presidency.
Soon thereafter came September 11, 2001—the culmination of increasingly violent Al Qaeda attacks on American targets throughout the 1990s. This tragic event provoked three major US reactions. First, President George W. Bush committed the United States to a military undertaking in Afghanistan not only to crush Al Qaeda and to overthrow the Taliban regime that had sheltered it, but also to shape in Afghanistan a modern democracy. Then, in early 2002 he endorsed the military operation undertaken by Prime Minister Sharon (whom he described as “a man of peace”) to crush the PLO in the Palestinian West Bank. Third, in early spring of 2003 he invaded Iraq because of unsubstantiated accusations of an Iraqi connection with Al Qaeda and of its alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction.” Cumulatively, these actions heightened public animus toward the United States in the Middle East, enhanced Iran’s regional standing, and engaged America in two interminable wars.
By 2010, the Afghan and Iraqi wars were among the longest in America’s history. The first of these, undertaken within weeks of the terrorists’ attack on New York City, which had produced the largest number of civilian casualties ever inflicted by an enemy on American society, precipitated a publically endorsed military reaction designed to destroy the Al Qaeda network responsible for the attack, and to remove from power the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had provided safe haven to the perpetrators. The second of these long wars was the early 2003 US military invasion of Iraq, supported from abroad only by a politically pliant British Prime Minister and by Israel, but otherwise opposed or viewed with skepticism by most of America’s other allies. It was publicly justified by the US President on the basis of dubious charges of Iraqi possession of WMDs, which evaporated altogether within a few months, with no supporting evidence ever found in US-OCCUPIED Iraq. Since this war commanded President Bush’s enthusiasm, the war in Afghanistan was relegated to almost seven years of relative neglect.
DURATION OF MAJOR US WARS
Afghanistan* 112
Vietnam 102
Independence 100
Iraq* 96
Civil War 48
World War II 45
Korea 37
Britain (1812) 32
Philippine insurrection 30
Mexico 21
World War I 20
Spain 3
Iraq (1991) 2
These two wars had one common trait: they were expeditionary military operations in hostile territories. In both cases, the Bush administration showed little regard for the complex cultural settings, deeply rooted ethnic rivalries generating conflicts within conflicts, dangerously unsettled regional neighborhoods (especially involving Pakistan and Iran), and the unresolved territorial disputes, all of which severely complicated US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and ignited wider regional anti-American passions. Though America’s interventions were reminiscent of nineteenth-century punitive imperial expeditions against primitive and usually disunited tribes, in the new age of mass political awakening, warfare against aroused populism has become, as the United States has painfully discovered, more protracted and taxing. Last but by no means least, in the age of global transparency, a total victory, achieved ruthlessly by any means necessary has ceased to be a viable option; even the Russians, who did not hesitate to kill hundreds of thousands of Afghans and who drove several million of them into exile, did not go all out in seeking to prevail.
At the same time, however, both the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts—much like the West ’s expeditionary wars of the past—left the American homeland largely unaffected, except of course for soldiers and their families. Though both wars cost America billions of dollars and though their totals were higher than of all previous wars except for World War II, their cost as a percentage of America’s GDP was low because of the enormous expansion of the US economy. Moreover, the Bush administration refrained from increasing taxes in order to pay for the wars, financing them instead by more politically expedient borrowing, including from abroad. From a social perspective, the fact that the fighting and dying was being done by volunteers—unlike in the earlier Vietnamese and Korean wars—also reduced the societal scope of personal pain.
Insofar as the actual conduct of these wars is concerned, the several-years-long neglect of the War in Afghanistan in favor of the Iraq War was compounded by the Bush administration’s use of a deliberately sweeping definition of terrorism as a justification for prioritizing the campaign against Saddam Hussein, ignoring Iraq’s ideological hostility toward Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda’s reciprocal animus toward Saddam’s regime. By implicitly collating the two under the sweeping rubric of “Islamic jihad,” and by making the “war on terror” the justification for US military reactions, it became easier to mobilize American public outrage at 9/11 against not only the actual perpetrators but also against other Islamic entities. The “mushroom cloud,” said by Condoleezza Rice (then National Security Advisor) to be threatening America, thus became a convenient symbol for mobilizing public opinion against a newly designated and very sweeping target. It served to drive public fears to a high pitch, placing at a disadvantage those who dared to express reservations regarding the factual accuracy of the White House’s case for war against Iraq.
Demagogy fueled by fear can be a potent tool, effective in the short run but with significant long-term domestic and foreign costs. Its pernicious effects can be seen in some of the more notorious cases of abuse of Iraqi prisoners, including of some senior Iraqi officers. They were the byproducts of an atmosphere in which the enemy came to be seen as the personification of evil, and thus justifiably the object of personal cruelty. American mass media—including Hollywood movies and TV dramas—likewise contributed significantly to shaping a public mood in which fear and hatred were visually focused on actors with personally distinctive Arab features. Such demagogy inspired discriminatory acts against individual Muslim Americans, especially Arab Americans, ranging in scope from racial profiling to broad indictments against Arab American charities. Cumulatively, infusing into the “war on terror” a racial as well as religious dimension tarnished America’s democratic credentials, while the decision to go to war against Iraq a year and a half after 9/11 became a costly diversion.
It could have been—and should have been—otherwise. First of all, the Iraq War was unnecessary and should have been avoided. It soon acquired greater importance to President Bush than the earlier and justifiable US military reaction to the attack launched by Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. That made the conflict in Afghanistan more prolonged, bloody, and eventually more complex geopolitically because of its increasing suction effect on Pakistan. Second, even earlier, the United States should not have neglected Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew. The country was literally shattered and in desperate need of economic assistance to regain some measure of stability. Both the Bush I and Clinton administrations were passively indifferent. The resulting void was filled in the 1990s by the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, which sought thereby to gain geostrategic depth against India. Before long, the Taliban offered hospitality to Al Qaeda and the rest is history. After 9/11, the United States had no choice but to respond forcefully.
But even then, the United States could have sought to fashion a comprehensive strategy for isolating Al Qaeda’s religiously extremist terrorists from the Muslim mainstream. That strategy, as this writer argued at the time on the op-ed pages of both the
The consequences were a dramatic decline in America’s global standing in contrast to the last decade of the
