Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (7 page)

These smart, talented, good-hearted, and well-intentioned men and women never had a chance and in the end did a great deal more harm than good for U.S. interests, a self-inflicted fiasco that their successors are repeating and deepening today in Afghanistan and Iraq at a time when the stakes are much greater for America. U.S. diplomats, U.S. AID officials, and hundreds of Western nongovernmental organizations flooded the Afghan playing field armed with large amounts of money and expectations entirely inapplicable to those of the people they were trying to help. Ambassador Tomsen, for example, spoke often about building a Hamiltonian federal system in Afghanistan,
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and Ambassador Phyllis Oakley brought in groups of American lawyers (as if the Afghans had not suffered enough under the Soviets) to lecture Afghan tribesmen on the niceties of due process, human rights, and the rule of law. Simultaneously, Ambassadors Robert Oakley and Zalmay Khalilzad spent untold hours trying to teach Afghan resistance leaders the ins and outs of parliamentary government, fiscal responsibility, and the protection of minority rights. Always polite, patient, and hospitable, the Afghans listened intently to their professorate of ambassadors, took the money that was on offer, and proved themselves unable and more often unwilling to implement anything they were taught. Why? Because the U.S., Western, and UN diplomats wanted to deal with Afghans like those who had fled to overseas exile during the war against the Soviets or who belonged to resistance groups that talked but did not fight. They wanted to deal with people who resembled themselves in style and temperament, men who were mannered, well-coiffed, wore suits, spoke English or French, were educated in India or the West, and were at most nominal Muslims—after all, no polity needs too much of that religion stuff. In short, the West preferred to deal with those Afghans who had played a minor role in the struggle against the Red Army or had safely spent the war abroad.

To the surprise of Western diplomats but not of anyone with common sense, the Afghan leaders who had fought the Red Army had no intention of ceding control of their country to a government installed, paid for, and protected by foreigners. By deliberately leaving the Islamist Afghan mujahedin on the outside looking in, the West ensured that no weak but coherent Afghan central government would emerge (the only type of central government the Afghans will tolerate) and that the civil war that began to take shape as the Soviet withdrawal was completed would evolve into a nationwide Hobbesian conflict of all against all.

The upshot of this democracy-spreading U.S.-Western involvement, then, was not the now-dominant urban legend of Western abandonment after Soviet withdrawal but an involvement that guaranteed that post-jihad Afghanistan would not find a way toward either the anathema of secular democracy or the political stability potentially possible through the use of the tools and practices of a two-millennia-old, tribal-dominated polity. Indeed, the Western spanner in the Afghan works helped to foster a national environment of intertribal strife, crime, banditry, narcotics trafficking, and ethnic animosity so dire that the rise of the harsh Koran-based rule of the Taliban would be welcomed because it brought reliable law and order in its train. Thus 1989 marked the start of a period in which the West missed a chance to let the Afghans find their own political equilibrium and resume their traditional, intense insularity. By seeking to install a secular democracy, it ensured that Afghanistan would grow from a nonthreat to the United States to the home of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Sadly, the 1989 effort in Afghanistan would not be the last time U.S. governing elites would embark on attempts to install democracy abroad and succeed only in killing Americans and bleeding their wealth.
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1990–91: More Steps on the Road to Defeat

If there were ever turning-point years for the United States, setting the stage for almost everything negative that occurred to it after 9/11, they are surely 1990 and 1991. Responding in panic to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990, Saudi king Fahd coerced his bought-and-paid-for clerics into defying the Prophet Muhammad’s prohibition against the presence of non-Muslims on the Arabian Peninsula. Warned by many dissenting Saudi clerics and prominent citizens—including Osama bin Laden—that once U.S. forces arrived on the peninsula they would never leave, King Fahd nonetheless approved the U.S. deployment and foolishly accepted Washington’s word that U.S. forces would be withdrawn after Iraq was defeated. Poor, silly Fahd, he did not know that Washington went to war without the slightest intention of winning, and so U.S. forces are still on the peninsula today, seventeen years later. The now-dead king’s lasting legacy to the Saudi state will be that his decision to allow deployment marked the first step toward the final destruction of the al-Saud regime.

