Bush and Bin Laden's virtual war - Asia Times

[sukant....@gmail.com]

Bush and Bin Laden's virtual war
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: Shi'ite blue has moved in irrevocably from the east
of the Tigris River; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shi'ite 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 US Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after
September 11, 2002, - in a vast territory stretching from the southern
Philippines to the Maghreb and the Strait 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 author George 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
President George W 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, the
former defense secretary.

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 - 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
that 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
[seminaries] 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 US 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"?

Ultimately, as 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 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 US need to fashion a broad, integrated
plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?"

For me, the poignancy comes from 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 celebre for
jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim
world and cultivating support for the global jihadist movement" - this
point from the 2006 NIE is truly an example of a "chronicle of a war
foretold" (to borrow from Garcia Marquez).

In fact, that NIE cites the "Iraq jihad" as the second of four factors
"fueling the jihadist movement", along with "entrenched grievances,
such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading
to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness"; "the slow pace
of real and sustained economic, social and political reforms in many
Muslim majority nations"; and "pervasive anti-US sentiment among most
Muslims".

Any attempt to "take stock of the war on terror" must begin with the
sad fact that the story of that war has largely become the story of
the war in Iraq as well, and the story of the Iraq war (all discussion
of the so-called "surge" aside) has been pretty much an unmitigated
disaster for US security and for the United States position in the
Middle East and the world. Which means that telling the story of the
"war on terror", a half dozen years on - and "taking stock" of that
war - merges inevitably with the sad tale of how that so-called war,
strange and multiform beast that it is, became subsumed in a bold and
utterly incompetent attempt to occupy and remake a major Arab country.

That broader story comes down to a matter of two strategies and two
generals: General Osama bin Laden and General George W Bush. General
bin Laden, from the start, has been waging a campaign of indirection
and provocation: that is, bin Laden's ultimate targets are the so-
called apostate regimes of the Muslim world - foremost among them the
Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt and the House of Saud on the Arabian
Peninsula - which he hopes to overthrow and supplant with a new
caliphate.

For bin Laden, these are the "near enemies", which rely for their
existence on the vital support of the "far enemy", the United States.
By attacking this far enemy, beginning in the mid-1990s, bin Laden
hoped both to lead vast numbers of new Muslim recruits to join al-
Qaeda and to weaken US support for the Mubarak and Saud regimes. He
hoped to succeed, through indirection, in "cutting the strings of the
puppets", eventually leading to the collapse of those regimes.

In this sense, 9/11 proved the culmination of a long-term strategy,
following on a series of attacks of increasing lethality during the
mid to late 1990s in Riyadh, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Aden. The 9/11
attackers used as their climactic weapon not transcontinental
airliners or box cutters but the television set - for the image was
the true weapon that day, the overwhelmingly powerful image of the
towers collapsing - and used it not only to "dirty the face of
imperial power" (former Israeli premier Menachim Begin's description
of what terrorists do), but also to provoke the United States to
strike deep into the Islamic world.

It is clear from various documents and from the assassination, days
before 9/11, of Afghan Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud,
that bin Laden expected this American counter-strike to come in
Afghanistan, which would have given al-Qaeda the opportunity to do to
the remaining superpower what it had done - so the myth went, anyway -
to the Soviet Union a dozen years before: trap its arrogant, hulking
military in a quagmire and, through patient, unrelenting guerrilla
warfare, force it to withdraw in ignominious defeat.

In the event, of course, the Americans, by relying on air bombardment
and on the ground forces of their Afghan allies in the Northern
Alliance, avoided the quagmire of Afghanistan - at least in that
initial phase in the autumn of 2001 - and instead offered bin Laden a
much greater gift. In March 2003, they invaded Iraq, a far more
important Islamic country and one much closer to the heart of Arab
concerns.

General Bush
Why did General George W Bush do it? Lacking in legitimacy and on the
political defensive, the president and his administration moved
instantly to transform the "war on terror" into an ideological
crusade, one implicitly crafted as a new cold war.

