911 What Did Bush Do to Make Sure 911 Didnt Happen Again
Deep within the catalogue of regrets that is the 9/xi Commission written report — long afterwards readers learn of the origins and objectives of al-Qaeda, past the warnings ignored by consecutive administrations, through the litany of institutional failures that allowed terrorists to hijack four commercial airliners — the authors pause to make a rousing case for the power of the nation's character.
"The U.S. government must ascertain what the message is, what information technology stands for," the report asserts. "Nosotros should offering an example of moral leadership in the globe, committed to care for people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. . . . We demand to defend our ideals abroad vigorously. America does stand up up for its values."
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This affirmation of American idealism is one of the document's more opinionated moments. Looking back, information technology's also among the most ignored.
Rather than exemplify the nation's highest values, the official response to ix/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: charade, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, mirage, overreach and carelessness. This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the by two decades — the works of investigation, memoir and narrative past journalists and former officials that have charted the path to that day, revealed the heroism and confusion of the early on response, chronicled the battles in and about Afghanistan and Iraq, and uncovered the excesses of the war on terror. Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember. The anguish comes from knowing how the tale volition unfold; the frustration from realizing that this was hardly the simply possible outcome.
Whatever individual stories the 9/11 books tell, too many draw the repudiation of U.S. values, non past extremist outsiders just past our own hand. The betrayal of America'southward professed principles was the friendly fire of the war on terror. In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives fashion to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized.
It was an emergency, yes, that's understood. But that land of exception became our new American exceptionalism.
It happened fast. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to "engage the struggle of ideas," it was already too late; the Justice Department's initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.Southward. claims to moral authority. And information technology has lasted long. The latest works on the legacy of nine/eleven show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United states. The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place.
"It is for now far easier for a researcher to explicate how and why September 11 happened than it is to explicate the backwash," Steve Coll writes in "Ghost Wars," his 2004 business relationship of the CIA'south pre-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan. Throughout that aftermath, Washington fantasized near remaking the globe in its epitome, only to reveal an ugly paradigm of itself to the world.
The literature of ix/eleven also considers Osama bin Laden's varied aspirations for the attacks and his shifting visions of that aftermath. He originally imagined America as weak and easily panicked, retreating from the world — in item from the Centre Due east — every bit soon as its troops began dying. But bin Laden also came to grasp, possibly self-servingly, the benefits of luring Washington into regal overreach, of "bleeding America to the point of defalcation," equally he put information technology in 2004, through endless military expansionism, thus beating back its global sway and undermining its internal unity. "We conceptualize a black future for America," bin Laden told ABC News more than than three years before the 9/11 attacks. "Instead of remaining United States, it shall finish up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America."
Bin Laden did not win the war of ideas. Merely neither did we. To an unnerving caste, the United states of america moved toward the enemy'south fantasies of what information technology might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars information technology did not want just would not end. When President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Function on the evening of Sept. eleven, 2001, he asserted that America was attacked because it is "the brightest buoy for freedom and opportunity in the earth, and no 1 will keep that low-cal from shining." Bush-league was correct; al-Qaeda could not dim the promise of America. Simply we could do that to ourselves.
I.
"The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic." That is how Lawrence Wright depicts the early on impressions of bin Laden and his terrorist network amid U.S. officials in "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to ix/eleven." For a country still basking in its mail service-Common cold State of war glow, it all seemed then far away, even as al-Qaeda's strikes — on the Earth Trade Eye in 1993, on U.S. Embassies in 1998, on the USS Cole in 2000 — grew bolder. This was American complacency, mixed with denial.
The books traveling that road to 9/11 have an inexorable, virtually suffocating experience to them, as though every plow invariably leads to the offset beat out of steel and glass. Their starting points vary. Wright dwells on the influence of Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb, whose mid-20th-century sojourn in the United States blithe his vision of a clash betwixt Islam and modernity, and whose piece of work would inspire future jihadists. In "Ghost Wars," Coll laments America'south abandonment of Afghanistan once it ceased serving as a proxy battlefield against Moscow. In "The Ascent and Fall of Osama bin Laden," Peter Bergen stresses the moment bin Laden arrived in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan from Sudan in 1996, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed first pitched him on the planes plot. And the 9/xi Commission lingers on bin Laden'due south declarations of war against the United states, particularly his 1998 fatwa calling information technology "the individual duty for every Muslim" to murder Americans "in whatever country in which it is possible."