As 1990 became 1991, the Saudi Arabia–based, U.S.-led coalition bombed the daylights out of Iraq’s infrastructure; the U.S. military stupidly televised its killing of Muslims to the entire Islamic world, then drove Iraqi ground forces out of Kuwait in one hundred hours and won—nothing. Saddam survived, his military and intelligence forces survived, the societies of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the other Arabian Peninsula states began a journey toward Islamic radicalization, and the many bureaucrats who masquerade as U.S. generals actually believed they had won a decisive victory and would henceforth be able to conduct wars with virtually no casualties.

What the 1991 U.S.-led war against Iraq did was to prove to Saddam and our other enemies in the Islamic world (nation-states and transnational actors) that U.S. presidents and officials would speak loudly, rattle sabers endlessly, and then apply their mighty club with resolute daintiness so the world—and especially the European elites they so much admired—would not think too badly of those in power in Washington. In 1991, as in 2003, we let nearly a half-million Iraqi military personnel not only survive but also flee to safety with their guns, thereby living to fight and kill U.S. soldiers and Marines another day. President George H. W. Bush’s contention that destroying Iraq’s ground forces and dethroning Saddam would have meant capturing Baghdad, and thereby destabilizing the Middle East, was and is a false rationalization serving to disguise moral cowardice. Then-general Colin Powell (before he degenerated into just one more tacking, pragmatic politician) was right: once we decided on war, the job at hand was to surround the Iraqi army, kill all of it, and let the chips fall where they might. Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Barry McCaffrey accomplished the surrounding requirement of Powell’s doctrine, but Bush and his cabinet decided to let those they had identified as the enemies of America survive, escape, re-form, and reequip. As I write, nearly 3,900 service personnel have died in Iraq because the first President Bush and his team did not have the courage of their convictions to destroy Saddam’s state when they had the chance.

The first U.S.-Iraq war also provides a good example of the “fog of war,” in which unexpected and seemingly unrelated matters can be exceedingly costly. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait there was a good deal of informal discussion and debate within the U.S. Intelligence Community about whether President Bush would use enough U.S. military power to definitively eliminate the Saddam problem. Bush was well liked in the U.S. Intelligence Community—especially in the CIA, where he had been DCI under President Gerald Ford—but he did not inspire the same confidence as had Ronald Reagan. Reagan left the constant impression that he was out to protect America, first, last, and always. Bush and his closest advisers, on the other hand, were clearly what I have referred to as “nuancers” and “ballet of international politics” men, people who would make international affairs so complex and interconnected that the result was often either paralysis and no action or half-measures that left threats undefeated and simmering, ready to boil another day. And so it seemed likely to be the case in Iraq. Recognizing this eternally temporizing potential, some in the IC took comfort in the thought that Bush and his team would be kept up to mark because there was at least one manly, decisive leader in the Iraq war coalition—British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Having watched Mrs. Thatcher conduct the Falklands war, break relations with Syria on the terrorism issue, and face down and then smash Britain’s labor unions, she seemed likely to keep Bush from “going wobbly” and leaving a half-fought, eventually-to-be-resumed war in Iraq.

