“We’re
fighting terrorism in Iraq so we don’t have to fight it
at home.”
— President Bush
Yeah? Tell that to the British!
If the president truly believed what he said, and he
might have, then he must be shocked and disoriented by
the suicide bombings on one of those distinctive London
buses and the city’s subways.
It may be helpful then to go back to the beginning of
the war against al-Qaida and its allies, to see how we
arrived at this point, and determine if we’ve strayed
from the original strategy for fighting the war.
Remember, the FBI and CIA did not know the name
al-Qaida until 1996, and the first presidential speech
declaring a “war on terror” was in April of that year.
Compared to the 40-year Cold War, we haven’t been at
this very long. We won that war by containing the
Soviets with steely self-control — never firing a shot —
while the arsenal of democracy strengthened us and
socialism weakened them. In 1990, the empire imploded,
fell over dead.
With the continental menace of the USSR no longer
filling the screen, our intelligence agencies began to
see small but deadly vermin were infecting the Middle
East.
In the early 90s the CIA kept hearing the name Usama
or Osama bin Laden, whom they described as a rich boy
playing at terrorism, a financier of radical groups. But
neither the outgoing Bush administration nor the
incoming Clinton team had terrorism high on its priority
list.
The Republican Congress in 1995 was also nonchalant
about the threat of terrorism, refusing to pass a
measure that would have cut off the flow of “charitable”
funds for terrorist organizations. This, despite the
first World Trade Center bombing and 18 Americans killed
in the Khobar apartment building blast in Saudi Arabia.
As the threat became more apparent, a Bush holdover,
Richard Clarke, became the counterterrorism director,
the budget grew from $5.7 billion in 1995 to $11.1
billion in 2000, and President Clinton spoke out.
In a speech at Georgetown University, the president
declared “a war on terror.” He said, “Terrorism is the
enemy of our generation, and we must prevail.” But I
want to make it clear to the American people that while
we can defeat terrorists, it will be a long time before
we can defeat terrorism.”
After coordinated attacks on our embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania in 1998, President Clinton asked his
National Security team to deal with al-Qaida. “Listen,”
he said, “retaliating for these attacks is all well and
good, but we gotta get rid of these guys once and for
all.”
A comprehensive plan was developed to eliminate
al-Qaida and, in JFK’s phrase, to begin the long,
twilight struggle against terrorism itself. Lacking the
urgent anger of 9/11, the plan wasn’t executed, and was
passed on to the new administration in 2001.
Understandably wanting to put their own stamp on the
plan, and diverted by the controlled chaos of
transition, a full-scale assault on al-Qaida was only a
paper plan on September 11, 2001.
The savage drama of that day had one good
consequence: The United States could at last focus on a
state sponsor of the al-Qaida vermin — the Taliban
regime in Afghanistan.
With the whole world cheering us on, even sympathetic
Islamic nations, we at last had the opportunity to
eliminate al-Qaida, and build a secure, unified
Afghanistan as a Middle Eastern model of democracy.
But an uninvited demon kept rising at White House
meetings to obscure the clarity and simplicity of that
vision. The demon was Iraq.
At the very first meeting of Cabinet deputies to deal
with al-Qaida and the Taliban, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz insisted that Saddam Hussein must be
behind the 9/11 attacks.
Though the FBI, the CIA and State Department said
they could find no evidence of a connection to Saddam,
the specter of Iraq would not die. It grew and grew
until it became an obsession.
So here we are, our soldiers dying by the hundreds
and innocent Iraqis by the tens of thousands, searching
for an honorable way out, and trying to remember why we
went there in the first place.
Two explanations — that the war prevents terrorism
and Iraq was tied to 9/11 — won’t stand up anymore. The
dead in London, and those who are yet to die from
terrorism on American soil, mock those excuses.