Yet these early works also brand clear that the route to 9/eleven featured plenty of billboards warning of the likely destination. A Presidential Daily Cursory detail on Aug. 6, 2001, titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US" became infamous in 9/11 lore, withal the commission report notes that it was the 36th PDB relating to bin Laden or al-Qaeda that year lonely. ("All right. You've covered your ass now," Bush reportedly sneered at the briefer.) Both the FBI and the CIA produced classified warnings on terrorist threats in the mid-1990s, Coll writes, including a particularly precise National Intelligence Estimate. "Several targets are especially at risk: national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol, and symbols of U.S. commercialism such equally Wall Street," it stated. "We assess that civil aviation will figure prominently among possible terrorist targets in the U.s.." Some of the admonitions scattered throughout the ix/11 literature are as well over-the-height even for a movie script: There'south the exasperated State Department official complaining nearly Defense Section inaction ("Does al Qaeda accept to attack the Pentagon to go their attention?"), and the earnest FBI supervisor in Minneapolis alarm a skeptical amanuensis in Washington nigh suspected terrorism activeness, insisting that he was "trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center."
In these books, everyone is warning everyone else. Bergen emphasizes that a young intelligence analyst in the State Department, Gina Bennett, wrote the first classified memo warning virtually bin Laden in 1993. Pockets within the FBI and the CIA obsess over bin Laden while regarding one some other equally rivals. On his mode out, President Bill Clinton warns Bush. Outgoing national security adviser Sandy Berger warns his successor, Condoleezza Rice. And White Firm counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, every bit he reminds incessantly in his 2004 memoir, "Confronting All Enemies," warns anyone who will listen and many who will not.
With the system "blinking cherry-red," as CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, why were all these warnings not plenty? Wright lingers on bureaucratic failings, emphasizing that intelligence drove on al-Qaeda was hampered past the "institutional warfare" between the CIA and the FBI, two agencies that by all accounts were non on speaking terms. Coll writes that Clinton regarded bin Laden as "an isolated fanatic, flailing dangerously but quixotically against the forces of global progress," whereas the Bush team was fixated on nifty-power politics, missile defense and People's republic of china.
Clarke'due south conclusion is simple, and information technology highlights America'south we-know-better swagger, a national trait that ofttimes masquerades as courage or wisdom. "America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings," he writes. "Our country seems unable to exercise all that must be washed until at that place has been some awful calamity."
The problem with responding only to cataclysm is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves information technology is the right thing, peradventure the simply thing, to exercise.
Ii.
A last-minute flying alter. A new job at the Pentagon. A retirement from the fire station. The final tilt of a plane'due south wings before impact. If the books about the atomic number 82-upward to nine/11 are packed with unbearable inevitability, the volumes on the solar day itself highlight how randomness separated survival from death. "The ferocity of the attacks meant that innocent people lived or died because they stepped back from a doorway, or hopped onto a closing elevator, or but shifted their weight from ane pes to another," Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn write in "102 Minutes," their narrative of events inside the Earth Trade Middle from the moment the first plane hit through the collapse of both towers. Their detailed reporting on the human saga — such every bit a police force officer request a fire chaplain to hear his confession as they both flee a collapsing building — is excruciating and riveting at once.
Withal, as much as the people inside, the structures and history of the World Merchandise Centre are key actors, besides. They are non merely symbols and targets merely fully formed and deeply flawed characters in the day's drama.
[9/11 has become all about New York — with D.C. and the Pentagon nearly forgotten]
Had the Globe Trade Middle, built in the late 1960s and early on 1970s, been erected according to the city building lawmaking in effect since 1938, Dwyer and Flynn explicate, "it is likely that a very different world merchandise center would take been congenital." Instead, it was constructed according to a new code that the real manor industry had avidly promoted, a code that fabricated it cheaper and more than lucrative to build and own skyscrapers. "It increased the floor infinite bachelor for rent . . . past cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, nether the earlier police, to evacuation and go out," the authors write. The issue: Getting everybody out on 9/11 was near impossible.
Under the new rules, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey was able to rent three-quarters of each flooring of the World Trade Center, Dwyer and Flynn study, a 21 percent increment over the yield of older skyscrapers. The cost was dear. Some 1,000 people inside the North Tower who initially survived the impact of American Airlines Flight 11 could not reach an open staircase. "Their fate was sealed nearly 4 decades earlier, when the stairways were amassed in the core of the edifice, and burn down stairs were eliminated as a wasteful use of valuable space." (The authors write that "building code reform hardly makes for gripping drama," an aside as minor as it is inaccurate.) The towers embodied the ability of American capitalism, but their design embodied the folly of American greed. On that 24-hour interval, both conditions proved fatal.
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The assault on the Pentagon, long treated as an undercard to New York's main issue, could have yielded fifty-fifty greater devastation, and once again the details of the building played a role. In his oral history of 9/11, "The Only Airplane in the Sky," Garrett Graff quotes Defense Section officials marveling at how American Airlines Flight 77 struck a office of the Pentagon that, because of new anti-terrorism standards, had recently been reinforced and renovated. This meant information technology was not but stronger but, on that morning, besides relatively unoccupied. "It was truly a miracle," Army co-operative master Philip Smith said. "In whatsoever other wedge of the Pentagon, there would have been 5,000 people, and the plane would accept flown right through the center of the building." Instead, fewer than 200 people were killed in the assail on the Pentagon, including the passengers on the hijacked jet. Take chances and preparedness came together.
