On the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, about 10 hours after the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, President Bush addressed the nation and vowed to "find those responsible and bring them to justice." But that didn't work out. Six and a half years later, the person responsible for the attacks, Osama bin Laden, is still at large, and Bush has mired America in a disastrous war in Iraq — a country that had nothing whatever to do with 9/11 — with no end in sight. Bush's mind-boggling blunder was launched five years ago this week. The war, and the way it has been conducted, has done more to jeopardize our country's security, economy and international stature than could have been caused by any other imaginable response to the terrorist attacks.
How did it happen? A complicated web of reasons lay behind America's most disastrous foreign policy mistake, but in the end, it comes down to one man: George W. Bush. The new president, with a family chip on his shoulder and little interest in foreign policy, was easily convinced to buy into the archaic Cold War thinking and predetermined policy notions of his vice president and Defense Secretary. Well before 9/11, both Cheney and Rumsfeld had forcefully pushed the idea that overthrowing Saddam Hussein should be a top U.S. priority. When the planes crashed into those buildings on Sept. 11, Bush drank Dick and Rummy's Kool-Aid, and off to war we went.
On March 20, 2003, around 120,000 U.S. troops, 45,000 from the U.K., and a handful from three other allies invaded Iraq. Within weeks, they overthrew Saddam Hussein's government, which freed President Bush to dress up like a fighter pilot and give his exultant speech of triumph, standing in front of his really neat "Mission Accomplished" banner. Afterward, however, reality set in when a multi-faceted insurgency went on the attack, turning Iraq into a violent nightmare. By now, hundreds of thousands of "free Iraqis" have died and more than 4 million more have left their homes as refugees (the comparative U.S. equivalent would be if the entire populations of New York state, New Jersey, Virginia and North Carolina were displaced and looking for a new place to live).
And oh yeah, nearly 4,000 U.S. troops have died, too, in case anyone in Washington is still counting, or cares.
Today, we're in the middle of another great Bush project -- the surge. A year ago, we sent in another 20,000 or so troops, mostly to Baghdad, we isolated several of that city's neighborhoods behind huge concrete walls, and we offered massive bribes to some Sunni leaders to quit shooting at us. Depending on whom you talk to, the surge has been a roaring success, or a pitiful endnote. Surge supporters correctly point out that until a few weeks ago, the level of overall violence in Iraq was down 60 percent. Critics note that the 60 percent reduction is in comparison to June 2007, when a sectarian war was raging throughout the country with multiple daily bombings killing scores of victims; the surge, in other words, has essentially reduced the level of violence from catastrophic to merely unacceptable. That's a far, far cry from "liberating the Middle East and spreading democracy," huh?
Critics of Bush's troop escalation also note that the ceasefire declared by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is at least as decisive a factor in the reduction in violence as the troop surge. Yet others call attention to the fact that the supposedly new, peaceful Iraq has been wracked for several weeks by the kind of horrific violence and bombings we were used to hearing about in the pre-surge days. In any case, whatever gains were initially made in reducing violence seem to be fading.
If you want a picture of the real situation inside Iraq, you couldn't ask for a clearer one than what happened three weeks ago when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad swept into Baghdad for a little visit. Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki rolled out the red carpet for the Iranian ruler, and a ceremonial motorcade wound through the city to a great fanfare. Now, if you remember, whenever President Bush has gone to Iraq, he has had to fly in unannounced and could only stay for a few hours due to "security considerations." So, the Iraqi government throws Ahmadinejad a party while violence levels inch upward again. And the cost to American taxpayers for all this "progress"? Just $12 billion per month, a mere $16 million per day.
What follows is a look at how we got into our present mess, the results of the war for the United States, thoughts on what's next, and hopes for specific changes in our national policies and priorities.
How we got into this mess
1. Ignoring intelligence about bin Laden
The 9/11 Commission's report made it very clear that members of the Bush administration received many warnings from the CIA that Osama bin Laden was preparing a big attack of some sort. In his recent book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, author Philip Shenon goes even farther in documenting the clueless travesty that was the Bush White House's foreign policy team in 2001. Shenon shows conclusively that in 2001, the CIA repeatedly told the administration -- specifically, then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and President Bush -- that something big was on the way. The reports became more frequent and urgent in tone throughout that spring and summer as Sept. 11 approached, even warning Bush and Rice that hijacking and using airplanes as missiles was a possible terrorist tactic. The startling and sad truth is that Bush, Rice & Co., for whatever reasons, did absolutely nothing about the reports and treated them as a low priority.