"They hate our freedoms," Bush told Congress and the nation a few days
after the 9/11 attacks. "Our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote
and assemble and disagree with one another ... We are not deceived by
their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the
heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By
sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions - by abandoning
every value except the will to power - they follow in the path of
fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that
path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of
discarded lies."

Drawing a lurid picture of a new cold war, with terrorists playing the
role of communists, Bush rallied the country behind the "war on
terror", obliterating the subtleties of the struggle against al-Qaeda
and with them the critique of US Middle East policy implicit in the
assault. "This is not about our policies," as Henry Kissinger put it
soon after the attack. "This is about our existence."

In this view, the attack came not because of what the United States
actually did in the Middle East - what regimes it supported, for
example - but because of what it stood for: the universalist
aspirations it symbolized. Iraq quickly became part of this crusade,
the great struggle to protect, and now to spread, freedom and
democracy.

One can argue long and hard about the roots of the Iraq war, but in
the end one must tease out a set of realist compulsions (centrally
concerned with the restoration of American credibility and American
deterrent power) and idealist aspirations (shaped around the so-called
democratic domino effect). The realist case was well summarized, once
again, by Kissinger, who, when asked by a Bush speechwriter why he
supported the Iraq war, replied: "Because Afghanistan wasn't enough."
In the conflict with radical Islam, he went on, "They want to
humiliate us and we have to humiliate them." The Iraq war was
essential in order to make the point that "we're not going to live in
the world that they want for us".

Ron Suskind, in his fine book The One Percent Doctrine, puts what is
essentially the same point in "geostrategic" terms, reporting that, in
meetings of the National Security Council in the months after the 9/11
attacks, the main concern "was to make an example of [Saddam] Hussein,
to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with
the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the
authority of the United States".

Set alongside this was the "democratic tsunami" that was to follow the
shock-and-awe triumph over Saddam. It would sweep through the Middle
East from Iraq to Iran and thence to Syria and Palestine. ("The road
to Jerusalem" - so ran the neo-conservative gospel at the time - "runs
through Baghdad.") As I wrote in October 2002, five months before the
Iraq War was launched, this vision was detailed and well elaborated:

Behind the notion that an American intervention will make of Iraq
"the first Arab democracy", as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
put it, lies a project of great ambition. It envisions a post-Saddam
Hussein Iraq - secular, middle-class, urbanized, rich with oil - that
will replace the autocracy of Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in
the Persian Gulf, allowing the withdrawal of United States troops from
the kingdom. The presence of a victorious American army in Iraq would
then serve as a powerful boost to moderate elements in neighboring
Iran, hastening that critical country's evolution away from the
mullahs and toward a more moderate course. Such an evolution in Tehran
would lead to a withdrawal of Iranian support for Hezbollah and other
radical groups, thereby isolating Syria and reducing pressure on
Israel. This undercutting of radicals on Israel's northern borders and
within the West Bank and Gaza would spell the definitive end of Yasser
Arafat and lead eventually to a favorable solution of the Arab-Israeli
problem.

This is a vision of great sweep and imagination: comprehensive,
prophetic, evangelical. In its ambitions, it is wholly foreign to the
modesty of containment, the ideology of a status-quo power that lay at
the heart of American strategy for half a century. It means to remake
the world, to offer to a political threat a political answer. It
represents a great step on the road toward President Bush's ultimate
vision of "freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes".

One can identify two factors underlying this vision: first, the great
enthusiasm for a moralistic foreign policy based on universalized
principles and democratic reform that dated back to containment's main
rival, the "rollback" movement of the 1950s, and that had been
revivified by the thrilling series of Eastern European revolutions of
the late 1980s and by scenes of popular, American-aided democratic
triumph (as it was then thought to be) in Afghanistan; and, second,
the recognition that terrorism, at the end of the day, was a political
problem that arose from a calcified authoritarian order in the Middle
East and that only a dose of "creative destabilization" could shake up
that order.

"Transforming the Middle East," in Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice's words, "is the only guarantee that it will no longer produce
ideologies of hatred that lead men to fly airplanes into buildings in
New York and Washington."

