Don't Panic: Isis, Terror and the Middle East (7 page)

If American policy in Afghanistan had continued in the same prudent and pragmatic mode, the next step would have been the construction of a new Afghan regime, preferably with a democratic veneer, that actually depended on the self-serving support of the various northern warlords and of comparable Pashtun leaders, ex-Taliban or not, from the south of the country. (The Pashtuns, amounting to about 40 percent of the population, had been the main and almost the only source of support for the Taliban.) Then, as soon as possible and certainly within a couple of years, Western troops would have gone home, leaving only a large and steady flow of money for the new masters of the country as an inducement for them to remain cooperative.

It would not have been an elegant solution, but that is precisely how Afghanistan had been ruled for most of its history, and it would have been at least as stable as any alternative solution. It would also have deprived Islamists of the opportunity to claim that the West was at war with Islam.

The “war on terror” would have continued in some form, for the American public would have insisted on that. With the Afghan victory under his belt, however, Bush could have explained to Americans that Afghanistan had been the one target in this war against which it made sense to use conventional military force. There had actually been physical al Qaeda bases there under the protection of a sovereign state, so a real war was necessary to destroy them (although mercifully few American soldiers had been involved in the actual fighting). But terrorists are in
general civilians living among other civilians, and the appropriate tools for dealing with this sort of threat are police forces, intelligence services, and of course better security measures at home.

“Go home, folks, the show’s over,” President Bush should have said in his State of the Union message in January 2002. “The war on terror is now moving into a second, much longer phase that will be largely invisible. We’ll be working hard to track down and eliminate the remaining al Qaeda members, but it will be a mostly secret war and even when we have a big success you may not always hear about it.” If he had said that, the history of the early twenty-first century would have been considerably altered. But he said something quite different, and utterly unexpected. He said he was going to invade Iraq.

I expected to go back to a round of meetings [on September 12, 2001] examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized … that [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, they had been pressing for a war in Iraq
.

Former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke
⁸

What Bush actually said in his address was that states like Iraq, Iran and North Korea and their terrorist allies constituted an “axis of evil,” arming to threaten the peace of the world. These three countries had virtually nothing in common except that they had all successfully defied American power at some point in the past. Iraq was a secular Arab dictatorship; Iran was a theocratic revolutionary state that had recently fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq; and North Korea was a hereditary Communist hermit kingdom at the far end of Asia. Bush did not explicitly say that he was going to invade them all, but he was certainly suggesting that something would have to be done about them. And it was quite clear that the first candidate for the treatment would be Iraq.

A very charitable interpretation of Bush’s choices would be that all three of these countries had been working on nuclear weapons at some point, and that the president feared they might “provide these arms to terrorists” to attack the United States. (North Korea was indeed trying to develop nuclear weapons, and would actually test one in 2006; Iran was clandestinely working on them too, probably in response to the Pakistani nuclear tests of 1998, although it is not clear that this was known to the American intelligence services until later in 2002; and Saddam Hussein in Iraq had been trying to build nuclear weapons during the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq war—but his nuclear facilities had been comprehensively dismantled by the United Nations Special Commission and International Atomic
Energy Agency inspectors after his defeat in the first Gulf War of 1990–91.)

But there was no discussion of possible Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” in those early cabinet conversations in Washington about an invasion of Iraq. The real reason that it rose to the top of the target list was the great influence of the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration. The “neo-cons” believed that a unique opportunity to dominate the planet in the service of American capital and American democratic ideals had been given to the United States when the former Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. However, it had been frittered away by the reluctance of the Clinton administrations (1992–2000) to exploit U.S. military strength to the full. They therefore argued that one or more demonstrations of American resolve were needed, in the form of short, successful wars against hostile regimes, in order to restore global respect for American power. Afghanistan had been a success, but it was too quick and easy, against an opponent with little conventional military power, to serve the neo-conservatives’ purposes. Iraq, which did have large armed forces but not very effective ones, would be an ideal venue for the necessary demonstration. Going along with this idea was Bush’s biggest blunder—but it represented salvation for Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden’s masterstroke had not worked out as planned at all. The United States had responded to his attack by invading Afghanistan, as he anticipated, but it did it in such a way that his expectation of a long, bloody guerrilla
war with lots of Muslim casualties, like the one the Soviet Union had to fight during its ten-year occupation of Afghanistan, was not fulfilled. American troops did end up staying for ten years and more, but even so their total military casualties in Afghanistan were only 2,312 dead. Soviet fatal casualties in a comparable period in 1979–89 were 14,453, more than six times as high. The difference between the Soviet and American occupations in nonmilitary casualties is even greater, with civilian deaths twenty or more times higher under the Russians. The much lower American figures were a direct consequence of the relatively circumspect way in which U.S. military power was employed in Afghanistan both during and after the invasion. Bin Laden did not get the holocaust of innocent Muslim victims he had been expecting. In short, 9/11 failed in its primary purpose.