Neither Rice nor Bush ordered any follow-ups or clarifications to the intelligence reports; no strategic teams were gathered; no coordination of the military, CIA and State Department was launched; no nothing. Neither Bush nor Rice seemed to care one way or another about terrorism, didn't consider it much of a threat and certainly did nothing to thwart it despite what became nearly daily warnings. Bush told one bearer of news about a possible attack, "OK, you've successfully covered your ass," and shuttled the guy out the Oval Office door. For her part, Rice actively discouraged the administration's domestic security expert, Richard Clarke, from bothering her with his insistent messages about possible disastrous terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Finally, Clarke became such a pest, Rice fired him. Turns out he was right. Oops.
2. The post-9/11 panic
Americans are fortunate in that no major wars have been fought on our soil since the Civil War. Unfortunately, that bit of luck also meant that the country and its leaders were utterly unprepared, historically or psychologically, for an attack of the 9/11 strikes' magnitude. So we panicked. For weeks, TV news announcers sat before banners proclaiming, "America Under Attack," "America At War," or in Comedy Central's too-true sign, "America Freaks Out." Suddenly, terrorists were behind every tree and in much of the frightened public's eyes, the U.S. government could do no wrong. Bush rammed the clearly unconstitutional Patriot Act (or, as a friend called it, the Fascism 101 Act) through an obedient Congress. The country, in general, gladly approved of mass arrests, as around 1,200 men, mostly of Middle Eastern descent, were detained by U.S. law enforcement agents in the frantic weeks after Sept. 11. None of those men were ever connected to terrorist groups. Tales of al-Qaeda "sleeper cells" in the United States, later completely discredited, swept through the country. Americans, in other words, were angry, vulnerable, scared and desperately eager to believe that the people in charge of the government knew what they were doing. Soon enough, the willingness to believe turned into gullibility, and a large majority of us lapped up the river of lies that soon flowed from the White House.
3. White House delusions
Bush's foreign affairs team was led by a group of old Cold Warriors, now called neo-conservatives, like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom thought almost exclusively in terms of nation states pitted against one another. They were convinced that no cave-dwelling terrorist group could have pulled off the 9/11 attacks without substantial help from a friendly government -- namely, the regime of Saddam Hussein, whose overthrow was the centerpiece of neo-conservative policy. The neo-cons had convinced themselves that post-Cold War America was so all-powerful, it could do whatever it wanted, including the violent overthrow of other governments, and other countries would just have to go along. Not only that, they believed that America could transform the world -- or at least the most ancient part of it -- into a wellspring of democracy, just by showing up there with an army.
Talk of an Iraqi invasion began in the White House on Sept. 12, 2001, even though the administration's terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, repeatedly reported that al-Qaeda and Hussein weren't connected. The neo-cons held fast to their delusions; in fact, when the intelligence they received didn't meet their preconceived notions, they convened their own private intel club, the Office of Special Plans, to second-guess CIA information and accumulate scattered pieces of data that would support their compulsion to attack Iraq -- no matter how many times that data had been discredited by professionals (think yellowcake uranium from Niger, for instance). Later, the Bushies would try to blame their lies on "faulty intelligence," when in reality they had cherry-picked snippets of discredited intelligence to make their case for the war. The word "hubris" doesn't even begin to match these folks' astonishing level of arrogance.
4. Administration lies and the press
So many lies were told by Bush officials in the build-up to the war, it would take more pages than this newspaper contains in a month to document them all. In fact, a careful study by Mother Jones magazine of administration statements in that time period show that when it came to Iraq and terrorism, Bush & Co. weren't just telling the occasional political lie of expediency; they hardly ever told the truth.
Just as unconscionable as the Bush White House's lies were the administration's enablers in the mainstream press. Americans often kid themselves that we have an independent press, but history shows that when the big dogs begin ratcheting up war rhetoric, press independence largely flies out the window. In the case of Iraq, however, the brazenness of administration lies, and the ease with which a few clicks on the Internet could dismantle them, indicate that the U.S. press donned the role of war cheerleaders without much serious thought of the consequences. The result was a successful administration campaign to scare the living hell out of American citizens in order to build support for a war that made no sense.