The latter perception - that terrorism as it struck the United States
arose from political factors and that it could only be confronted and
defeated with a political response - strikes me as incontestable. The
problem the administration faced, or rather didn't want to face, was
that the calcified order that lay at the root of the problem was the
very order that, for nearly six decades, had been shaped, shepherded
and sustained by the United States.

We see an explicit acknowledgment of this in the "Bletchley II" report
drafted after 9/11 at Defense Department urging by a number of
intellectuals close to the administration: "The general analysis," one
of its authors told the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "was that
Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from, were
the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more
important ... But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing
with. But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable ..."

A very complicated war
In this sense, many of the Bush administration's leading Iraq war
backers comprised a kind of guerrilla force within the US government,
fighting against a longstanding strategic alignment in the Middle
East. This guerrilla status, which defined many of the government's
most knowledgeable Middle East hands as enemies to be isolated and
ignored, helps to account, at least in part, for a great many of the
extraordinary incompetencies and disasters of the war itself.

That the roots of the war lie in stark opposition to established US
policy also helps explain the central conundrum of the current US
strategic position in Iraq and the Middle East. This was defined for
me with typical concision and aplomb by Ahmed Chalabi in Baghdad last
year. "The American tragedy in Iraq," said Chalabi, "is that your
friends in Iraq are allied with your enemies in the region, and your
enemies in Iraq are allied with your friends in the region."

Chalabi's concision and wit are admirable (and typical); but his
point, once you look at the map, is obvious. The United States has
made possible the rise to power in Iraq of a Shi'ite government which
is allied with its major geopolitical antagonist in the region, the
Islamic Republic of Iran. And the United States has been fighting with
great persistence and distinctly mixed results a Sunni insurgency
which is allied with the Saudis, the Jordanians and its other longtime
friends among the traditional Sunni autocracies of the Gulf.

This is another way of saying that the US policy built on the famous
meeting between president Franklin D Roosevelt and King ibn Saud
aboard Roosevelt's cruiser on the Great Bitter Lake near the end of
World War II - a policy that envisioned a vital, mutually beneficial
and enduring alliance between the Saudis and the Americans - having
been put in grave question by the Saudi insurgents at the controls of
those mighty airliners of September 11, now smashed full on into the
strategic assault perpetrated by the Bush administration insurgents
led by Paul Wolfowitz and his associates. Their "creative
destabilization" was aimed not just at Saddam's Iraq, but at more than
a half century of American policy in the Middle East.

Al-Qaeda, opportunistic as always, was willing to play this game,
seizing on the occupation of Iraq as the golden opportunity it most
certainly was and focusing on the Shi'ite-Sunni divide on which US
policy was foundering. The late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's famous
intercepted letter to Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, in which the
insurgent leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia told the al-Qaeda
potentates - the front office, as it were - that his aim in Iraq was
to "awaken the sleeping Sunnis" by launching a vast bombing campaign
against the "Shi'ite heretic", describes precisely both the national
and regional strategy: "If we manage to draw them into the terrain of
partisan war, it will be possible to tear the Sunnis away from their
heedlessness, for they will feel the weight of the imminence of
danger."

This is a strategy that, after the bombing of the revered al-Askari
mosque and shrine in Samarra in February 2006, bore terrible fruit. My
map that shows divisions running through Baghdad will show, if you
zoom out, those same divisions running through Iraq and beyond its
borders. Like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq is a nation that gathers
within itself the cultural and sectarian fault lines of the region;
the Sunni-Shi'ite divide running through Iraq in effect runs through
the entire Middle East. The United States, in choosing this place to
stage its democratic revolution, could hardly have done al-Qaeda a
better favor.

At this moment, the Iraq war is at a stalemate. Confronted with a
growing threat from those "enemies allied with its friends in the
region", the Sunni insurgents, the Bush administration has adopted a
practical and typically American strategy: it has bought them. The
Americans have purchased the insurgency, hiring its foot soldiers at
the rate of US$300 per month. The Sunni fighters, once called
insurgents, we now refer to as "tribesmen" or "concerned citizens".

