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Gandalf Grey
Guest
Tomgram: Mark Danner on a Defeat Only American Power Could Have Brought
About
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Mar 26 2008 - 8:47am
- from TruthDig [1]
Today, in his usual remarkable way, Mark Danner takes stock of the
President's failed War on Terror abroad. One day, we will also need to take
full stock of George W. Bush's War on Terror at home. After all,
conceptually speaking, the War on Terror lay at the heart of everything he
and his top officials hoped for in an administration -- in, as they called
it, a "unitary executive" that would be unrestrained by the checks and
balances of either Congress or the courts. The announcement [2] (not
declaration) of "war" was, in fact, a necessity for this administration, the
only lever available with which to pry a commander-in-chief presidency out
of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Without the President's self-proclaimed War on Terror [3], there would have
been no "war" at all, and so no "wartime" atmosphere or "wartime" presidency
to be invoked to cow Congress into backing Bush's future war of choice in
Iraq. Without "war" and "wartime," it would have been impossible to bring
the American people along so readily and difficult to apply "war rules" from
the Guantanamo prison complex in Cuba and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to
Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Otherwise, as Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
recently pointed out [4] in the New Yorker, how could American officials and
commanders have designated those prisoners seized by the U.S. military in
Iraq as "'security detainees,' a label that had gained currency in the war
on terror, to describe 'unlawful combatants' and other prisoners who had
been denied P.O.W. status and could be held indefinitely, in isolation and
secrecy, without judicial recourse."
Every hope the Bush administration's top officials had of future power
hinged on the War on Terror that preceded actual war anywhere. True, in
World War I, not 19 hijackers, but a single assassin triggered the
mobilizing of the armies of all the Great Powers of Europe, which did indeed
lead to global war. But after 9/11, on the provocation of 19 men (and the
scattered bands behind them), only one power mobilized, which meant, by the
standards of history, there was no war to be had. Only aggression.
On the domestic power grab that the President and his men (and a few women)
believed would lead not just to a global Pax Americana, but to a Pax
Republicana at home, the equivalent of a National Intelligence Estimate has
yet to arrive. But the recent, little noted loss [5] of the previously safe
Illinois seat of former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dennis
Hastert -- a contest into which a strapped National Republican Congressional
Committee poured $1.2 million (20% of the cash it had on hand) against a
neophyte Democratic candidate -- is a striking sign that Bush's Pax
Republicana may prove anything but generational. In the meantime, consider
with Mark Danner, author most recently of The Secret Way to War [6], the
fate of that global Pax Americana which the War on Terror was intended to
bring about.
-- Tom
Taking Stock of the War on Terror: A Defeat Only American Power Could Have
Brought About
By Mark Danner
[This essay was adapted from an address first delivered in February at the
Tenth Asia Security Conference at the Institute for Security and Defense
Analysis in New Delhi.]
To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad -- as I do the one before me, with
sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow -- is to look
back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored
mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the "mixed" neighborhoods of the
city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after
this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in
irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as
Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar
province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems,
the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the
months and years of sectarian war.
I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope
about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed
to "take stock" of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it is, like one
of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let
us take a moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look closely at
its misshapen contours, we can see in the War on Terror:
Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;
Part shooting-war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;
Part intelligence, spy v. spy covert struggle, fought quietly -- "on the
dark side," as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 -- in a
vast territory stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and
the Straits of Gibraltar;
And finally the War on Terror is part, perhaps its largest part, Virtual
War -- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political utility
not wholly unlike Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia, and
Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always
expanding.
Snowflakes Drifting Down on the War on Terror
President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11,
2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he
told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to
answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."
Astonishing words from a world leader -- declaring that he would "rid the
world of evil." Just in case anyone thought they might have misheard the
sweep of the President's ambition, his National Security Strategy, issued a
few months later, was careful to specify that "the enemy is not a single
political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is
terrorism -- premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated
against innocents."
Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out;
for declaring war on "terrorism" -- a technique of war, not an identifiable
group or target -- was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its
implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, "Declaring
war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power."
Six and a half years later, evil is still with us and so is terrorism. In my
search for a starting point in taking stock of those years, I find myself in
the sad position of pondering fondly what have become two of the saddest
words in the English language: Donald Rumsfeld.
Remember him? In late October 2003, when I was in Baghdad watching the
launch of the so-called Ramadan Offensive -- five simultaneous suicide
bombings, beginning with one at the headquarters of the Red Cross, the fiery
aftermath of which I witnessed -- then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was in
Washington still denying that an insurgency was underway in Iraq. He was
also drafting one of his famous "snowflakes," those late-night memoranda
which he used to rain down on his terrorized Pentagon employees.
This particular snowflake, dated October 16, 2003 and entitled "Global War
on Terrorism," reads almost poignantly now, as the Defense Secretary gropes
to define the war that it has become his lot to fight: "Today we lack
metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he
wrote. "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more
terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are
recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
Rumsfeld asks the right question, for beyond the obvious metrics like the
number of terrorist attacks worldwide -- which have gone up steadily, and
precipitously since 9/11 (for 2006, the last year for which State Department
figures are available, by nearly 29%, to 14,338); and the somewhat subtler
ones like the percentage of those in the Middle East and the broader Muslim
world who hold unfavorable opinions of the United States (which soared in
the wake of the invasion of Iraq and have fallen back just a bit since) --
apart from these sorts of numbers which, for various and obvious reasons,
are problematic in themselves, the key question is: How do you "take stock"
of the War on Terror? At the end of the day, as Secretary Rumsfeld
perceived, this is a political judgment, for in its essence it has to do
with the evolution of public opinion and the readiness of those with certain
political sympathies to move from holding those opinions to taking action in
support of them.
What "metrics" do we have to take account of the progress of this
"evolution"? Well, none really -- but we do have the guarded opinions of
intelligence agencies, notably this rather explicit statement from the U.S.
government's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of April 2006, entitled
"Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," which
reads in part: "Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with
precision" -- those metrics again -- "a large body of all-source reporting
indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although still
a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic
distribution. If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and
abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide."
Dark words, and yet that 2006 report looks positively sanguine when set
beside two reports from a year later, both leaked in July 2007. A National
Intelligence Estimate entitled "The Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland"
noted that al-Qaeda had managed -- in the summary in the Washington Post --
to reestablish "its central organization, training infrastructure and lines
of global communication," over the previous two years and had placed the
United States in a "heightened threat environment. The U.S. Homeland will
face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years."
This NIE -- the combined opinion of the country's major intelligence
agencies -- only confirmed a report that had been leaked a couple days
before from the National Counterterrorism Center, grimly entitled "Al Qaeda
Better Positioned to Strike the West." This report concluded that al-Qaeda,
in the words of one official who briefed its contents to a reporter for the
Christian Science Monitor, was "considerably operationally stronger than a
year ago," "has regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001," and has managed
to create "the most robust training program since 2001, with an interest in
using European operatives." Another intelligence official, summarizing the
report to the Associated Press, offered a blunt and bleak conclusion:
al-Qaeda, he said, is "showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks
in Europe and the United States."
Given these grim results, one must return to one of the more poignant
passages in Secretary Rumsfeld's "snowflake," released to flutter down on
his poor Pentagon subordinates back in those blinkered days of October 2003.
Having wondered about the metrics, and what could and could not be measured
in the War on Terror, the Secretary of Defense posed a critical question:
"Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next
generation of terrorists?"
For me, the poignancy comes from Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to see that, in
effect, he and his boss had already "fashioned" the "broad, integrated plan"
he was asking for. It was called the Iraq War.
