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2 Bush and
Bin Laden's virtual war By
Mark Danner
to guide the behavior of anyone
with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons
or, in any way, flout the authority of the United
States".
Set alongside this was the
"democratic tsunami" that was to follow the
shock-and-awe triumph over Saddam. It would sweep
through the Middle East from Iraq to Iran and
thence to Syria and Palestine. ("The road to
Jerusalem" - so ran the neo-conservative gospel at
the time - "runs through Baghdad.") As I wrote in
October 2002, five months before the Iraq War was
launched, this vision was detailed and well
elaborated:
Behind the notion that an American
intervention will make of Iraq "the first Arab
democracy", as Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz put it, lies a project of great
ambition. It envisions a post-Saddam Hussein
Iraq - secular, middle-class, urbanized, rich
with oil - that will replace the autocracy of
Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in the
Persian Gulf, allowing the withdrawal of United
States troops from the kingdom. The presence of
a victorious American army in Iraq would then
serve as a powerful boost to moderate elements
in neighboring Iran, hastening that critical
country's evolution away from the mullahs and
toward a more moderate course. Such an evolution
in Tehran would lead to a withdrawal of Iranian
support for Hezbollah and other radical groups,
thereby isolating Syria and reducing pressure on
Israel. This undercutting of radicals on
Israel's northern borders and within the West
Bank and Gaza would spell the definitive end of
Yasser Arafat and lead eventually to a favorable
solution of the Arab-Israeli problem.
This is a vision of great sweep and
imagination: comprehensive, prophetic,
evangelical. In its ambitions, it is wholly
foreign to the modesty of containment, the
ideology of a status-quo power that lay at the
heart of American strategy for half a century.
It means to remake the world, to offer to a
political threat a political answer. It
represents a great step on the road toward
President Bush's ultimate vision of "freedom's
triumph over all its age-old foes".
One can
identify two factors underlying this vision:
first, the great enthusiasm for a moralistic
foreign policy based on universalized principles
and democratic reform that dated back to
containment's main rival, the "rollback"
movement of the 1950s, and that had been
revivified by the thrilling series of Eastern
European revolutions of the late 1980s and by
scenes of popular, American-aided democratic
triumph (as it was then thought to be) in
Afghanistan; and, second, the recognition that
terrorism, at the end of the day, was a
political problem that arose from a calcified
authoritarian order in the Middle East and that
only a dose of "creative destabilization" could
shake up that order.
"Transforming the
Middle East," in Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice's words, "is the only guarantee that it
will no longer produce ideologies of hatred that
lead men to fly airplanes into buildings in New
York and Washington."
The latter
perception - that terrorism as it struck the
United States arose from political factors and
that it could only be confronted and defeated
with a political response - strikes me as
incontestable. The problem the administration
faced, or rather didn't want to face, was that
the calcified order that lay at the root of the
problem was the very order that, for nearly six
decades, had been shaped, shepherded and
sustained by the United States.
We see
an explicit acknowledgment of this in the
"Bletchley II" report drafted after 9/11 at
Defense Department urging by a number of
intellectuals close to the administration: "The
general analysis," one of its authors told the
Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "was that Egypt
and Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers
came from, were the key, but the problems there
are intractable. Iran is more important ... But
Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing
with. But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker,
more vulnerable ..."
A very
complicated war In this sense, many of
the Bush administration's leading Iraq war
backers comprised a kind of guerrilla force
within the US government, fighting against a
longstanding strategic alignment in the Middle
East. This guerrilla status, which defined many
of the government's most knowledgeable Middle
East hands as enemies to be isolated and
ignored, helps to account, at least in part, for
a great many of the extraordinary incompetencies
and disasters of the war itself.
That
the roots of the war lie in stark opposition to
established US policy also helps explain the
central conundrum of the current US strategic
position in Iraq and the Middle East. This was
defined for me with typical concision and aplomb
by Ahmed Chalabi in Baghdad last year. "The
American tragedy in Iraq," said Chalabi, "is
that your friends in Iraq are allied with your
enemies in the region, and your enemies in Iraq
are allied with your friends in the region."
Chalabi's concision and wit are
admirable (and typical); but his point, once you
look at the map, is obvious. The United States
has made possible the rise to power in Iraq of a
Shi'ite government which is allied with its
major geopolitical antagonist in the region, the
Islamic Republic of Iran. And the United States
has been fighting with great persistence and
distinctly mixed results a Sunni insurgency
which is allied with the Saudis, the Jordanians
and its other longtime friends among the
traditional Sunni autocracies of the Gulf.
This is another way of saying that the
US policy built on the famous meeting between
president Franklin D Roosevelt and King ibn Saud
aboard Roosevelt's cruiser on the Great Bitter
Lake near the end of World War II - a policy
that envisioned a vital, mutually beneficial and
enduring alliance between the Saudis and the
Americans - having been put in grave question by
the Saudi insurgents at the controls of those
mighty airliners of September 11, now smashed
full on into the strategic assault perpetrated
by the Bush administration insurgents led by
Paul Wolfowitz and his associates. Their
"creative destabilization" was aimed not just at
Saddam's Iraq, but at more than a half century
of American policy in the Middle East.
Al-Qaeda, opportunistic as always, was
willing to play this game, seizing on the
occupation of Iraq as the golden opportunity it
most certainly was and focusing on the
Shi'ite-Sunni divide on which US policy was
foundering. The late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's
famous intercepted letter to Ayman al-Zawahiri
and bin Laden, in which the insurgent leader of
al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia told the al-Qaeda
potentates - the front office, as it were - that
his aim in Iraq was to "awaken the sleeping
Sunnis" by launching a vast bombing campaign
against the "Shi'ite heretic", describes
precisely both the national and regional
strategy: "If we manage to draw them into the
terrain of partisan war, it will be possible to
tear the Sunnis away from their heedlessness,
for they will feel the weight of the imminence
of danger."