The bravery of police and firefighters is the subject area of countless nine/11 retrospectives, only these books also emphasize the selflessness of civilians who morphed into first responders. Port Authority workers Frank De Martini, Pablo Ortiz, Carlos da Costa and Peter Negron, for instance, saved at to the lowest degree 70 people in the World Merchandise Eye'south N Belfry by pulling apart elevator doors, busting walls and shining flashlights to observe survivors, only to not make information technology out themselves. "With crowbar, flashlight, hardhat and big mouths, De Martini and Ortiz and their colleagues had pushed back the purlieus line between life and death," Dwyer and Flynn write. The authors also note how the double lines of people descending a Earth Trade Center staircase would automatically blend into single file when word came down that an injured person was backside them. And Graff cites a local banana fire main who recalls the "truly heroic" work of civilians and uniformed personnel at the Pentagon that day. "They were the ones who really got their comrades, got their workmates out," he says.
The civilians aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose resistance forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than the U.S. Capitol, were later lionized as emblems of swashbuckling Americana. But one offhand detail in the nine/xi Commission report underscores only how American their defiance was. The passengers had fabricated phone calls when the hijacking began and had learned the fate of other shipping that day. "According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane," the commission report states. "They decided, and acted."
They voted on it. They voted. Even in that moment of unfathomable fright and distress, the passengers took a moment to engage in the great American tradition of popular consultation before deciding to become this new war's earliest soldiers. Was at that place ever any doubt as to the outcome of that ballot?
Such episodes, led by ordinary civilians, embodied values that the 9/11 Committee called on the nation to display. Except those values would soon exist dismantled, in the name of security, by those entrusted to uphold them.
3.
Lawyering to death.
The phrase appears in multiple 9/11 volumes, normally uttered by top officials adamant that they were going to become things done, laws and rules be damned. Anti-terrorism efforts were always "lawyered to death" during the Clinton administration, Tenet complains in "Bush at War," Bob Woodward'due south 2002 volume on the debates among the president and his national security team. In an interview with Woodward, Bush-league drops the phrase among the machospeak — "dead or alive," "bring 'em on" and the like — that became typical of his anti-terrorism rhetoric. "I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do any it took to win," Bush-league explains. "No yielding. No equivocation. No, you lot know, lawyering this thing to death." In "Against All Enemies," Clarke recalls the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush snapped at an official who suggested that international constabulary looked askance at military forcefulness as a tool of revenge. "I don't intendance what the international lawyers say, nosotros are going to kicking some ass," the president retorted.
The bulletin was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism. Worrying about procedural niceties is passe in a 9/xi world, an annoying impediment to the essential work of ass-kick.
Except, they did lawyer this thing to death. Instead of disregarding the police, the Bush administration enlisted information technology. "Outset almost immediately after September 11, 2001, [Vice President Dick] Cheney saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came upward with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the regime'southward power in waging state of war on terror," Jane Mayer writes in "The Night Side," her relentless 2008 compilation of the arguments and machinations of government lawyers subsequently the attacks. Through public declarations and hush-hush memos, the administration sought to remove limits on the president's comport of warfare and to deny terrorism suspects the protections of the Geneva Conventions by redefining them as unlawful enemy combatants. Nothing, Mayer argues of the latter endeavor, "more directly cleared the style for torture than this."
To comprehend what our regime tin justify in the name of national security, consider the torture memos themselves, authored by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 to greenish-low-cal CIA interrogation methods for terrorism suspects. Tactics such as cramped confinement, sleep deprivation and waterboarding were rebranded as "enhanced interrogation techniques," legally and linguistically contorted to avert the characterization of torture. Though the techniques could be cruel and inhuman, the OLC best-selling in an August 2002 memo, they would constitute torture only if they produced hurting equivalent to organ failure or death, and if the individual inflicting such hurting really really meant to practise and then: "Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will event from his actions, if causing such harm is non his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent." Information technology'southward quite the sleight of hand, with torture moving from the body of the interrogated to the heed of the interrogator.
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After devoting dozens of pages to the metaphysics of specific intent, the truthful significant of "prolonged" mental harm or "imminent" death, and the elasticity of the Convention Against Torture, the memo concludes that none of it really matters. Even if a detail interrogation method would cantankerous some legal line, the relevant statute would be considered unconstitutional because it "impermissibly encroached" on the commander in chief'southward authority to deport warfare. Almost nowhere in these memos does the Justice Department curtail the power of the CIA to do every bit information technology pleases.