General Bin Laden
That the Iraq War is "fueling the spread of the jidahist movement," as the
2006 National Intelligence Estimate put it, has been a truism of
intelligence reporting from the war's beginning; indeed, from before it
began. "[T]he Iraq conflict has become the cause c
About
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Mar 26 2008 - 8:47am
- from TruthDig [1]
Today, in his usual remarkable way, Mark Danner takes stock of the
President's failed War on Terror abroad. One day, we will also need to take
full stock of George W. Bush's War on Terror at home. After all,
conceptually speaking, the War on Terror lay at the heart of everything he
and his top officials hoped for in an administration -- in, as they called
it, a "unitary executive" that would be unrestrained by the checks and
balances of either Congress or the courts. The announcement [2] (not
declaration) of "war" was, in fact, a necessity for this administration, the
only lever available with which to pry a commander-in-chief presidency out
of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Without the President's self-proclaimed War on Terror [3], there would have
been no "war" at all, and so no "wartime" atmosphere or "wartime" presidency
to be invoked to cow Congress into backing Bush's future war of choice in
Iraq. Without "war" and "wartime," it would have been impossible to bring
the American people along so readily and difficult to apply "war rules" from
the Guantanamo prison complex in Cuba and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to
Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Otherwise, as Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
recently pointed out [4] in the New Yorker, how could American officials and
commanders have designated those prisoners seized by the U.S. military in
Iraq as "'security detainees,' a label that had gained currency in the war
on terror, to describe 'unlawful combatants' and other prisoners who had
been denied P.O.W. status and could be held indefinitely, in isolation and
secrecy, without judicial recourse."
Every hope the Bush administration's top officials had of future power
hinged on the War on Terror that preceded actual war anywhere. True, in
World War I, not 19 hijackers, but a single assassin triggered the
mobilizing of the armies of all the Great Powers of Europe, which did indeed
lead to global war. But after 9/11, on the provocation of 19 men (and the
scattered bands behind them), only one power mobilized, which meant, by the
standards of history, there was no war to be had. Only aggression.
On the domestic power grab that the President and his men (and a few women)
believed would lead not just to a global Pax Americana, but to a Pax
Republicana at home, the equivalent of a National Intelligence Estimate has
yet to arrive. But the recent, little noted loss [5] of the previously safe
Illinois seat of former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dennis
Hastert -- a contest into which a strapped National Republican Congressional
Committee poured $1.2 million (20% of the cash it had on hand) against a
neophyte Democratic candidate -- is a striking sign that Bush's Pax
Republicana may prove anything but generational. In the meantime, consider
with Mark Danner, author most recently of The Secret Way to War [6], the
fate of that global Pax Americana which the War on Terror was intended to
bring about.
-- Tom
Taking Stock of the War on Terror: A Defeat Only American Power Could Have
Brought About
By Mark Danner
[This essay was adapted from an address first delivered in February at the
Tenth Asia Security Conference at the Institute for Security and Defense
Analysis in New Delhi.]
To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad -- as I do the one before me, with
sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow -- is to look
back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored
mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the "mixed" neighborhoods of the
city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after
this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in
irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as
Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar
province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems,
the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the
months and years of sectarian war.
I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope
about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed
to "take stock" of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it is, like one
of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let
us take a moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look closely at
its misshapen contours, we can see in the War on Terror:
Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;
Part shooting-war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;
Part intelligence, spy v. spy covert struggle, fought quietly -- "on the
dark side," as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 -- in a
vast territory stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and
the Straits of Gibraltar;
And finally the War on Terror is part, perhaps its largest part, Virtual
War -- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political utility
not wholly unlike Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia, and
Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always
expanding.
Snowflakes Drifting Down on the War on Terror
President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11,
2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he
told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to
answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."
Astonishing words from a world leader -- declaring that he would "rid the
world of evil." Just in case anyone thought they might have misheard the
sweep of the President's ambition, his National Security Strategy, issued a
few months later, was careful to specify that "the enemy is not a single
political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is
terrorism -- premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated
against innocents."
Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out;
for declaring war on "terrorism" -- a technique of war, not an identifiable
group or target -- was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its
implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, "Declaring
war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power."
