The 9/11 Wars (46 page)

This drop in support did not indicate lower levels of animosity towards ‘the West’, America, Bush, Israel and Jews, or lower levels of belief in conspiracy theories attributing the September 11 attacks to Mossad or the CIA. Large majorities in the Muslim world remained convinced that there was a widespread lack of respect for Islam in the West and that any American rhetoric about spreading democracy was, like the ‘Global War on Terror’, simply a cover for a neo-imperialist strategy to divide and exploit.
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But the polls did apparently show that, even as the apparently unstoppable wave of violence had broken across the Middle East and Europe over previous years, there had been a counter-current, a riptide, that had been difficult to see for what it was but was now finally making itself felt. The picture was messy. There was certainly little uniformity; visibility on a whole range of issues was very poor and a counter-example could be found for every more positive sign.

There was certainly much evidence that very serious problems remained. In August of 2006. a new plot had been uncovered in the UK centred on a group of young British Pakistanis in Walthamstow, east London. Very similar to the conspiracies that had preceded it except in its ambition, it would have seen suicide attackers mix liquid components to form explosives inside a series of airborne transatlantic jets, potentially causing the deaths of as many as had died in the 9/11 attacks.
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Shortly afterwards had come another wave of global controversy sparked by a speech made by the newly elected conservative Pope Benedict XVI, who unhelpfully quoted a fourteenth-century Byzantine Emperor, saying that the Prophet Mohammed had brought ‘things only evil and inhuman such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached’.
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Muslim leaders, clerics and activists responded as they had before, demanding once again why the West was set on the humiliation and subordination of Islam and calling again on ‘the faithful’ to show their anger. But as 2006 wore on, it became clear that for the first time since 9/11 not all the dials had their needles deep in the red zone. There were even grounds for, if not optimism, then at least a nuancing of the previous deep pessimism.

Two months after the death of al-Zarqawi, in August 2006, militants linked to ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ assassinated a senior sheikh in Ramadi and dumped his body in undergrowth rather than return it for immediate burial as tribal and Muslim custom demanded. The incident provoked a young middle-ranking local sheikh called Abdul Sattar Buzaigh Albu Risha to organize a meeting to proclaim the formation of the Sahwa or ‘Awakening’ Council and to publicly call on the tribes to rise up against al-Qaeda. Sattar, who had had several relatives killed by the extremists, contacted the press in Baghdad to announce he had the support of twenty-five of the thirty-one tribes in Anbar and a strength of 30,000 armed men. It was a ludicrously inflated claim but that wasn’t the point. One significant difference to previous such initiatives was that Sattar, who made up for what he lacked in genuine tribal status with charisma and drive, had secured a promise of support and, most importantly, protection from a far-sighted local American commander.
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Over the following months, the tribes and the US forces began working closely together in Ramadi, gradually clearing the city of foreigners and extremists. Thousands of tribesmen were enrolled in the police or, if illiterate, into a range of auxiliary forces. As the US forces went from block to block, forcing out insurgents, these new reinforcements secured the areas they cleared. The rapid flow of large sums of cash disbursed by the local US senior officers for immediate reconstruction and development projects helped further consolidate the hold the new combined US and Iraqi regular and irregular forces had on any given neighbourhood and provided space for more durable political and administrative structures to be set up.