In fact, the OLC lawyers rely on assurances from the CIA itself to endorse such powers. In a 2nd memo from August 2002, the lawyers ruminate on the use of cramped confinement boxes. "Nosotros have no information from the medical experts you lot have consulted that the express elapsing for which the private is kept in the boxes causes whatever substantial physical pain," the memo states. Waterboarding likewise gets a pass. "You have informed us that this procedure does not inflict actual concrete harm," the memo states. "Based on your inquiry . . . you practice not conceptualize that any prolonged mental harm would event from the use of the waterboard."
You have informed united states of america. Experts you accept consulted. Based on your inquiry. You do non anticipate. Such hand-washing words appear throughout the memos. The Justice Section relies on data provided by the CIA to reach its conclusions; the CIA then has the cover of the Justice Department to keep with its interrogations. It's a perfect circle of trust.
Even so the logic is itself tortured. In a May 2005 memo, the lawyers conclude that because no unmarried technique inflicts "severe" hurting amounting to torture, their combined use "would not be expected" to reach that level, either. As though embarrassed at such illogic, the memo attaches a triple-negative footnote: "We are not suggesting that combinations or repetitions of acts that do non individually crusade severe concrete pain could not event in astringent physical pain." Well, then, what exactly are you suggesting? Even when the OLC in 2004 officially withdrew its August 2002 memo post-obit a public outcry and declared torture "abhorrent," the lawyers added a footnote to the new memo assuring that they had reviewed the prior opinions on the treatment of detainees and "do not believe that any of their conclusions would be different nether the standards set forth in this memorandum."
In these documents, lawyers enable lawlessness. Another May 2005 memo concludes that, because the Convention Against Torture applies only to actions occurring nether U.S. jurisdiction, the CIA's cosmos of detention sites in other countries renders the convention "inapplicable." Similarly, because the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual penalization is meant to protect people convicted of crimes, it should not employ to terrorism detainees — because they have not been officially bedevilled of anything. The lack of due process conveniently eliminates ramble protections. In his introduction to "The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable," David Cole describes the documents as "bad-organized religion lawyering," which might be generous. It is another kind of lawyering to death, one in which the rule of law that the ix/eleven Commission urged us to abide by becomes the victim.
Years subsequently, the Senate Intelligence Committee would investigate the CIA's post-9/11 interrogation program. Its massive report — the executive summary of which appeared as a 549-page book in 2014 — found that torture did not produce useful intelligence, that the interrogations were more vicious than the CIA let on, that the Justice Department did not independently verify the CIA's information, and that the spy agency impeded oversight by Congress and the CIA inspector full general. It explains that the CIA purported to oversee itself and, no surprise, that information technology deemed its interrogations effective and necessary, no matter the results. (If a detainee provided information, it meant the program worked; if he did not, it meant stricter applications of the techniques were needed; if still no information was forthcoming, the program had succeeded in proving he had none to requite.)
"The CIA's effectiveness representations were well-nigh entirely inaccurate," the Senate report concluded. Information technology is ane of the few lies of the war on terror unmasked past an official regime investigation and public written report, merely only one of the many documented in the 9/xi literature.
IV.
Officials in the state of war on terror didn't deceive or dissemble just with lawmakers or the public. In the recurring tragedy of war, they lied but as oftentimes to themselves.
In "To First a War: How the Bush Assistants Took America Into Iraq," Robert Draper considers the influence of the president'due south top aides. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (long obsessed with ousting Saddam Hussein), Pentagon primary Donald Rumsfeld (eager to test his theories of military transformation) and Cheney (fixated on apocalyptic visions of America's vulnerability) all had their reasons. Simply Draper identifies a single responsible political party: "The decision to invade Iraq was i made, finally and exclusively, by the president of the United States, George W. Bush-league," he writes.
A president initially concerned about defending and preserving the nation'due south moral goodness against terrorism found himself driven by darker impulses. "I'm having difficulty controlling my bloodlust," Bush confessed to religious leaders in the Oval Part on Sept. 20, 2001, Draper reports. It was non a one-off comment; in Woodward'south "Bush at War," the president admitted that before 9/xi, "I didn't feel that sense of urgency [about al-Qaeda], and my blood was non near as boiling."
Bloodlust, moral certainty and sudden vulnerability make a dangerous combination. The belief that you are defending expert against evil can atomic number 82 to the belief that any you do to that finish is good, too. Draper distills Bush's worldview: "The terrorists' primary objective was to destroy America's freedom. Saddam hated America. Therefore, he hated freedom. Therefore, Saddam was himself a terrorist, bent on destroying America and its liberty."