Six and a half years later, evil is still with us and so is terrorism. In my
search for a starting point in taking stock of those years, I find myself in
the sad position of pondering fondly what have become two of the saddest
words in the English language: Donald Rumsfeld.
Remember him? In late October 2003, when I was in Baghdad watching the
launch of the so-called Ramadan Offensive -- five simultaneous suicide
bombings, beginning with one at the headquarters of the Red Cross, the fiery
aftermath of which I witnessed -- then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was in
Washington still denying that an insurgency was underway in Iraq. He was
also drafting one of his famous "snowflakes," those late-night memoranda
which he used to rain down on his terrorized Pentagon employees.
This particular snowflake, dated October 16, 2003 and entitled "Global War
on Terrorism," reads almost poignantly now, as the Defense Secretary gropes
to define the war that it has become his lot to fight: "Today we lack
metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he
wrote. "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more
terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are
recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
Rumsfeld asks the right question, for beyond the obvious metrics like the
number of terrorist attacks worldwide -- which have gone up steadily, and
precipitously since 9/11 (for 2006, the last year for which State Department
figures are available, by nearly 29%, to 14,338); and the somewhat subtler
ones like the percentage of those in the Middle East and the broader Muslim
world who hold unfavorable opinions of the United States (which soared in
the wake of the invasion of Iraq and have fallen back just a bit since) --
apart from these sorts of numbers which, for various and obvious reasons,
are problematic in themselves, the key question is: How do you "take stock"
of the War on Terror? At the end of the day, as Secretary Rumsfeld
perceived, this is a political judgment, for in its essence it has to do
with the evolution of public opinion and the readiness of those with certain
political sympathies to move from holding those opinions to taking action in
support of them.
What "metrics" do we have to take account of the progress of this
"evolution"? Well, none really -- but we do have the guarded opinions of
intelligence agencies, notably this rather explicit statement from the U.S.
government's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of April 2006, entitled
"Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," which
reads in part: "Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with
precision" -- those metrics again -- "a large body of all-source reporting
indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although still
a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic
distribution. If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and
abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide."
Dark words, and yet that 2006 report looks positively sanguine when set
beside two reports from a year later, both leaked in July 2007. A National
Intelligence Estimate entitled "The Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland"
noted that al-Qaeda had managed -- in the summary in the Washington Post --
to reestablish "its central organization, training infrastructure and lines
of global communication," over the previous two years and had placed the
United States in a "heightened threat environment. The U.S. Homeland will
face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years."
This NIE -- the combined opinion of the country's major intelligence
agencies -- only confirmed a report that had been leaked a couple days
before from the National Counterterrorism Center, grimly entitled "Al Qaeda
Better Positioned to Strike the West." This report concluded that al-Qaeda,
in the words of one official who briefed its contents to a reporter for the
Christian Science Monitor, was "considerably operationally stronger than a
year ago," "has regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001," and has managed
to create "the most robust training program since 2001, with an interest in
using European operatives." Another intelligence official, summarizing the
report to the Associated Press, offered a blunt and bleak conclusion:
al-Qaeda, he said, is "showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks
in Europe and the United States."
Given these grim results, one must return to one of the more poignant
passages in Secretary Rumsfeld's "snowflake," released to flutter down on
his poor Pentagon subordinates back in those blinkered days of October 2003.
Having wondered about the metrics, and what could and could not be measured
in the War on Terror, the Secretary of Defense posed a critical question:
"Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next
generation of terrorists?"
For me, the poignancy comes from Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to see that, in
effect, he and his boss had already "fashioned" the "broad, integrated plan"
he was asking for. It was called the Iraq War.
General Bin Laden
That the Iraq War is "fueling the spread of the jidahist movement," as the
2006 National Intelligence Estimate put it, has been a truism of
intelligence reporting from the war's beginning; indeed, from before it
began. "[T]he Iraq conflict has become the cause c