How has a cave-dwelling trust-fund baby with a video camera and a chip on his shoulder managed to outfight the most powerful nation in the history of Earth?
September 2007 marked the sixth anniversary of the War on Terror™.
Six years is a mighty long time.
That's longer than it took the Union to subdue the Confederacy. Longer than it took the Allies to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Longer than it took Frodo to get the Ring back to Mount Doom. Longer than it took me to graduate college.
Of the United States' major conflicts, only the Revolutionary War, Vietnam and the Battle of the Network Stars lasted longer. And what have we gotten for our six-year, trillion dollar war?
A debacle of historic proportions that has left hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, weakened the U.S. military, earned the animosity and distrust of the world, and left the United States with stronger enemies.
The United States is losing the War on Terror™. Badly.
So what happened?
Simple.
America is losing the War on Terror™ because it put a feckless man-child in charge, then turned and watched American Idol, CSI: Miami and YouTube videos of teenagers making rockets out of Diet Coke and Mentos.
Let's start at the beginning.
The pilgrims came to America for religious freedom and turkey dinners in Massachusetts.
OK, maybe not that far back.
Let's try Sept. 20, 2001.
President Bush preempted both Will & Grace AND Temptation Island to formally announce the nation's response to the 9/11 attacks:
"Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."
Hold it right there.
Loser move No. 1: The war's objective was defined so broadly that the war can never be won.
A group of violent Muslim fundamentalists with bases, operatives and national allies attacked U.S. civilians.
But instead of declaring war on them and their supporters, the president declared a war on terror -- a war to fight the feeling they instilled in us.
It's as if FDR walked into Congress the day after Pearl Harbor and said "Yesterday is a day that will live in infamy, but instead of declaring war on Japan, I've decided to declare war on infamy."
Terror is an emotion. Terrorism is a guerilla warfare tactic. It's possible to fight and even defeat groups of terrorists, but the tactics and the emotions they generate cannot be eradicated.
Declaring war on an emotion or a tactic is to declare either a) a state of perpetual war or b) a war that will end in certain defeat.
Let's not forget the second part of Bush's war declaration -- the bit about a war that will not end until every terrorist group with global reach has been defeated. Um, what the fuck?
Every terrorist group didn't attack us. Al-Qaeda attacked us. What's the point of declaring war on terrorist groups who didn't attack us and never will?
Hey, Lord's Resistance Army, leaving piles of dead bodies all over Central Africa. I'm talkin' to you. Kashmir separatists in India. So what if most Americans think you're a sweater, a scarf or a Led Zeppelin song, we're coming after you.
Except, we're not really.
War on Terror™ is a brand and therefore required a hyperbolic marketing hook, kinda like how tooth-whitening products are marketed as "revolutionary." "Every terrorist group with global reach" sounds better than "We'll fight some of you. The rest can carry on terrorizing."
Loser move No. 2: President Bush can't seem to finish what he starts.
On Oct. 7, 2001, U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan. Kinda sorta.
Instead of a full-scale invasion, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom. Enduring Freedom was a massive air campaign backing the ground forces of the Northern Alliance, a confederation of anti-Taliban rebels fighting in Afghanistan since 1996.
With our help, however, Northern Alliance started kicking ass. Its forces swept across Afghanistan in weeks.
By early December, the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar had fallen and bin Laden was hunkered down in Tora Bora, a rugged mountain region near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan.
Three months after his followers killed 3,000 Americans in a single morning, we had bin Laden surrounded.
And Bush choked.
Instead of sending our best soldiers into Tora Bora to get him, he outsourced. The United States paid local tribal militias to do the job for us. Up against soldiers whose only incentive to capture him was cash, bin Laden opened his fat wallet and offered them even more cash. He bribed local militiamen and nearby villagers to get him and his people across the border to safety in Pakistan.
Faced with the war's first major setback, Bush did what spoiled children tend to do when they don't get their way: He lost interest.
"I truly am not that concerned about him," he said of bin Laden in March 2002.
And so, as swiftly as he vanished into Pakistan, bin Laden all but vanished from the president's speeches.
Bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans in a single morning and didn't have the decency to surrender on schedule, so President Man-Child got bored and moved on.
To Iraq.
By early 2002, the White House already was planning the Iraq war -- even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no military threat to the United States.
Afghanistan was left to wither.
We sent a big enough force to remove the Taliban from power, but it was too small to secure the peace or prevent the Taliban from regrouping across the border in Pakistan.
The Taliban has gotten stronger every year since 2002 and now controls much of the countryside it abandoned in late 2001.
And Afghanistan is desperately poor, violent and unstable -- just like it was when the Taliban took power in the first place.
The only industry doing well in the post-Enduring Freedom Afghanistan is opium. Oh, and Kabul has a golf course and a boutique hotel.
And al-Qaeda?
Two years ago, a National Intelligence Estimate report, which reflects the collective judgment of the United States' myriad intelligence agencies, said al-Qaeda was on the run and in disarray.