Note the asymmetry. The president assumed the worst virtually what Hussein had done or might do, yet embraced best-case scenarios of how an American invasion would keep. "Iraqis would rejoice at the sight of their Western liberators," Draper recaps. "Their newly shared sense of national purpose would overcome any sectarian allegiances. Their native cleverness would brand upward for their inexperience with self-government. They would welcome the stewardship of Iraqi expatriates who had not gear up pes in Baghdad in decades. And their oil would pay for everything."
In that location are lies, and and so there is self-delusion. The Americans did non have to anticipate the specifics of the civil war that would engulf the land after the invasion; they but had to realize that managing postwar Iraq would never be as unproblematic as they imagined. It did non seem to occur to Bush and his advisers that Iraqis could simultaneously hate Hussein and resent the Americans — feelings that could have been discovered past speaking to Iraqis and hearing their concerns.
Anthony Shadid's "Night Draws Most: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War," published in 2005, is amongst the few books on the war that gets deep inside Iraqis' disfavor to the Americans in their midst. "What gives them the correct to change something that'south non theirs in the first place?" a adult female in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood asks him. "I don't like your house, so I'chiliad going to flop it and yous can rebuild it again the style I want it, with your money?" In Fallujah, where Shadid hears early on talk of the Americans as "kuffar" (heathens), a 51-year-old former instructor complains that "nosotros've exchanged a tyrant for an occupier." The occupation did not dissuade such impressions when it turned the former dictator'due south seat of government into its own luxurious Green Zone, or when information technology retrofitted the Abu Ghraib prison ("the worst of Saddam'due south hellholes," Shadid calls it) into its own bedroom of horrors.
Shadid understood that governmental legitimacy — who gets to rule, and by what right — was a matter of overriding importance for Iraqis. "The Americans never understood the question," he writes; "Iraqis never agreed on the answer." Information technology'south difficult to notice a improve summation of the trials of Republic of iraq in the aftermath of America's invasion. When the United States so quickly shifted from liberation to occupation, information technology lost whatever legitimacy it enjoyed. "Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that nosotros were the new Crusaders come up to occupy Muslim land," Clarke writes. "It was every bit if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range listen control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, y'all must invade Iraq.' "
[The Pentagon's Obsession With Counterinsurgency]
The foolishness and arrogance of the American occupation didn't help. In "Imperial Life in the Emerald Metropolis: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," Rajiv Chandrasekaran explains how, even as daily security was Iraqis' overwhelming concern, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, Bush's human being in Baghdad, was adamant to turn the land into a model free-market economy, complete with new investment laws, bankruptcy courts and a land-of-the-art stock exchange. In charge of the new exchange was a 24-year-sometime American with no academic groundwork in economics or finance. The human tasked with remaking Iraq'southward sprawling university system had no experience in the Eye Eastward — just did have connections to the Rumsfeld and Cheney families. A new traffic police for Iraq was partially cut and pasted from Maryland'southward motor vehicle code. An antismoking campaign was led by a U.S. official who was a closet smoker. And a U.S. Army general, when asked by local journalists why American helicopters must wing then low at night, thus scaring Iraqi children, replied that the kids were simply hearing "the sound of liberty."
Message: Freedom sounds terrifying.
For some Americans, inflicting that terror became part of the chore, one more than tool in the arsenal. In "The Forever State of war" by Dexter Filkins, a U.S. Ground forces lieutenant colonel in Iraq assures the writer that "with a heavy dose of fearfulness and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I remember we can convince these people that we are here to help them." (Filkins asked him if he really meant it most fearfulness and violence; the officer insisted that he did.) Of course, not all officials were so deluded and then forthright; some knew meliorate but lied to the public. Chandrasekaran recalls the response of a meridian communications official under Bremer, when reporters asked about waves of violence striking Baghdad in the spring of 2004. "Off the record: Paris is called-for," the official told the journalists. "On the tape: Security and stability are returning to Iraq."
In "The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden," Bergen sums up how the Iraq War, conjured in part on the faux connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, concluded up helping the terrorist network: It pulled resources from the war in Afghanistan, gave infinite for bin Laden's men to regroup and spurred a new generation of terrorists in the Middle East. "A bigger souvenir to bin Laden was hard to imagine," Bergen writes.
If Iraq was the war born of lies, Afghanistan was the one nurtured by them. Afghanistan was where al-Qaeda, supported by the Taliban, had made its base — it was supposed to be the good state of war, the right war, the war of necessity and not choice, the state of war endorsed at home and abroad. "U.S. officials had no need to prevarication or spin to justify the state of war," Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes in "The Afghanistan Papers," a damning contrast of the war'due south reality vs. its rhetoric. "Notwithstanding leaders at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Section soon began to make false assurances and to newspaper over setbacks on the battleground." As the years passed, the deceit became entrenched, what Whitlock calls "an unspoken conspiracy" to hide the truth.