Alas, however, such was not to be the case. As the war opened, a now deservedly forgotten Tory politician named Michael Heseltine led a successful party revolt and unseated Mrs. Thatcher, although he did not win the premiership. At precisely the instant President Bush and company were collapsing with wobbliness, Mrs. Thatcher was no longer on hand to provide the Oval Office with the requisite spine. And on such pedestrian events do great disasters pivot. Without the Iron Lady at his side, President Bush proved to be very much a man meant for turning. Quailing before the bloodbath that would have permanently protected America, Israel, the West, their allies, and the Iraqi people against Saddam, Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft joined hands and danced the nuancers’ minuet and explained away their lack of concern for Americans by dilating on the complex and unpredictable impact that annihilating Iraq’s military would have on regional and world affairs. To paraphrase a 1790s American who hated the diplomat John Jay for not adequately protecting U.S. trade from Britain, every American parent who has lost a son or a daughter in Iraq since 1990, and every Iraqi who lost a child because of the UN sanctions that became necessary because Bush and his dance partners refused to destroy Saddam’s regime, should once a day express their contempt by saying: “Damn George Bush! Damn everyone who won’t damn George Bush! Damn everyone that won’t put lights in their windows and sit up all night damning George Bush!”
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The second momentous event of 1991 was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This event was, of course, a great victory for the United States and a singular achievement for the determination and vision of Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, Mr. Reagan was not president when the great moment came, and instead America was led by a very good man and a very bad politician, George H. W. Bush. While the fall of the wall was certainly an occasion to celebrate the victory of America and Mr. Reagan, President Bush turned out to be something of a weepy, dreamy Adlai Stevenson/Henry Wallace clone, talking endlessly about the arrival of what Noël Coward once called “the age of peace and plenty,” and the “New World Order” that the U.S. government would build from it.

Well, the elder-Bush-designed and-managed New Jerusalem never arrived, but we went on speaking as if it had for the rest of the 1990’s and to this day—recall Madeleine Albright’s delusion that America is “the indispensable nation.”
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The major result of terminating the USSR was the destruction of the fairly well-ordered and world war–less international environment we had enjoyed for nearly half a century. In many ways the Cold War–era’s U.S.-USSR standoff had amounted to a genuine New World Order, but that framework of stability and peace was shattered by the American victory, and the world thereafter began a steady descent toward a new era of barbarity, an era whose arrival would be hastened by the happy talk and silly democracy-spreading notions of Messrs. Bush, Clinton, and Bush. While these three gentlemen put protecting Americans on the back burner in favor of occupying an office the U.S. Constitution does not provide for—President of the World—the forces that attacked us on 9/11 peacefully and quite openly, as noted above, gathered, trained, and prepared for war. Barbarism arrived to kill Americans, while our presidents were busy seeking the world’s applause, admiration, and cultural amalgamation.

1993: An Unshared Revelation, Another Pulled Punch

In February 1993 Ramzi Ahmed Yusuf and a team of minimally talented and intelligent individuals spent about twenty thousand dollars on explosives and other materials and detonated a bomb that came within an ace of collapsing the two towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City. If it had been completely successful, the attack would have killed many times more Americans than died on 9/11. After the bombing, Yusuf scurried out of the United States and continued to roam the world looking for U.S. targets to attack. In January 1994, Yusuf barely escaped from Philippine police in Manila but was captured the next month in Pakistan in an operation led by Pakistani security officers. The effort yielded Yusuf in chains and the opportunity for the FBI to falsely claim credit for the success. This claim established a now-hallowed FBI tradition regarding its efforts against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda: claiming credit for other agencies’ successes. Such claims now amount to a fabricated litany of Bureau “successes” that probably explains why the FBI continues to be involved in counterterrorist operations. There is no other plausible reason. Without these claims of overseas successes, the FBI could do no more than its standard operating procedure: find some addled U.S. Muslims, recruit a slightly brighter Muslim, and then use the latter to frame the former in a sting operation that makes them look like terrorists. We all have seen this method of operation in practice in such places as Lodi, Minneapolis, Albany, and Miami.
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Anyway, Yusuf’s near-miss attack on the WTC should have persuaded U.S. officialdom that one icily brilliant Islamist militant and his retinue of mostly half-baked colleagues had demolished the doctrine of deterrence, as it had come to be known during the Cold War. Al-Qaeda would later publish a brilliantly written essay explaining the strategic importance of the 9/11 attacks and claiming that the attack had destroyed the three pillars of U.S. security policy: early warning, preemption, and deterrence.
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Al-Qaeda was wrong. What the attack on 9/11 did was definitively drive home for U.S. political leaders and policymakers the great lesson of Ramzi Yusuf’s failed 1993 attack; namely, that deterrence was useless against religiously motivated nonstate actors, and that our ability to detect and preempt them before they attacked was extremely limited.