THE HUNT FOR THE 9/11 JIHADISTS … AND BUSH’S NATION-BUILDING^[5]

9/11 and its aftermath.  That morning he got the terrible news that deep tragedy had just fallen on New York City’s Twin Towers – the tragedy soon amplified by a similar hit on the Pentagon … and also a downed plane in the Pennsylvania countryside.

Four commercial airplanes had been hijacked by al-Qaeda jihadists.   Two planes were flown straight into the New York World Trade Center buildings, eventually bringing them down, with 2,600 office workers, police and firefighters dying in the tragedy.  Another plane was aimed at the Pentagon building, killing 125 officers and workers there.  And one flight – alerted via cell phone by spouses that their hijacked plane was undoubtedly headed for a strategic site in Washington, D.C. – was brought down in rural southwestern Pennsylvania by very heroic passengers.  All aboard were killed (40 passengers and crew as well as the hijackers).  But either the Capitol Building or White House (the probable goals of the hijackers) was spared the fate of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

America – and the world – was stunned, though parts of the Muslim world understood the jihadist source of the hit and celebrated this “victory” accordingly.

It is not that the world should have been completely surprised by this event.^[6]  A similar attack had happened only eight years earlier.  And a key Afghan ally of America’s, Massoud, had been assassinated only a couple of days earlier – and the American intelligence community sensed that something big might be about to unfold.  But the sharing of intelligence across the many agencies involved in such national intelligence activity was very poor – actually rather competitive, thus the subsequent creation of the Homeland Security Office in order to force better cooperation within the intelligence community.

In any case, it took no time to realize that behind this all was the hand of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda jihadist group.  His training camps in Afghanistan were well known to American intelligence, as well as the even more numerous camps located in America’s supposed ally Pakistan.

The “Bush Doctrine.”  Thus on September 20th Bush went before Congress to announce his “Bush Doctrine” – namely that any country harboring such jihadist criminals must give them up, or suffer dire consequences from the Americans. Americans would go after bin Laden and his associates, wherever they might go.

At the time, supposedly the search for bin Laden involved only the Taliban group that had overthrown Massoud’s Northern Alliance group and taken control of Kabul, the Afghan capital. But clearly the Taliban were in no mood to give up bin Laden and his terrorist organization. To them the al-Qaeda terrorists were heroes, defenders of Muslim integrity.

And so the Americans would have to devise their own way to bring down bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Supposedly this would involve undercover work of CIA operatives – bribing local clan leaders to zero in on bin Laden. But even then, such action would involve some large-scale operations which certainly were going to involve deep conflict with the Taliban.

As it turned out, the Northern Alliance – even with its leader gone – was able to keep itself organized and, with the aid of NATO airpower, ultimately was able to chase the Taliban out of the Afghan capital of Kabul (mid-November) and off into the Afghan Tora Bora mountains. But still, this did not bring bin Laden or al Qaeda to account.

Nation-building in Afghanistan.  At this point Bush seemed to see the Afghan picture in much, much bigger terms.  With the expulsion of the Taliban from Kabul, Afghanistan supposedly could now be brought into closer alliance with America – by “democratizing” its political habits.  The president’s wife, Laura Bush even went before the press to talk about how American action in Afghanistan could finally liberate Afghan women from the traditional oppression that they had suffered under for so long.

In short, the Bushes were now focused on “nation-building” in Afghanistan – a much, much bigger process than simply bringing bin Laden to justice.

While such talk impressed many Americans and Westerners, it also impressed many in the Muslim world – except in the very opposite manner.  Americans find it virtually impossible to understand that not everyone else in the world goes at life, or even wants to go at life, the way they do.  Muslims understand that the good life comes from a universe in which everyone finds a place of submission to the larger order of things, children to their parents, wives to their husbands, families to their elders or community leaders (from tribal sheiks to religious mullahs), regional community leaders to their ruling or presiding princes, amirs, kings and ayatollahs, and all of them ultimately to Allah.  The central idea in Islam is “to submit.”  Muslims are “those who submit.”

American (especially Boomer) talk about pursuing full personal freedom from any and all authority shocks Muslims, appearing to them as something very dangerous to human order, to the good life, especially to the pleasure and blessings of Allah himself.  Thus when Americans go invading a Muslim country to bring “democracy” as part of a new nation-building venture, this is not destined to work the way Boomers believe it is supposed to.  “Freedom of choice” to Muslims means the opportunity to show ever stronger support for those in authority, not infrequently in opposition to other groups seeking to do the same.  If this is not handled carefully, such “democratizing” can easily plunge a Muslim society into a horrible state of civil war among local groups that have found no higher personality to unite around.  Thus dumping Muslim “dictators” is a very dangerous program in the Muslim world.