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Drawing from a "Lessons Learned" project that interviewed hundreds of military and civilian officials involved with Afghanistan, as well equally from oral histories, government cables and reports, Whitlock finds commanding generals privately admitting that they long fought the war "without a functional strategy." That, two years into the conflict, Rumsfeld complained that he had "no visibility into who the bad guys are." That Regular army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a former coordinator of Iraq and Afghanistan policy, acknowledged that "we didn't have the foggiest idea of what we were undertaking." That U.S. officials long wanted to withdraw American forces but feared — correctly so, it turns out — that the Afghan authorities might collapse. "Bin Laden had hoped for this verbal scenario," Whitlock observes. "To lure the U.S. superpower into an unwinnable guerrilla disharmonize that would deplete its national treasury and diminish its global influence."
All along, acme officials publicly contradicted these internal views, issuing favorable accounts of steady progress. Bad news was twisted into good: Ascension suicide attacks in Kabul meant the Taliban was likewise weak for direct combat, for instance, while increased U.South. casualties meant America was taking the fight to the enemy. The skills and size of the Afghan security forces were oftentimes exaggerated; by the end of President Barack Obama'southward second term, U.S. officials concluded that some thirty,000 Afghan soldiers on the payroll didn't actually be; they were newspaper creations of local commanders who pocketed the fake soldiers' salaries at U.S. taxpayer expense. American officials publicly lamented big-calibration corruption in Afghanistan merely enabled that abuse in practice, pouring massive contracts and projects into a country ill-equipped to absorb them. Such deceptions transpired beyond U.S. presidents, but the Obama administration, eager to show that its first-term troop surge was working, "took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false," Whitlock writes. And then nether President Donald Trump, he adds, the generals felt pressure to "speak more forcefully and boast that his war strategy was destined to succeed."
Long before President Biden declared the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan this summertime, the United States twice made similar pronouncements, proclaiming the decision of combat operations in 2003 and again in 2014 — all the same still the war endured. It did so in part because "in public, almost no senior government officials had the courage to acknowledge that the United States was slowly losing," Whitlock writes. "With their complicit silence, military machine and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict."
Information technology'due south not like nobody warned them. In "Bush at State of war," Woodward reports that CIA Counterterrorism Heart Manager Cofer Blackness and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage traveled to Moscow shortly later 9/11 to give officials a heads up about the coming hostilities in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan. The Russians, recent visitors to the graveyard of empires, cautioned that Afghanistan was an "ambush sky" and that, in the words of i of them, "you're actually going to go the hell kicked out of you." Cofer responded confidently: "We're going to impale them. . . . We're going to rock their globe."
Now, with U.South. forces gone and the Taliban having reclaimed power in Afghanistan, Washington is wrestling with the legacy of the nation'southward longest war. Why and how did America lose? Should we take stayed longer? Was it worth its price in blood and billions? How does the United States repay the courage of Afghans who worked alongside U.South. war machine and civilian authorities? What if Afghanistan again becomes a haven for terrorists attacking U.S. interests and allies, as the airport suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members last month may signal? Biden has asserted that "the war in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan is now over" but has besides pledged to continue the fight confronting terrorists there — so what are the limits and the means of future U.S. military and intelligence action in the country?
These are essential debates, but a war should not exist measured merely by the timing and the competence of its end. Nosotros even so face an equally consequential appraisal: How proficient was this expert state of war if it could be sustained only past lies?
Five.
In the ii decades since the ix/11 attacks, the United states of america has ofttimes attempted to reconsider its response. Take two documents from late 2006: the report from the Republic of iraq Report Group, co-chaired by James A. Baker 3 and Lee H. Hamilton, which argued that Washington needed to radically rethink its diplomatic and political strategy for Republic of iraq; and "The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual," written past a squad led by and then-Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, which argued that U.S. officials needed to radically rethink military tactics for insurgency wars of the kind it faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They are written as though intending to solve problems. Only they tin can be read as proof that the problems accept no realistic solution, or that the just solution is to never take created them.
"At that place is no magic formula to solve the bug of Iraq," the ISG report begins, even so its proposed fixes would accept required enough of fairy grit. The written report calls for a "diplomatic offensive" to gain international support for Iraq, to persuade Iran and Syria to respect Iraq's territory and sovereignty, and to commit to "a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts." Uncomplicated! Republic of iraq, meanwhile, needed to brand progress on national reconciliation (in a land already brimful in sectarian bloodletting), heave domestic security (even though the report deems the Iraqi army a mess and the Iraqi police worse) and deliver social services (even as the report concludes that the government was declining to adequately provide electricity, drinking water, sewage services and educational activity).
