How Bergen botched his war on terror lede.
CNN’s Peter Bergen offers a critique of Bush’s war on terror. Lunchtime and recess soon to follow.
Bergen begins righteously:
The dean of military strategists, Carl von Clausewitz, explains the importance of this decision-making in his treatise “On War”: “The first, the supreme, the most decisive act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish…the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something that is alien to its nature.”
Clausewitz’s excellent advice about the absolute necessity of properly defining the war upon which a nation is about to embark was ignored by Bush administration officials who instead declared an open-ended and ambiguous “war on terror” after the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001.
So, Bush failed to define the war correctly at the onset, and thus doomed the effort from the start. But I distinctly recall he (and Rumsfeld) leaving plenty of room on this, saying this war will NOT be like any others we’ve fought, and it will be ambiguous and lengthy.
Read more after the break
Bush took the nation to war against a tactic, rather than a war against a specific enemy, which was obviously al Qaeda and anyone allied to it. When the United States went to war against the Nazis and the Japanese during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt and his congressional supporters did not declare war against U-boats and kamikaze pilots, but on the Nazi state and Imperial Japan.
Now it’s conventional wisdom that the Pentagon, US intelligence organizations, and the even larger Industrial Military Complex as a whole decided to pursue the war on a tactical level instead of strategic level! Bergen thinks we reorganized our entire intelligence bureaucracy–tens of thousands of people– to better prevent . . . suicide bombers.
The war on terror, sometimes known as the “Global War on Terror” or by the clunky acronym GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. That proved to be dangerously counterproductive on several levels.
The GWOT framework propelled the Bush administration into its disastrous entanglement in Iraq. It had nothing to do with 9/11 but was launched under the rubric of the war on terror and the erroneous claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
The theory was that he might give such weapons to terrorists, including al Qaeda to whom he was supposedly allied, and that he therefore threatened American interests. None of this, of course, turned out to be true.
Except that, you know, the parts that were actually true. Like multiple caches of undeclared sarin gas ordnance that were eventually used against American forces and civilians by insurgents. And the major AQ affiliate residing within Iraqi borders, launching terror attacks against Turkey and assassinating Americans in Jordan. By that measure, even warhawk Barack would have launched a “Pawkistawn“-style crossborder invasion. Something tells me, though, Hussein would not have cooperated like General Musharraf.
Iraq was no sideshow; it was a part of a saga spanning two decades that happened to coincide (but fit nicely) with the GWOT. They are interrelated no matter how people like Bergen try to spin it. Why do journalists continue to assert that the Iraq War occured in a vacuum, and that its numerous operational failures outweigh any of the stated (and unstated) strategic results? Is it beyond your ability to consider that the war in Iraq–outside of the stated reasons like WMD and terror links–was for any number of strategic reasons, notably the containment of Russia (via Iran)? Or do you think Saddam Hussein would have been a willing ally in the GWOT? Didn’t you notice that the loudest critics of the war–Germany, Russia, France–also happened to be those with the most to lose financially from the dismantling of the corrupt UN Oil-for-Food bureacracy?
The Bush administration’s approach to the war on terror collided badly with another of its doctrines, spreading democracy in the Middle East as a panacea to reduce radicalism.
It pushed for elections in the Palestinian territories in which, in early 2006, the more radical Hamas won a resounding victory, propelled to power on a wave of popular revulsion for the incompetence and corruption of the Fatah party that had dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s.
It pushed for democracy in the Palestinian territories because of extreme international pressure to do so, not simply because democracy is a panacea. But even if it is a panacea, why would anyone interested in human rights and basic civility promote the alternatives? That democracy has loud and violent critics doesn’t render it a worthless folly.
Imprisoned by its war on terror framework, the Bush administration supported Israel in a disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Hezbollah is not only a terrorist group but is also part of the rickety Lebanese government and runs social welfare services across the country, yet for the Bush administration its involvement in terrorism was all that mattered.
No, it was something else that Bush was interested in, wait . . .can’t think of it. Oh yes! Bush understood that Hezbollah is really an Iranian shadow army, but only with popular social welfare services!
Under the banner of the war on terror, the Bush administration also tied itself in conceptual knots conflating the threat from al Qaeda with Shiite groups like Hezbollah and the ayatollahs in Iran.
In 2006, for instance, President Bush claimed that “the Sunni and Shiite extremist represent different faces of the same threat.” In reality, Sunni and Shiite extremists have been killing each other in large numbers for years in countries from Pakistan to Iraq. The groups have differing attitudes toward the United States, which Sunni extremists attacked in 1993 and again on 9/11, while Shiite militants have never done so.
Did Bush mispeak or is Bergen terribly wrong? Hezbollah has never EVER carried out a terrorist attack. . .
Despite the hyperventilating rhetoric of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda’s amateur investigations into weapons of mass destruction do not compare to the very real possibility of nuclear conflagration that we faced during the Cold War. There are relatively few adherents of Binladen-ism in the West today, while there were tens of millions of devotees of communism and fascism.
Is it OK then to just absorb the occasional 200-fatality train bomb by “amateurish” AQ-affiliates, just because you don’t think this war is like the Cold War? So WHAT if Bush called it “Cold War Redux”. Maybe he’s right, or maybe he’s just blowing smoke. But he’s the one watching the flowcharts, and what he’s not telling you will shock the shit out of you when it comes out in ten years.
Obama should also make it clear that instead of the Bush formulation of “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” the Obama administration doctrine will be, “Anyone who is against the terrorists is with us.”
Perfect, Peter, except that the two examples will likely TRANSLATE TO THE SAME EXACT MEANING in just about every other foreign language. Admit it, your liberal backside is still stinging from this cowboy slap. Almost eight years later and you’re still crying over this ‘affront’ to enlightened world citizens. There are colossal power struggles happening in the Middle East right now between the United States and Russia Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran, and CNN’s best is still smarting over his misinformed worldview.
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