculations about bin Laden’s motives—perhaps he just enjoyed pulling Uncle Sam’s beard—but it did seem to be the sort of insult designed to rally people around the president. Whatever the reasons (there were also charges of irregularities at the polls), Kerry narrowly lost the election, amid much controversy.

Bush’s second inaugural address promised recommitment to the Wilsonian themes he had sounded in London.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

From its outset, however, the second Bush administration struggled with questions and deepening anxiety about Iraq. And so long as Osama bin Laden remained hidden somewhere, moreover, the administration could make no claim to have set al Qaeda permanently on the run.

Here I Come, Ready or Not

The Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, and it appeared the Republican grip on national security issues in the post-Vietnam era had at last loosened up. The Bush administration confronted a desperate situation in Iraq in which civil war loomed on the horizon, and it had to deal with a Democratic Congress apparently elected to end the war. Appearances were deceiving, however, as the Democrats had as yet no real sense of their next steps. In this vacuum Bush acted, in February 2007 promising a new way forward with a “surge” of additional troops and naming General David Petraeus to take command in Iraq.

At approximately the same time, Barack Obama, a first-term Democratic senator from Illinois, declared he would run for president
in 2008. It was an equally audacious move, given the expectation that Senator Hillary Clinton would sweep the primaries. Her problem was Iraq. Like Kerry, she had some explaining to do about her votes, but she had lots of support in the party and was also a path-breaker as the first serious female contender.

National discontent over the Iraq War had not quite reached its highest point. Congress confirmed the Petraeus appointment, but the public did not welcome the idea of sending more troops to a war that many now considered a terrible blunder. By June only 10 percent of those answering an opinion poll thought the situation had been made better by the surge, while 54 percent thought the situation had gotten worse. And as for what to do next, the public opinion poll gave an unequivocal answer: “Despite four months of a military surge in Iraq, 68 percent of the public either want to withdraw right away (25 percent) or begin bringing troops home within the next year (43 percent). Just 26 percent want to keep troops in Iraq ‘for as long as it takes to win the war.’ ”
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Since Iraq absorbed the public’s attention, the “other war” in Afghanistan was not the subject of many polls in 2007. Senator Obama’s qualifications centered on his supporters’ faith that he would end the Iraq War if elected. Moreover, several important Republican senators held similar views about the war. Richard Lugar of Indiana, George Voinovich of Ohio, and John Warner of Virginia expressed skepticism about the administration’s plans. “Lugar said the military escalation, the so-called surge that began in the spring, has ‘very limited’ prospects for success and called for troop reduction, a statement praised by Warner. And Voinovich called for ‘a comprehensive plan for our country’s gradual military disengagement’ from Iraq.”
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In a major speech on August 1, 2007, Obama promised to do just that, and even asserted that President George W. Bush, “by refusing to end the war in Iraq, . . . is giving the terrorists what they really want, and what the Congress voted to give them in 2002: a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with underestimated consequences.”
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These were bold accusations. They confirmed a belief that Obama would challenge not only the White
House but also the Clinton-centrist dominance of the Democratic Party. Before Obama started stealing headlines from her, Senator Clinton had been the odds-on favorite for the nomination. But, again, she was vulnerable on Iraq, having cast a vote in 2002 in favor of the president’s request for open-ended support in the run-up to the war.