The recommendations seem written in the knowledge that they volition never happen. "Miracles cannot exist expected," the written report states — twice. Absent divine intervention, the next pace is obvious. If the Iraqi government tin can't demonstrate "substantial progress" toward its goals, the written report asserts, "the United States should reduce its political, military, or economic back up" for Iraq. Indeed, the report sets the bar for staying and then high that an go out strategy appears to be its master purpose.
The counterinsurgency manual is an extraordinary document. Implicitly repudiating notions such as "shock and awe" and "overwhelming strength," it argues that the key to battling an insurgency in countries such every bit Iraq and Transitional islamic state of afghanistan is to provide security for the local population and to win its support through effective governance. It as well attempts to grasp the nature of America'south foes. "Nearly enemies either do not endeavor to defeat the United States with conventional operations or practise not limit themselves to purely military means," the transmission states. "They know that they cannot compete with U.S. forces on those terms. Instead, they endeavor to exhaust U.S. national will." Exhausting America'due south will is an objective that al-Qaeda understood well.
"Soldiers and Marines are expected to exist nation builders equally well every bit warriors," the manual proclaims, just the arduous tasks involved — reestablishing authorities institutions, rebuilding infrastructure, strengthening local security forces, enforcing the rule of law — reveal the tension at the heart of the new doctrine. "Counterinsurgents should prepare for a long-term delivery," the manual states. Still, only a few pages later on, information technology admits that "eventually all foreign armies are seen as interlopers or occupiers." How to reach the former without descending into the latter? No wonder so many of the historical examples of animus that the manual highlights, including accounts from the Vietnam War, are stories of failure.
The manual seems enlightened of its importance. The 2007 edition contains a foreword, followed by an introduction, then another foreword, a preface, and so some cursory acknowledgments and finally one more introduction. (Just reaching Affiliate 1 feels similar defeating an insurgency.) Merely the throat-clearing is clarifying. In his foreword, Army Lt. Col. John Nagl writes that the document's about lasting impact may be as a catalyst non for remaking Iraq or Afghanistan, only for transforming the Regular army and Marine Corps into "more constructive learning organizations," better able to adjust to irresolute warfare. And in her introduction, Sarah Sewall, so director of Harvard'south Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, concludes that its "ultimate value" may be in warning civilian officials to think hard before engaging in a animus campaign.
At all-time, then, the manual helps us rethink time to come conflicts — how we fight and whether we should. It's no coincidence that Biden, in his Aug. xvi remarks defending the decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, specifically repudiated counterinsurgency as an objective of U.South. policy. "I've argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counterterrorism, not animus or nation-building," the president affirmed. Even the longest state of war was not long plenty for a counterinsurgency endeavor to succeed.
In his 2009 volume, "The Skilful Soldiers," David Finkel chronicles the experiences of an Army battalion deployed in Iraq during the U.S. troop surge in 2007 and 2008, a period of the war ostensibly informed by the new animus doctrine. In his 2013 sequel, "Thank You for Your Service," the author witnesses these men when they come domicile and try to make sense of their war machine experience and adapt to their new lives. "The matter that got to everyone," Finkel explains in the latter book, "was not having a defined front end line. It was a state of war in 360 degrees, no front end to advance toward, no enemy in uniform, no anticipated patterns, no relief." Information technology's a powerful summation of battling an insurgency.
Adam Schumann returns from war considering of mail service-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic encephalon injury, "the event of a mortar circular that dropped without warning out of a blue sky," Finkel explains. Schumann suffers from nightmares, headaches and guilt; he wishes he needed bandages or crutches, annihilation to visibly justify his absence from the forepart. His wife endures his treatments, his anger, his ambiguity toward life. "He's nonetheless a practiced guy," she decides. "He'southward just a broken good guy." Some other returning soldier, Nic DeNinno, struggles to tell his wife almost the fourth dimension he and his fellow soldiers burst into an Iraqi abode in search of a high-value target. He threw a man down the stairs and held another by the pharynx. Subsequently they left, the lieutenant told him it was the wrong house. "The wrong f---ing house," Nic says to his married woman. "1 of the things I want to remember is how many times we hit the wrong house."
Hitting the incorrect house is what animus doctrine is supposed to avoid. Even successfully capturing or killing a high-value target can be counterproductive if in the process you lot terrorize a customs and create more than enemies. In Republic of iraq, the whole country was the wrong house. America'southward leaders knew it was the wrong house. They hit it anyway.
VI.
In the 11th affiliate of the ix/xi Commission report, just before all the recommendations for reforms in domestic and strange policy, the authors become philosophical, pondering how hindsight had afflicted their views of Sept. 11, 2001. "As time passes, more documents go available, and the bare facts of what happened become however clearer," the report states. "Even so the film of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that by earth, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes." Before making definitive judgments, then, they ask themselves "whether the insights that seem apparent at present would actually have been meaningful at the time."