This is a strategy that,
after the bombing of the revered al-Askari
mosque and shrine in Samarra in February 2006,
bore terrible fruit. My map that shows divisions
running through Baghdad will show, if you zoom
out, those same divisions running through Iraq
and beyond its borders. Like the former
Yugoslavia, Iraq is a nation that gathers within
itself the cultural and sectarian fault lines of
the region; the Sunni-Shi'ite divide running
through Iraq in effect runs through the entire
Middle East. The United States, in choosing this
place to stage its democratic revolution, could
hardly have done al-Qaeda a better favor.
At this moment, the Iraq war is at a
stalemate. Confronted with a growing threat from
those "enemies allied with its friends in the
region", the Sunni insurgents, the Bush
administration has adopted a practical and
typically American strategy: it has bought them.
The Americans have purchased the insurgency,
hiring its foot soldiers at the rate of US$300
per month. The Sunni fighters, once called
insurgents, we now refer to as "tribesmen" or
"concerned citizens".
This has isolated
al-Qaeda, a tactical victory. But because these
purchased Sunni fighters have not been accepted
by the Shi'ite government - the allies of our
enemies - the United States has set in motion a
policy that will require, to keep violence at
current levels, its own permanent presence in
the country. This at a time when two in three
Americans think the war was a mistake and when
both surviving Democrat presidential candidates
vow to begin bringing the troops home "on day
one" of a Democratic administration.
On
the horizon, after such a withdrawal, is a
re-ignition of the civil war at an even more
brutal level, helped by the American rearming of
the Sunni forces - and indeed the American
arming of Shi'ite government forces as well. It
is a curious reality, if we look again at the
regional map, that the current geostrategic
situation in the Middle East resembles nothing
so much as the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, in
which the United States, along with Egypt, the
Saudis and the Jordanians supported Saddam's
Iraq in its great war against ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini's Iran.
We see a similar array
of forces today, with these two differences:
First, we must move the line of conflict about
320 kilometers west, shifting it from the
Iraq-Iran border to a line running through
Baghdad along the Tigris River. Second, the
United States is now arming and supporting both
sides. And behind the current configuration and
the supposed "success of the surge" looms the
darkening threat of regionalization - a
region-wide struggle fought over the body of
Iraq in the wake of an American withdrawal. It
has become, to appropriate a phrase, a very
complicated war.
A defeat only
American power could have brought about
Whether or not this darkest of dark
visions comes to pass, that very complicated war
in Iraq, as the intelligence analysts and our
own eyes tell us, will continue to pay vast
dividends into the account of political
grievances with which terrorist groups recruit.
This has only partly to do with the
original al-Qaeda itself (or "al-Qaeda prime",
as some analysts now call it); for however much
it has managed to "reconstitute" itself, the
true game has moved elsewhere, toward "viral
al-Qaeda" - "spontaneous groups of friends", in
the words of former Central Intelligence Agency
analyst and psychiatrist Marc Sageman, "as in
[the] Madrid and Casablanca [bombings], who have
few links to any central leadership, [who] are
generating sometimes very dangerous terrorist
operations, notwithstanding their frequent
errors and poor training."
While US and
allied intelligence agencies have had
considerable success attacking the various
formal nodes of al-Qaeda prime on the Arabian
Peninsula and elsewhere, those struggles have
about them the air of the past; we have really
passed into a different era, the era of the
amateurs. Today's network is self-organized,
Internet reliant and decentralized, dependent
not on armies, training, or even technology but
on desire and political will. And the US has
ensured, by the way it fought this forever war,
that it is precisely these vital qualities its
enemies have in large and growing supply.
So how, finally, do we "take stock of
the war on terror"? Let me suggest three words:
1. Fragmentation - brought
about by "creative destabilization", as we see
it not only in Iraq but in Lebanon, Palestine
and elsewhere in the region. 2.
Diminution - of American prestige,
both military and political, and thus of
American power. 3. Destruction
- of the political consensus within the United
States for a strong global role.
Gaze
for a moment at those three words and marvel at
how far the US has come in a half-dozen years.
In September 2001, the United States
faced a grave threat. The attacks that have
become synonymous with that date were
unprecedented in their destructiveness, in their
lethality, in the pure apocalyptic shock of
their spectacle. But in their aftermath,
American policymakers, partly through
ideological blindness and preening exaggeration
of American power, partly through blindness
brought about by political opportunism, made
decisions that led to a defeat only their own
actions - that only American power itself -
could have brought about.
A small coven
of America's enemies, using the strategy of
provocation so familiar in guerrilla warfare,
had launched in spectacular fashion on that
bright September morning a plan to use the
superpower's strength against itself. To use a
different metaphor, they were trying to make
good on Archimedes' celebrated boast: having
found the perfect lever and place to stand, they
proposed to move the Earth. To an extent I am
sure even they did not anticipate, in their
choice of opponent - an evangelical, redemptive
regime scornful of history and determined to
remake the fallen world - lay the seeds of their
success.
Mark Danner is the
author, most recently, of Torture and Truth:
America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror
(2004) and The Secret Way to War: The
Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried
History (2007). He has covered the Iraq war
from its beginning for the New York Review of
Books. He teaches at both Bard College and the
Graduate School of Journalism at the University
of California, Berkeley. His work is archived at
MarkDanner.com.
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