And America was soon to discover this.  And once again, America would also fail to take note of the actual dynamic – instead simply pushing ever-harder to make their version of social dynamics work in a setting where there was no natural inclination of the people themselves to go the way Americans thought things should go!  Therefore, things would get very brutal, very fast.

With the decision to go to full nation-building in Afghanistan the operation was taken out of the hands of the CIA and put under direction of Donald Rumsfeld and his Department of Defense – that is, the American military establishment.  But of course the U.S. military was by no means battle-ready at a moment’s notice for such an operation, and would need weeks of preparation, during which time bin Laden naturally slipped into the mountains – and then probably back into Pakistan.

And there in Pakistan, where the Americans had no authorization to pursue him, he would be safe from the American military’s effort to hunt down him and his organization. Because Pakistan was a supposed American ally, and because it was a nuclear power, and because Pakistan made it very clear that they too would under no terms give bin Laden and al Qaeda over to the Americans, Pakistan was one place – the key place in fact –where the Bush Doctrine did not apply.  Thus in terms of political reality, the “Bush Doctrine” had no real meaning.

But in any case, the “democratization” of Afghanistan would supposedly justify any and all American political and military operations in Afghanistan – even if all that ultimately had nothing to do with bringing bin Laden to justice.

This would prove to be a major American foreign policy distraction –along the lines of Johnson’s Vietnam program – one which would prove very costly to the Americans, and to the Afghans.  And it had strikingly similar qualities to the (failed) Soviet efforts earlier to bring Afghanistan into their political orbit.  But Bush took no notice of the dynamics that made his program there look extremely costly – with little real political benefit likely to come from the effort.

But oddly enough, America had the rather substantial assistance of a number of its European NATO allies, in part due to the fact that they too had lost some of their own citizens in the Twin Towers tragedy.  But what that had to do with Bush’s program of democratizing Afghanistan was just as remote for them as it was for America.

Nation-building in Iraq.  What then possessed Bush to turn his attention to Iraq remains to this day an unanswered question.  Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein was a dictator, a flamboyant self-appointed candidate to become the leader of the entire Arab nation (all the Arab countries of the Middle East), in competition with other such Arab candidates.  He used the usual Arab call to unity around the Jewish intrusion into the Arab world in the establishment of Israel and made all kinds of noise in that regard.  And he built up his military accordingly in order to present a plausible claim to such candidacy.

But as we have seen, he overstepped himself in Kuwait and he and his army got burned badly.  He was put under all sorts of military quarantine which restricted his venturesome ways – though not necessarily his language, used to keep himself “important” in the eyes of his own people.  Bush Sr. had not bothered to do more than kick him out of Kuwait, but had gone no further in the matter of hemming in the loud dictator.  As his then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney would later explain, to have gone deeper into Iraq would have amounted to entry into a “quagmire.”  Nothing would be gained – at great expense to everyone concerned.

But Bush Jr. somehow decided that the world would be a better place if Saddam were to just disappear.  And it would also offer Iraq the opportunity to go “democratic.”  That, to Bush, justified the huge enterprise.  He was determined to go nation-building in Iraq, no matter what the cost involved.

But Bush’s cabinet seemed to be less than unanimous about undertaking this project.  However, Dick Cheney, now Bush’s Vice President and closest advisor, was changing his tune – and was now fully in favor of jumping into the quagmire.  Likewise his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, not only had the U.S. military standing in readiness, but had the perfect candidate in mind, Ahmed Chalabi, to lead Iraq to “democracy.”  And the U.S. Congress, in October of 2002, not wanting to appear to be unpatriotic, authorized exactly such action in Iraq – by a huge majority: 297-133 in the House and 77-23 in the Senate.^[7]

But unlike his successful efforts in enlisting allies for his Afghan program, he got very little support from the international community (Britain would however join Bush in this enterprise – at great loss to both Britain and its Prime Minister Tony Blair).  At first Bush tried the “Bush Doctrine,” claiming Saddam’s support for al-Qaeda, and thus candidacy for American retribution.  But nobody bought that explanation.  Then in September 2002, Bush went before the United Nations General Assembly to put forward the claim that Saddam was violating the international restrictions he had been placed under since his rebuke over Kuwait – that Saddam was secretly developing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

The physical evidence in this claim offered by U.S. intelligence was very questionable – and it quickly appeared that the larger world was not buying his story.  Ultimately the UN simply decided to send more inspectors into Iraq to see what evidence they themselves could find on this matter.

But when, after months of searching Iraq, the UN inspectors were unable to come up with any such WMD evidence, an anxious Bush saw his case before the court of world opinion weakening rapidly.  Thus he made one more effort to win the world to his cause, using the excellent international reputation of his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, to make a hopefully compelling presentation in February of 2003 before the United Nations on this WMD matter.  Bush also had an American proposal put before the UN Security Council authorizing action against Saddam.  But when it became apparent that France, Russia and Germany were strongly opposed to this, he had the proposal withdrawn.