It's a commendable attitude, 1 that helps readers sympathise what the attacks felt like in real time and why authorities responded every bit they did. Only that approach also keeps the day trapped in the past, safely distant. Ii of the latest additions to the canon, "Reign of Terror" past Spencer Ackerman and "Subtle Tools" past Karen Greenberg, draw direct, stark lines betwixt the earliest days of the war on terror and its mutations in our current time, between conflicts abroad and divisions at home. These works show how ix/11 remains with u.s.a., and how we are still living in the ruins.
When Trump alleged that "we don't accept victories anymore" in his 2015 speech announcing his presidential candidacy, he was both belittling the legacy of 9/11 and harnessing information technology to his ends. "His smashing insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself," Ackerman writes. "That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness." And if greatness is lost, someone must have taken it. The backlash against Muslims, confronting immigrants crossing the southern border and against protesters rallying for racial justice was strengthened past the open up-ended nature of the global war on terror. In Ackerman'due south vivid telling — his prose tin be hyperbolic, even if his arguments are not — the state of war is non only far away in Iraq or Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, in Yemen or Syria, but it's happening hither, with mass surveillance, militarized police force enforcement and the rebranding of immigration equally a threat to the nation's security rather than a cornerstone of its identity. "Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11," Ackerman writes, "that the terrorists were whomever y'all said they were."
Both Ackerman and Greenberg signal to the Authorization for Use of War machine Strength, drafted by assistants lawyers and approved by Congress just days after the attacks, as the moment when America's response began to go awry. The brief articulation resolution allowed the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against any nation, organization or person who committed the attacks, and to prevent any future ones. It was the "Ur document in the war on terror and its legacy," Greenberg writes. "Riddled with imprecision, its terminology was geared to formulate expansive powers." Where the battleground, the enemy and the definition of victory all remain vague, war becomes incessantly expansive, "with neither temporal nor geographical boundaries."
This was the moment the war on terror was "conceptually doomed," Ackerman concludes. This is how you get a forever state of war.
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There were moments when an off-ramp was visible. The killing of bin Laden in 2011 was one such instance, Ackerman argues, but "Obama squandered the all-time chance anyone could ever have to end the ix/11 era." The author assails Obama for making the war on terror more "sustainable" through a veneer of legality — banning torture yet failing to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and relying on drone strikes that "perversely incentivized the military and the CIA to kill instead of capture." There would always be more targets, more battlefields, regardless of president or party. Failures became the reason to double downward, never wind down.
The longer the war went on, the more that what Ackerman calls its "grotesque subtext" of nativism and racism would movement to the foreground of American politics. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a presidential candidate decrying a sitting commander in principal as foreign, Muslim, illegitimate — and using that lie as a successful political platform. Absent-minded the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent the state of war on terror, it is harder to imagine American protesters labeled terrorists, or a secretary of defence describing the nation'southward urban streets as a "battle infinite" to exist dominated. Trump was a confusing forcefulness in American life, simply there was much continuity in that location, as well. "A vastly dissimilar America has taken root" in the two decades since 9/11, Greenberg writes. "In the name of retaliation, 'justice,' and prevention, fundamental values have been bandage aside."
In his latest book on bin Laden, Bergen argues that ix/11 was a major tactical success but a long-term strategic failure for the terrorist leader. Yeah, he struck a cruel accident against "the caput of the snake," as he called the United States, only "rather than catastrophe American influence in the Muslim world, the 9/11 attacks greatly amplified it," with two lengthy, large-scale invasions and new bases established throughout the region.
Yet the legacy of the 9/11 era is found not merely in Afghanistan or Republic of iraq, only too in an America that drew out and heightened some of its ugliest impulses — a nation that is deeply divided (like those "separated states" bin Laden imagined); that bypasses inconvenient facts and embraces conspiracy theories; that demonizes outsiders; and that, afterward declining to spread freedom and republic around the world, seems less inclined to uphold them here. More than Americans today are concerned nearly domestic extremism than strange terrorism, and on January. vi, 2021, our own citizens assaulted the Capitol building that al-Qaeda hoped to strike on Sept. xi, 2001. Seventeen years after the 9/11 Commission chosen on the U.s.a. to offer moral leadership to the globe and to be generous and caring to our neighbors, our moral leadership is in question, and we tin barely be generous and caring to ourselves.
In "The Forever State of war," Dexter Filkins describes a nation in which "something had broken fundamentally subsequently so many years of war . . . in that location had been some kind of central dislocation betwixt crusade and effect, a numbness wholly understandable, necessary fifty-fifty, given the hurting." He was writing of Afghanistan, only his words could double as an estimation of the United States over the past two decades. Withal reeling from an attack that dropped out of a blue heaven, America is suffering from a sort of post-traumatic stress democracy. It remains in recovery, still a good country, even if a cleaved practiced state.
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/interactive/2021/911-books-american-values/
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