The July 2007 NIE says al-Qaeda's core leaders have rebuilt their organization in the relative safety of Pakistan -- the country we let bin Laden flee to in 2001. Al-Qaeda is organized, strong, and, in the words of the report, the "most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland."
Which brings me to ...
Loser move No. 3: President Bush doesn't know the difference between a goal and a plan.
For the sake of not boring you to death by rehashing old arguments about why the United States went to war in Iraq, let's just imagine the following:
Let's imagine the Bush administration didn't link Saddam Hussein to 9/11 by falsely insinuating his affiliation with al-Qaeda.
Let's imagine the Bush administration didn't cherry-pick intelligence for the purpose of falsely inflating Iraq's WMD abilities.
Let's imagine administration officials were just joshin' when they said Iraq would be a cakewalk, and that Iraqis would greet Americans as liberators.
Let's imagine every word the president told us prior to the war was true.
Let's assume adorable fairies with magic wands and little spangly ballerina outfits are, as you read this, filling your bathtub with gold and candy.
Even if all of the above were true, the war in Iraq would still be a ginormous catastrophe.
Because the president didn't just fail to plan adequately. He refused to plan at all.
Bush and his top advisers didn't just reject a State Department effort to prepare for the occupation -- they rejected the idea that the State Department should have prepared.
It never occurred to the White House that Iraqis might not accept the U.S. invasion, or that Muslim extremists would attempt to fill the power vacuum left by Saddam's removal.
Iraq now has no effective national government. It's in a civil war, likely followed by a breakup. Sunni Arabs, who dominated under Saddam, don't want to live under a government dominated by Shiite Arab theocratic political parties any more than you or I do.
Iraq's Kurds are headed toward declaring independence. If so, they'll end up fighting the Arabs and Turkomen who won't want to live in a Kurdish state. It's already illegal to fly the Iraqi flag in the Kurdish part of the country.
Or maybe our NATO ally (well, for now) Turkey will invade Iraqi Kurdistan with the 150,000 or so troops it has already massed on Iraq's northern border. Turkey doesn't want the Kurds to have their own state, for fear it will encourage the Kurdish separatists who live in eastern Turkey to break away and join it.
You know how President Bush always says if we don't fight 'em there, we're gonna have to fight 'em here? Iraq is now a training and testing ground for violent radicals who get their rocks off by attacking our planes, trains and gathering places -- just like Afghanistan was in the 1980s. We're gonna have to fight them there and here. For years.
And then there's Iran. Thanks to the War on Terror™, Iran is stronger than it's been at any point since the Islamic Revolution 28 years ago. In the spring of 2003, Iran offered to negotiate away its nuclear program and its support of terrorism in exchange for normal relations and a promise that we wouldn't invade. Not only did we say, "Hell no," we yelled at the Swiss for delivering the message.
Now, Iran's thought to be two or three years away from a nuke -- a nuke it will never negotiate away.
Shockingly, even when confronted by the reality of the invasion's failure to transform Iraq into an oasis of peace, prosperity and American-style democracy, Bush refused to change course.
Critics of the war were greeted with Bush's "good progress" mantra. His supporters berated critics as Negative Nellies, Henny Pennies and, worst of all, terrorist sympathizers.
Last December, Bush finally acknowledged that the occupation was going terribly. But his solution was more of the same: a small escalation popularly known as "The Surge."
The goal of the Surge is to stabilize Iraq enough to hand off control to Iraqi troops working for the Iraqi government. It might have worked if it had started in May 2003 with an international force of 450,000. But with only 160,000 exhausted American troops, whose rotations will require a significant troop reduction by April 2008, it has no chance. Besides, there aren't enough Iraqi troops. And there isn't really an Iraqi government.
Which brings us to:
Loser move No. 4: "You" haven't been paying any attention.
Yeah, You.
I know You have been feeling really good about yourself ever since Time magazine glued a mirror to its cover and declared You its 2006 Person of the Year.
But You have a lot to answer for. By which I mean "We."
We put Bush in office (in this case, by "We," I actually mean you, since I didn't vote for him). We paid scant attention to all the smart people who explained that his policies weren't only incoherent and illogical, but harmful to the cause of fighting terrorists.
Yet, we cheered him on.
Some of You are still cheering him on. Reality-be-damned, you're intent on rooting for your team.
Some of You used to cheer him on, but are now so horrified by Iraq that you want to pull out completely -- as if we have no obligation to help the country we've actually done a worse job of running than Saddam Hussein did.
We've made so many loser moves that all we have left are loser options. If we stay, we babysit a civil war. If we leave, we abandon the civil war we unleashed.
Our least-bad option may be to shepherd the breakup of Iraq, which carries its own risks (ethnic cleansing, an Iranian invasion, etc.). Whatever we do, our choices are complicated. "You" need to start paying attention and voicing support for leaders who are honest about which policies have the best chance of limiting the damage Bush's War on Terror™ has wrought. Or should I say, hath wrought. "Hath" sounds more biblical.
Iraq and the War on Terror™ are going to be part of our lives for a long time. So be it. That works out well for me. It keeps me employed. I'm like Halliburton that way.