This NIE -- the combined opinion of the country's major intelligence agencies -- only confirmed a report that had been leaked a couple of days before from the National Counterterrorism Center, grimly titled "Al Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West." This report concluded that al-Qaida, 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-Qaida, 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 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.
That the Iraq war is "fueling the spread of the jihadist 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. "The Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. 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 García Márquez). 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 U.S. security and for America's position in the Middle East and the world. Which means that telling the story of the war on terror, half a 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: Gen. Osama bin Laden and Gen. 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 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-Qaida and to weaken U.S. 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, Saudi Arabia; Nairobi, Kenya; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Aden, Yemen. 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" (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 Ahmed Shah Masood, that bin Laden expected this American counterstrike to come in Afghanistan, which would have given al-Qaida 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 fall 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.
Why did Gen. 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-Qaida and with them the critique of U.S. 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."
Next page: "Iran is more important … But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with"