Today’s 9/11 anniversary hoopla left me cold. May the dead rest in peace, may the living go in peace, and may the U.S. never again live through such a day. And may we never again be governed by such a gang of incompetent, self-serving, short-sighted fools.
I have little to add to the words Frank Rich offered this past weekend, lamenting the disappearance of the all-too-brief moment of national unity after the al-Qaeda attacks, squandered by an administration determined to drive wedges rather than build alliances and to start new wars rather than finish current ones. My colleague Walter Shapiro offers an astute analysis of Bush’s speech tonight, with its hyperbolic rhetoric of war without end; I couldn’t bear to watch it.
Instead, in thinking back to the immediate post-9/11 era, I looked back at a brief piece I wrote on the one-year anniversary of those attacks. At that time, Bush and his team were rolling out their autumn offensive (the appropriate time to unveil a new product, as his spokespeople had reminded us earlier that summer) to persuade the electorate and the world that their war on terror demanded an invasion of Iraq. Long ago, I’d been a student of military history, and I basically said, hold on a minute: before we go start another war, how are we doing on the one we’re already fighting?
Then and now, the Bush administration has so successfully defined the war on terror as a vague global struggle, generations long and apocalyptic in scope, that it resists the application of any conventional yardstick of performance. There are metrics you can apply to normal wars — casualty rates, dollars spent, enemy capabilities impaired; but when you’re fighting “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” as Bush called it tonight, you can get away with pretty much anything.
In September 2002, I said that since the president wouldn’t ever tell us how the war was going, we’d better start asking questions ourselves.
Had we prevented further terorrist attacks on American soil and citizens? Yes then and yes now.
Had we apprehended the parties responsible for the 9/11 attacks? Limited success then, minus the big prizes; no further success since.
Had we eliminated state-supported havens for al-Qaeda? Limited success then, and some ground lost since, as the border zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan reverts to Taliban control — a prospect that seemed inconceivable four years ago.
Had we successfully rebuilt Afghanistan to win international support for our anti-terror campaign? I rated this “mixed to positive” four years ago; this grade is considerably lower today.
Have we prevented the spread of Islamic radicalism and support for bin Laden? Again, I said the results were mixed in 2002, but since then the disastrous Iraq war and other missteps, including the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon, have left us far worse on this score.
Have we protected the U.S. economy as the backbone of our war effort? In 2002 I’d said “mixed to negative” here; today, the economy is somewhat improved in the short term, but long-term we’ve created an economic house of cards, thanks to a president and governing party that tell us we’re fighting the war of the century but won’t levy the taxes to pay for it (or even include its cost in their budgets).
Have we preserved the ideals of our open society in the face of terrorist threats? I over-optimistically judged this “mixed to positive” in 2002; this was before Abu Ghraib, before revelations of the Bush administration’s wiretapping efforts, before we came to understand that the president was claiming the right to incarcerate anyone anywhere in the world forever without trial. I still think we’ve succeeded in resisting the worst overreactions to terror that nations have made; we don’t live in a police state — but I can’t help thinking the president and vice president wish we did.
Have we kept dangerous weapons and material out of terrorists’ hands? I marked this a blank in 2002; today I’d have to say we’ve lost ground, given the failure of nuclear non-proliferation under the Bush team’s “we don’t talk to people we don’t like” diplomacy. We launched an invasion of a country that didn’t have weapons of mass destruction instead of working at containing countries that sought to produce them; we gave those countries a big incentive to hurry up and finish their deterrents before we attack them.
Have we cut American consumption of Mideast oil to reduce our exposure to instability in the area and our dependence on despotic regimes there? This was a failure in 2002 and remains one today. If anything, the rise in oil prices has hurt our economy and helped those of our enemies, real and potential.
Based on this set of yardsticks, I’d say that we’ve made no progress since 2002 and lost significant ground on a variety of fronts. In the current Atlantic, James Fallows offers a different argument, one that says, actually, we’re doing pretty well against al-Qaeda today — we’ve crippled its operational capacity, and the worst thing we have to fear is our own over-reaction to the remaining threat.
Fallows’ argument is persuasive in many ways, but so much of the progress he cites was achieved in the first year after 9/11; the years since, overshadowed by the Iraq adventure, have not helped much. He may be right that we should declare victory in the war on terror and move on. Sadly, we could have done that four years, and untold thousands of deaths, ago.
[tags]war on terror, james fallows[/tags]
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