Bush thus decided that he was going to take out Saddam anyway, no matter what the rest of the world’s opinion happened to be on this matter.

Into the quagmire.  Thus on March 20th, Rumsfeld’s military unleashed “Shock and Awe” (very heavy bombing) on the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.  Saddam went into hiding and Iraq found itself leaderless as Americans, joined by British (and smaller units of Australian and Polish) military invaded their country.  Within a few weeks Iraq found itself delivered over to its new “democratic liberators.”

Then the quagmire revealed itself.  Looting and ransacking of Baghdad got underway as people scrambled to get what they could of items before the economy shut down.  Then the three major ethnic groups that had been held together only by Saddam’s tough hand fell into fighting among themselves:  the Sunni Kurds in the North, the Sunni Arabs in the West, and the Shi’ite Arab community in the East and South.  And the Turks next door – America’s long-standing NATO ally – became intensely upset with Bush and his American invaders because Iraqi social breakdown also jeopardized the social order in heavily Kurdish south-eastern Turkey.  This would mark the beginning of the Turkish pull-back from its formerly close relationship with America.

Mission accomplished?  But Bush ignored these deepening disasters, and on May 1st, arrived by jet aboard a U.S. carrier located offshore from San Diego (not somewhere in the Middle East!), Bush wearing a flight suit, although he himself had not piloted the plane.  He changed clothing and then appeared on deck to address the world with a very upbeat speech, with the huge banner “Mission Accomplished” displayed above the deck – in indication of how things supposedly stood on this Iraqi matter.

But at this point nothing except disaster had been accomplished!  And that would immediately be worsened even further by Rumsfeld’s envoy, Jerry Bremer, sent to administer Iraq as Bremer himself saw the need.  In early May, Bremer issued fundamental Orders 1 and 2.  The first declared that anyone formerly connected with Saddam’s Ba’athist Party (virtually every professional in the country) would be prevented from serving in their former capacity in the “new Iraq.”  And the second order, issued over the objection of the U.S. military commanders who had called on the service of the Iraqi army to keep some degree of order in the country, was to disband the Iraqi army – to un-employ hundreds of thousands of young men with rifles, and the knowledge of how to use them.  So upset was the U.S. military command over this huge political blunder that all of the top generals chose to “retire” – leaving the new military matters in the hands of a very inexperienced American one-star general (actually Rumsfeld would direct overall U.S. military policy from DC anyway).

It was also at this point that anger aimed by the Iraqis against their fellow Iraqi social-cultural opponents now got turned on the occupying Americans and British, especially against the Americans.  At this point the real Iraqi war got underway.  And it would drag on for years – a true American (and British) quagmire.

Ultimately, Americans never came up with any evidence of Saddam having been developing WMDs.  However, Saddam himself was finally captured, sentenced and then executed – for committing crimes no worse than the ones Lincoln had committed in order to preserve the unity of the U.S. against Southern rebels.  Then Americans directed those Iraqis willing to take up the task of putting together a new Iraqi constitution – something that supposedly would finally justify this grand misadventure.

But politically speaking, all that would develop from this effort to “democratize” Iraq was to shift power from the Sunni Arab portion (about 20%) of the population, the sector that Saddam had counted on for his political support, to the Shi’ite Arab portion of the population (about 60%), the largest of the social groups and the one that had suffered minority status under Saddam.  But oddly enough there was little gratitude from the Shi’ites for their “liberation” by the Americans and the British.  Instead they simply took this opportunity for revenge against the Sunnis, and then turned on the Americans and the British when the latter group tried to settle the angry Shi’ite community down. And then there were the non-Arabic Sunni Kurds (another 20%), who had been waiting for decades for Kurdish independence (much to the anger of the Turks next door), the only group that showed some degree of real support of the American presence in Iraq.

Thus exactly how leaderless “democracy” was going to restore social unity in Iraq instead of merely intensifying these deeper social divisions would remain a mystery to Iraq’s American and British “liberators.” None of the Iraqis had ever even heard of Rumsfeld’s presidential candidate Chalabi (!!!) and so coming up with a leader was going to become difficult.  Finally (October 2005), under the new constitution, national elections were held (boycotted by most all of the Sunni Arabs) and a Shi’ite, Nouri al-Maliki, was put forward as a leader of a coalition and thus also as prime minister.

But this in no ways settled down the violence that consumed Iraq.  In 2006 the situation worsened deeply when some group blew up the al-Askari or Golden Dome in Samarra, one of Shi’ite Islam’s most holy sites.  Shi’ites turned on Sunni mosques and murdered the imams found there.  Soon death squads were roaming the country, especially in the Sunni West where American troops were expected to keep some kind of order (although Rumsfeld was trying to maintain a “small footprint” by keeping U.S. troops mostly restricted to the U.S. military bases in the country).