The motivations of Sattar and the tribes may not have been as altruistic or traditional as sometimes said. The murdered relatives for which Sattar sought vengeance had been executed after negotiating with coalition authorities for a slice of the vast reconstruction budgets available to local contractors. One reason for the Albu Risha, the clan to which Abdul Sattar belonged, turning against the foreign militants was that the latter had appropriated many of the lucrative smuggling, theft and extortion rackets focused around the main Baghdad–Amman highway which had provided much of the tribe’s income for several decades.
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But the exact motives of those picking up their AK-47s to fight beside the US and Iraqi government troops was not important. As the winter of 2006 came on, similar initiatives to that of the Albu Risha, all a result of a combination of similar micro-factors, had gained momentum in the town of Khalidiyah, where an al-Qaeda group had irritated local sheikhs by taking charge of the local distribution of smuggled petrol, in Haditha, scene of the massacre perpetrated by US Marines a year previously, and in a dozen other small towns across western Iraq.
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Given the still generalized mayhem in Iraq, where levels of violence were as high as they had ever been across the entire country and there was an unprecedented degree of political chaos, it was not surprising that the apparently very minor bits of good news were missed. A change in the evolution of a phenomenon as complex and as diverse as either the war in Iraq or the 9/11 Wars more generally would not come from a single event, a single new trend, a single development but from the accumulated effect of scores of different factors which together would alter its path. But out in the scruffy, battered towns and the fields and date orchards of the upper Euphrates valley, as much as in the bazaars, cafés, living rooms and mosques of Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere, another of the elements that together would begin a new evolution of the local conflict and the broader global one had fallen into place.

‘THE LONG WAR’

If this key turn looked in any way possible it was in spite of, rather than because of, anything Washington was doing. In February 2006, a couple of weeks before the Samarra bombing, the Pentagon had published a ‘Strategic Defense Review’, its third such comprehensive assessment of how best to shape America’s military forces to cope with the challenges that would face them over the coming two decades. The previous review, completed before the 9/11 attacks and published after them, had been largely obsolete by the time it had come out. The new version started with the unequivocal words: ‘The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war.’
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It went further than the simple reiteration of a fact that was clear to everyone, however. The document’s first chapter was entitled ‘Fighting the Long War’ and set about defining a conflict that, it said, saw 350,000 American servicemen and women engaged in 130 different countries.

The term ‘the Long War’ had emerged in military circles at least two years before it made its public debut. The man credited with first using it to describe the ensemble of ongoing operations undertaken by the US army was General Abizaid. He had spoken of the Long War ‘to underscore the long-term challenge posed by al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups’ and had had his staff prepare presentations on ‘The Long War 2006 to 2016’.
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At the time his thinking was a radical departure from the vision that had previously dominated. Though only days after 9/11 Bush had warned America to expect a different kind of conflict, there was in fact more continuity than change. America’s wars were still expected to be rapid and relatively cheap. The ‘full spectrum dominance’ which the US military believed it had attained, its huge technological advance on the rest of the planet and its energy, ‘warrior spirit’ and will were perceived as largely invincible. By 2005, mired in a hideous war of attrition for which they were neither trained nor equipped, senior American commanders were thus left groping for new conceptual tools to allow them to construct an appropriate strategic framework. The idea of the Long War, as evolved by Abizaid, with its implication of generational struggle, marathon effort and the interdependency of the various theatres in which the US military was engaged, appeared to explain the conflict in a new and potentially useful way.
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But there was another strand of thinking which had also sought to define the ongoing struggle and also used the term ‘the Long War’. Developed by senior officials in the Bush administration and in intellectual circles close to them, it was more controversial. For the politicians and several highly influential conservative thinkers the phrase ‘the Long War’ became, in part, a replacement for the increasingly discredited concept of a ‘Global War on Terrorism’.
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More broadly, it framed the various contemporary conflicts as the successors to those fought by the West through the twentieth century against Nazism and Fascism and then Communism.
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The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism of September 2006 clearly stated that al-Qaeda’s ‘ideology of oppression, violence and hate’ was a ‘form of totalitarianism following in the path of Fascism and Nazism’.
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Such a view undoubtedly reflected the collective historical vision of the senior Bush administration and their view of the current conflict – indeed it reiterated almost word for word phrases used in the president’s first address to Congress and the American nation nine days after 9/11. It also had clear political utility.
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By extending the timescale in which results could be expected in this new conflict, the vision of ‘the Long War’ explained the apparent failure to achieve rapid victory in Afghanistan and Iraq, justified the continued commitment of very significant resources to what was perceived as a fight for the survival of the American nation and of American values – ‘freedom’ – and provided a rationale for the continuation of extraordinary legal measures and presidential powers for the foreseeable future.

