Bush has Botched the War on Terror
by John McLaren
September 29, 2004
A puzzling feature of this campaign season is the credit many voters give to Mr. Bush for management of the war on terror. By any sensible standard, the Bush administration has failed in the war on terror, and in ways that few administrations could be expected to replicate.
It is well known that before 9/11, the Bush administration put terrorism on a back burner, ignoring the Hart-Rudman report that foresaw the attacks and many internal warnings of impending disaster. What is striking is that even after 9/11, the administration has taken decision after decision that help terrorists in their cause.
This began during the Afghan war. Our military were convinced that we had Bin Laden cornered at Tora Bora, but the job of capturing or killing the top Al Qaeda leadership was subcontracted out to local warlords who had no incentive to put their lives on the line to eliminate Bin Laden. Consequently, he escaped, and is now to the best of our knowledge planning new attacks against the United States. The Bush administration now appears to have lost all interest in Bin Laden. In 2002, Mr. Bush said, “So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him..., to be honest with you. . . . I truly am not that concerned about him.” CIA insider Michael Scheuer claims that the CIA’s group in charge of finding Bin Laden is now smaller than it was before 9/11, and that it has been facing hiring freezes and rapid turnover of personnel.
Before the Afghan war was over, the administration was already diverting military and intelligence resources to its planned Iraq war. As a result, the Afghan project was left half-finished, with most of the country in the hands of lawlessness and warlordism, and the Taliban reemerging. Opium sales are now booming, making up probably more than half of GDP, and providing revenues to terrorist groups, who funnel a portion of the proceeds to terrorist groups worldwide.
As uncomfortable as it may be to admit, the fact is that the Iraq war has been a great boon to terrorists. Our sloppy, poorly planned occupation has resulted in large swatches of the country in chaos, where bullying fundamentalists, who under Saddam had no power, now are free to roam and intimidate. This past April, in response to the murder of four US civilians, the administration ordered a siege of the city of Fallujah, which resulted in the deaths of several hundred Iraqi civilians. Our forces vowed to rid the city of insurgents, but soon retreated, leaving the city controlled by insurgents. It was an enormous propaganda victory for the insurgents, and now Fallujah is a haven for violent fundamentalists, and rife with car-bomb factories to be used against Americans and their allies. As New York Times reporters put it, “Marine commanders at Camp Falluja, a sprawling base less than five miles east of the city, have been telling reporters for weeks that the city has become little more than a terrorist camp, providing a haven for Iraqi militants and for scores of non-Iraqi Arabs, many of them with ties to Al Qaeda, who have homed in on Falluja as the ideal base to conduct a holy war against the United States.”
Saddam’s regime was a dreary dictatorship that bullied its own people but did not pose a real threat to the United States. The Bush administration policies are now turning the country into a giant haven for terrorists. As General William Odom, who served as Reagan’s National Security Advisor, put it: “Right now, the course we’re on [in Iraq], we’re achieving Bin Laden’s ends.”
The failure in Iraq has been compounded by the Bush administration’s astonishing decision to protect terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2002 and 2003. As NBC reported in March, the administration three times was given an opportunity to kill Zarqawi and destroy his camps before March 2003, but decided to keep him in place because they thought that eliminating him might weaken their case for going to war in Iraq. This act sacrificed our national security for domestic political reasons, with harrowing results. Zarqawi has been behind many terrorist attacks since the Bush administration chose to spare his life, including the beheading of American Nick Berg in May, and a number of beheadings of Americans and Iraqis since. He is thought to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people in Iraq, and possibly for the Madrid train bombings. It is beyond belief that his life was deliberately spared by an American president.
The investigation and prosecution of terrorist cases have also been marked by a remarkable degree of ineptitude. What had been hailed as our greatest prosecutorial victory in terrorism, the conviction of an alleged sleeper cell in Detroit, recently collapsed amid prosecutorial abuse and feuding within the Justice department. The administration held Yaser Esam Hamdi for more than two years in solitary confinement, without access to a lawyer, claiming that he was a Taliban-associated terror threat, but when the Supreme Court decided that as a US citizen he was entitled to a hearing, he was immediately released – and is now a free man. The administration’s highly publicized warnings of years-old threats to financial-sector buildings in New York and New Jersey may have effectively exposed the source of the information – a recently flipped double agent who was apparently our only mole in al Qaeda.
The lack of interest the administration has in real progress on terrorism is shown by its half-hearted approach to the problem of nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union. In addition, the administration has done very little to secure our ports, nuclear power plants and chemical facilities here at home. Last year, the GAO released a study indicating that more than 100 chemical plants in the US are attractive terrorism targets, each endangering at least one million people, and yet the government had done little to ensure that they were secure. The administration has indicated to frustrated local authorities in charge of port security that it wants them to find private funds to do more and more of the work of keeping our ports secure. It would currently be fairly easy to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the country in a shipping container passing through any of our large ports. This does not appear to attract much interest from the administration.
Lastly, it is very clear that in the battle for hearts and minds in the Arab world, the United States has lost badly in the last four years. If moderate Arabs begin to turn anti-American, then it will become all the more likely that anti-American ‘charities’ with terrorist ties will be well funded; that terrorists will more easily find safe houses and technical assistance; that they will have an easier time laundering money and obtaining new recruits. Due to the administration’s invasion of Iraq and what many Arabs see as one-sided support for the policies of Ariel Sharon, public opinion has turned sharply against the US in the very countries where we need to worry about Al Qaeda the most. This has been made sharply worse by the large numbers of civilians we are inadvertently killing in Iraq, and also by the horrors of Abu Ghraib, from which the administration cannot shirk responsibility. Early after 9/11, the Bush administration created a permissive environment in regards to torture, asking for memos from legal council on the possibility of using torture in interrogations. The White House counsel even called the Geneva Conventions ‘quaint.’ Eventually, in the chaos of occupied Iraq, these ideas filtered down into action. Now, because of this blunder, rightly or wrongly, much of the world thinks of the US military as an army of sadists. This is a tragedy for all Americans who take pride in their military, and a strategic victory of incalculable value to terrorists.
There have been some positive steps, of course. The Afghan war did disrupt Al Qaeda, even if it was not properly followed through. There have been some important arrests abroad. But the failures have been remarkable for their breadth and for the incompetence or inattention that they display, and they unquestionably have made Americans less safe. They would be forgivable in a pre-9/11 environment, but they are inexplicable post-9/11. It is difficult to imagine another President presiding over this fiasco.
The author is a professor of economics at the University of Virginia. The views expressed here do not represent the views of the University of Virginia or the State of Virginia.