Over and over, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and even Colin Powell at the United Nations told everyone they had definitive evidence that Iraq "is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," "has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used ... for missions targeting the United States," "recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," "has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agents," and that "senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda [took place], going back a decade," and, of course, "We know where Iraq's WMD's are."
During this period, the American press largely regurgitated Bush administration statements about Iraq with very little independent analysis, the most egregious example being the New York Times' Judith Miller, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, editorialists for the Wall Street Journal, and Charles Krauthammer and George Will at the Washington Post. Publications that reported evidence of the administration lying were routinely denounced by Bush and his supporters as "unpatriotic."
What the war has gotten us
• Nearly 4,000 American soldiers have been killed, including 145 who have committed suicide. Over 60,000 have been wounded, many severely and in profoundly life-altering ways.
• Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens (numbers range from 100K to 600K) have been killed. More than 4 million Iraqis have left their homes and are refugees, primarily living in Jordan or Syria.
• The U.S. government has spent over $500 billion on the war, and is expected to max out at around a trillion dollars. As a result, national debt has soared to record levels, leaving the country perilously dependent on the good will of China, which now owns around a trillion dollars in various U.S. bonds. Economists increasingly speak of America's "war debt" as a major factor in the looming recession. The value of the dollar has sunk so low, some American stores are asking customers if they can pay in euros.
• The U.S. military is stretched to the breaking point, according to numerous military experts, as the government's inability to lure enough new recruits led Bush to call up National Guard units and increase the length and number of soldiers' combat rotations. National Guard units, and many National Guard members' families, have been decimated by the multiple rotations.
• The war has inflamed Islamic terrorism -- which was, if we can remember, the cause of the Twin Towers' destruction -- to new heights and levels of fury previously unimagined.
• America's political position in the world has been seriously weakened, and has strengthened the positions of China and the European Union, at our economic expense. In addition, by launching a war of aggression and engaging in torture, we have squandered the goodwill of the world that we enjoyed until the war was launched.
• Private contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater have looted the federal treasury.
• In the more than six years since 9/11, the government has not acted to secure American ports, chemical plants or rail lines, and very little has been done to amplify security at the nation's nuclear plants.
• In the name of security, the Bush administration has launched the most widespread assault on Americans' freedoms since the days of the Civil War. Again, the number of lost rights is too large for this article's space, but a quick summary includes the following: The government monitors religious and political institutions whether or not criminal activity is suspected; habeas corpus, Western civilization's most revered legal concept, has been declared null and void in the "war on terror"; Americans can now be jailed without being charged, and held indefinitely without a trial (this has happened to hundreds of people, according to the Associated Press); the government may search and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable cause; the federal government combs through Americans' computers and credit card bills, and wiretaps their telephones.
What's next?
Frankly, who knows what's next? A Democratic president may begin bringing our troops home and convene some sort of international conference on the war next year, but until then we're certainly not going anywhere. In fact, unrepentant neo-cons are pushing for an attack on Iran and even Syria to effect "regime change." Some people are simply incapable of admitting mistakes, much less learning from them, but no one is certain how closely Bush pays attention to these bozos anymore.
There are no good resolutions possible for our involvement in Iraq, according to a vast majority of military experts. If that's the case, in this writer's opinion, then let's get the hell out of there and save as many American soldiers' lives as we can. Whatever we do, however, and whether we like it or not, we owe it to the Iraqis to help rebuild their devastated nation.
The major question for the United States is whether we will learn anything from Bush's disaster and begin moving our foreign policy in other directions. Our frayed military forces and weakened economy will certainly put a big dent in our ability to launch more invasions anytime soon, even after we've finally straightened out al-Qaeda's remnants in Afghanistan. But is that enough of a change? Not if we want to survive in the new world the next president will face. Our Iraq experience has shown the limits of military might in our interconnected world, as well as the new overriding importance of economic cooperation, not to mention harnessing our forces to reverse global climate change.
This writer's dream is that the United States will reduce the size of its global military empire, revive the economy by creating a new generation of "green" industries and "green collar" jobs, and pour money saved from our military draw-down into our infrastructure, health care systems and education. In other words, if we're able to learn anything from the past awful five years, let it be that the country needs to spend its energy on the needs of the American people rather than in taking on the unwanted, disliked and increasingly archaic role of "Cops of the World."