We have no reliable information about bin Laden’s activities and whereabouts in the months immediately after his escape from Afghanistan. He was presumably in Pakistan, in deep cover and not daring to use any electronic means of communication, but we do not know whether Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was protecting him at this stage; nor do we know when he was moved to his long-term hiding place in Abbottabad. He would not have been in direct contact with what remained of his network of collaborators within and beyond the Arab world, and most of his information about what was happening in the world would have come from Pakistan’s English-language
press. It would not have been positive news for him—but Bush’s State of the Union speech in January 2002 would have cheered him up immensely. He was going to be given a free second kick at the can.

All of us are saying: “Hey, United States, we don’t think this is a very good idea.”

King Abdullah II of Jordan, July 2002
⁹

Only in the traumatized United States was there widespread popular acceptance of the rationale President Bush offered for going to war: “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” (In fact there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein had no links whatever to al Qaeda or any other Islamist group, and the Iraqi people turned out to be deeply divided about being “freed” by the Americans.) U.S. allies in the Arab world were unanimous in arguing, publicly or privately, that this was in fact an extremely stupid and dangerous idea. Even in Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair was so dedicated to the Anglo-American “special relationship” that he had his first ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, instructed “to get up the arse of the White House and stay there,”
¹⁰
there was much public criticism about the way the intelligence was being “cooked” to provide justifications
for the invasion. Other long-standing American allies like France and Germany flatly refused to take any part in the operation, which they rightly judged to be contrary to international law. And despite a major diplomatic effort Blair and Bush failed to persuade the U.N. Security Council to authorize the invasion of Iraq. So, by starting the war anyway, both men technically made themselves liable to prosecution as war criminals—not that there was any real risk of that happening.

The hubris of the neo-cons in the Bush administration, who were the main moving force behind the enterprise, was astounding. They believed that Islamist terrorism in the Arab world could best be defeated by forcibly injecting democracy into Iraq and watching the infection spread. Moreover, they believed the new Arab democracies would automatically be pro-American. As Paul Wolfowitz assured Congress just before the invasion:

These are Arabs, 23 million of the most educated people in the Arab world, who are going to welcome us as liberators. And when the message gets out to the whole Arab world, it’s going to be a powerful counter to Osama bin Laden … It will be a great step forward.
¹¹

Fantasy images of grateful Arabs strewing flowers at the feet of the American invaders were a recurrent feature in the self-deceiving discourse of the neo-cons. The country’s 23 million people were indeed among the best-educated in
the Arab world—oil wealth had enabled the ruling Ba’ath Party to build a welfare state that made good education and decent health care available free to its citizens, and even accorded women equal footing in the law and the workplace—but Iraqis were far from a unified people. Twenty percent of them were not even Arabs: the Kurds of the north spoke a different language entirely and nurtured a desire for independence that made them see Americans as potential allies. Much trickier was the fact that about 20 percent of the population were Sunni Arabs, while an absolute majority, 60 percent, were Shia Muslims. Yet the Sunni Arab minority ran everything and had done so for hundreds of years.

Saddam Hussein was a Sunni (though not a particularly devout one for most of his life), and so had been every other governor, king and president since the Ottoman Empire took the territory from Persia in 1533. The great majority of the Arabic-speaking population remained Shia, but Sunnis so dominated the public sphere in Iraq under Turkish and British rule and in the forty-five years of independence before the American invasion that many Sunnis did not even realize they were a minority in Iraq. (Statistics on the sectarian loyalties of the population were not publicly available under Saddam’s rule, for obvious reasons.) So the first thing the U.S. occupation administration would face once it controlled the country was the bitter resistance of the Sunnis whose centuries-long rule it had overthrown, and the relentless drive of the Shia
majority to exploit the opportunity created by the invasion to install a new Shia political supremacy in the country. “Democracy,” in the American sense of the word, was not a high priority for either side.

Iraq was actually far better terrain for bin Laden’s strategy than Afghanistan, which was an extremely poor, non-Arab country on the far periphery of the Middle East. Iraq, by contrast, was mostly Arab in population, a major oil exporter, and located in the heart of the Arab world. The head of al Qaeda just hadn’t been in a position earlier to trick the United States into invading Iraq or some other major country in the Arab heartland, so he had made do with what was available. He must have been astounded at his luck when President Bush declared his intention to take down Saddam Hussein.