And wouldn’t you know, all this chaos (thanks to Bush) would allow al-Qaeda and other Sunni jihadists finally to make their way to Iraq and begin to base their operations there, a much more strategic location than Afghanistan or Pakistan in making anti-Western mischief throughout the Arab Middle East.  Thus it was that the only true “mission accomplished” that occurred in Iraq was the one gained by the anti-American Shi’ites (religious kinsmen of the Iranian Shi’ites next door, Muslims pledged to bring “death to the Great Satan America”) in the Iraqi East and South, and the anti-American Sunni jihadists in the West and Northwest of the country.

Political repercussions back home in America.  In the 2004 American presidential elections, Bush was able to gain reelection against the Democratic Party candidate, John Kerry – to a great extent because the election got to be not about public policy but about very personal matters.  Kerry’s Vietnam service record was challenged (unfairly as it turned out) by a group of Vietnam veterans, sinking greatly Kerry’s political support.  CBS had countered this attack with its own report of service scandal on Bush’s part – and then had to repent when it was discovered that the material Dan Rather had been using as “evidence” was a forgery.^[8]   While this CBS special was clearly intended to sabotage the Bush candidacy, it actually stirred sympathetic support to the besieged president!  Thus it was that, quite exceptionally, Bush was reelected – virtually unheard of at a time when a leader’s war was clearly not going well at all.

But the 2006 Congressional elections would hit the Republican hard.  They lost their majority in the House to the Democrats and had their position in the Senate reduced further, with also the two Senate independents tending to vote with the Democrats.

It was at this point that Bush got rid of Rumsfeld.  He had removed Rumsfeld’s cabinet rival Powell back in 2004.  But Bush was now reversing course (too late for Powell however) in getting rid of Rumsfeld.  But the Republicans were very upset:  why hadn’t Bush done this before the elections, when it would likely have helped the Republicans considerably?

The 2007 “surge” in Iraq.  The situation in Iraq was growing worse, not better through previous (Rumsfeld) policies.  And finally, on the basis of a study that Bush took a great interest in, the decision was made to end Rumsfeld’s “small footprint” strategy, increase considerably the number of U.S. troops in Iraq and pursue a very aggressive forward strategy, designated as a grand military “surge.”  Not surprisingly it worked.  It impressed the Shi’ite leaders enough that they decided to be more cooperative with the Americans, it allowed the British to back out of an Iraqi mess that had cost Britain’s political leadership deeply, and it cut back considerably the operational abilities of the Sunni jihadists in the northwest.  And hopefully it gave the Americans (and their private “contractors”) the opportunity to do some serious training of the (now mostly Shi’ite) Iraqi army so as to be able to take control.  And thus as Bush approached the last months of his presidency in late 2008, he was finally able to begin the drawdown of the American military presence in Iraq.

^[5]For a truly in-depth coverage of this section, see my Volume III, The Dismissing of America’s Covenant with God (Westbow, 2020), pp. 206-232.

^[6]Very, very ironically, in early September of 2001 (as a just-hired history and social studies teacher at a Christian school in Pennsylvania) I was making this introductory point that foreign affairs was not really an option for “Fortress America,” despite the huge walls of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that it seemed we could hide behind if we chose to do so.  I knew that there were enemies abroad intending to bring the battle to America itself, despite those oceanic walls.  I cited as the most obvious example Muslim jihadists, America-haters that I pointed out were certainly going to make another attempt on the highly visible and extremely valuable American national symbol, the New York Twin Towers.  However, I had no idea that this prophesy would be fulfilled literally the very next day.  My students never forgot this act of unintended prophecy.  But tragically, I lost two former parishioners in that disaster.  Thus this was indeed horribly painful prophecy, something I would hope never to be called on to do again.

^[7]All but 8 of the 213 Republican congressmen approved the resolution; but 126 of the 208 Democrats did not.  In the Senate, all but one of the 49 Republicans voted for approval.  But so did 29 of the 50 Democrats (one independent voting “no”), those voting in favor including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Charles Schumer – who would of course later try to backtrack on that unfortunate decision of theirs.

^[8]Scandal rather than serious news filling America’s media front-line reporting was not a new thing.  Grocery store checkout stations had long been loaded with “newspapers” reporting such things as: “I was raped by a monster from Mars”; “Dog gives birth to a puppy with two heads”; etc.  But when the nation’s prestige papers began to undertake this same behavior, along with national TV feeding sensationalist “news” to the public 24/7 as simply another form of entertainment, America’s news industry became itself a much-degraded American institution.  The Walter Cronkite days of CBS news were clearly over.