Thinkers such as Samuel Huntingdon, author of
The Clash of Civilizations
, and Bernard Lewis, the scholar of Islam and the Middle East, were both widely cited to provide intellectual ballast. Underlying such analyses was the perception of the Long War as being a single conflict against a single, united and uniform foe. In an editorial called ‘The Long War: the radical Islamists are on the offensive. Will we defeat them?’ in the
Weekly Standard
journal in March 2006 William Kristol, one of the most prominent American neo-conservatives, posed a simple question: ‘Does [the Bush administration] have the will … to lead the nation toward victory in the long war against radical Islamism.’ In this ‘Long War’ the enemy was aggregated. If it was not ‘Islam’ itself, as some argued, it was ‘Islamism’ or ‘Islamofascism’ or ‘jihadism’. As the emphasis on states as sponsors of terrorism lessened so a new stress on the uniformity and unity of the non-state groups who constituted the enemy emerged. The bombing of the al-Askariya shrine, to take one example, was thus described as ‘another indication of the worldwide jihadist offensive against the West’, an odd description of an attack on a Muslim holy place by other Muslims.
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The problem with this highly ideological vision of the Long War was that it perpetuated one of the fundamental attribution errors that had underpinned the conceptualization and execution of the entire ‘Global War on Terrorism’. Men like Abizaid within the military may have instinctively sensed that for their soldiers facing complex situations involving militancy on the ground such generalized responses were inadequate. But the development of any new strategies that might take local context into account or attempt to mitigate the violent reaction that efforts to impose wide-ranging political, social and customary changes on societies appeared often to provoke was politically very difficult. So though the Pentagon’s review argued that there was no ‘one size fits all’ approach and that solutions needed to be ‘tailored to local conditions and differentiated worldwide’, the conflict was still compared directly to the Cold War. Though the review was careful to explain that victory would be elusive and would depend ‘on information, perception, and how and what we communicate as much as application of kinetic effects’, i.e. firepower, the enemy was described as ‘global non-state terrorist networks’. Finally, though the review called for a new brand of warriors with deep cultural knowledge of the societies in which they operated. American soldiers were described bluntly as ‘a force for good’ and the enemy as opposing ‘globalization and the expansion of freedom it brings’.
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This tension ran through almost all American strategic thinking at the time. In his last press conference as chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff in September 2005, General Richard Myers had picked up on a variety of semantic changes introduced by Abizaid – such as referring to ‘violent extremists’ rather than ‘terrorists’ – but nonetheless described the conflict as ‘the long war against terrorism’. A seminar organized by the Pentagon on ‘Defining the Long War’ shortly after the publication of the review failed to come up with a satisfactory formula to describe and define the conflict.

Taken together this meant that, in the spring of 2006, little looked likely to change on the ground in Iraq or elsewhere in the near future. For authors of the Pentagon review the aims in Iraq remained those of 2003, ‘a democratic [nation] that will be able to defend itself, that will not be a safe haven for terrorists, that will not be a threat to its neighbours, and that can serve as a model of freedom for the Middle East’. The means of achieving that goal were also unaltered. Having been successful in ‘defeating the Iraqi military and liberating the Iraqi people’, the effort remained focused on ‘building up Iraqi security forces and local institutions and transitioning responsibility for security to the Iraqis’.
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If anything was going to change in Iraq and if the more positive developments there and elsewhere were to be exploited strategically, the thinking that would allow that to happen was clearly not going to come from the White House or the upper levels of the Pentagon. As had so often been the case in the course of the 9/11 Wars, the crucial shifts occurred much lower down, much closer to the dusty and bloody ground, where some soldiers and specialists were realizing that real communities have histories, aspirations, resentments, myths, views, hopes and hates which cannot be reduced to simple single-sentence slogans.