This has isolated al-Qaeda, a tactical victory. But because these
purchased Sunni fighters have not been accepted by the Shi'ite
government - the allies of our enemies - the United States has set in
motion a policy that will require, to keep violence at current levels,
its own permanent presence in the country. This at a time when two in
three Americans think the war was a mistake and when both surviving
Democrat presidential candidates vow to begin bringing the troops home
"on day one" of a Democratic administration.

On the horizon, after such a withdrawal, is a re-ignition of the civil
war at an even more brutal level, helped by the American rearming of
the Sunni forces - and indeed the American arming of Shi'ite
government forces as well. It is a curious reality, if we look again
at the regional map, that the current geostrategic situation in the
Middle East resembles nothing so much as the Iraq-Iran war of the
1980s, in which the United States, along with Egypt, the Saudis and
the Jordanians supported Saddam's Iraq in its great war against
ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Iran.

We see a similar array of forces today, with these two differences:
First, we must move the line of conflict about 320 kilometers west,
shifting it from the Iraq-Iran border to a line running through
Baghdad along the Tigris River. Second, the United States is now
arming and supporting both sides. And behind the current configuration
and the supposed "success of the surge" looms the darkening threat of
regionalization - a region-wide struggle fought over the body of Iraq
in the wake of an American withdrawal. It has become, to appropriate a
phrase, a very complicated war.

A defeat only American power could have brought about
Whether or not this darkest of dark visions comes to pass, that very
complicated war in Iraq, as the intelligence analysts and our own eyes
tell us, will continue to pay vast dividends into the account of
political grievances with which terrorist groups recruit.

This has only partly to do with the original al-Qaeda itself (or "al-
Qaeda prime", as some analysts now call it); for however much it has
managed to "reconstitute" itself, the true game has moved elsewhere,
toward "viral al-Qaeda" - "spontaneous groups of friends", in the
words of former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and psychiatrist
Marc Sageman, "as in [the] Madrid and Casablanca [bombings], who have
few links to any central leadership, [who] are generating sometimes
very dangerous terrorist operations, notwithstanding their frequent
errors and poor training."

While US and allied intelligence agencies have had considerable
success attacking the various formal nodes of al-Qaeda prime on the
Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere, those struggles have about them the
air of the past; we have really passed into a different era, the era
of the amateurs. Today's network is self-organized, Internet reliant
and decentralized, dependent not on armies, training, or even
technology but on desire and political will. And the US has ensured,
by the way it fought this forever war, that it is precisely these
vital qualities its enemies have in large and growing supply.

So how, finally, do we "take stock of the war on terror"? Let me
suggest three words:

1. Fragmentation - brought about by "creative destabilization", as we
see it not only in Iraq but in Lebanon, Palestine and elsewhere in the
region.
2. Diminution - of American prestige, both military and political, and
thus of American power.
3. Destruction - of the political consensus within the United States
for a strong global role.

Gaze for a moment at those three words and marvel at how far the US
has come in a half-dozen years.

In September 2001, the United States faced a grave threat. The attacks
that have become synonymous with that date were unprecedented in their
destructiveness, in their lethality, in the pure apocalyptic shock of
their spectacle. But in their aftermath, American policymakers, partly
through ideological blindness and preening exaggeration of American
power, partly through blindness brought about by political
opportunism, made decisions that led to a defeat only their own
actions - that only American power itself - could have brought about.

A small coven of America's enemies, using the strategy of provocation
so familiar in guerrilla warfare, had launched in spectacular fashion
on that bright September morning a plan to use the superpower's
strength against itself. To use a different metaphor, they were trying
to make good on Archimedes' celebrated boast: having found the perfect
lever and place to stand, they proposed to move the Earth. To an
extent I am sure even they did not anticipate, in their choice of
opponent - an evangelical, redemptive regime scornful of history and
determined to remake the fallen world - lay the seeds of their
success.

Mark Danner is the author, most recently, of Torture and Truth:
America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (2004) and The Secret Way to
War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (2007).
He has covered the Iraq war from its beginning for the New York Review
of Books. He teaches at both Bard College and the Graduate School of
Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His work is
archived at MarkDanner.com.

(Copyright 2008 Mark Danner.)