Can Any Candidate Clean Up Bush's Massive Post 9/11 Mess?

By Andrew J. Bacevich, Posted September 11, 2008.

The squandering of vast resources after 9/11 and our slide toward debt
and dependency pose a greater threat to the U.S. than Osama bin Laden
ever did.

Can anyone be surprised that, once again, the attacks of 9/11/01 were
reflexively ground zero for embattled Republicans? George W. Bush led
the way at the Republican National Convention, saying of John McCain,
"We need a president who understands the lessons of September 11,
2001." In his convention keynote address, Rudy Giuliani followed suit,
zapping Obama and his supporters this way: "The Democrats rarely
mentioned the attacks of September 11. They are in a state of denial
about the threat that faces us now and in the future."
Post-convention, it's evidently time to assure the nation that Sarah
Palin is just the pit bull to handle the next 9/11. Now comes the news
that this Thursday, the endless presidential election campaign will
finally make it -- quite literally -- to Ground Zero. Barack Obama and
John McCain will "put aside politics" and appear together for the
yearly ceremonies. By now, however, it's far too late to "put aside"
9/11, no less remove it from American politics. Our world has been
profoundly reshaped, after all, by the decisions Bush and his top
officials made in the wake of those attacks.

Still, taking up the President's implied question, what "lessons"
exactly should be drawn, seven years later, other than that you stand
a reasonable chance of winning elections by invoking 9/11 ad nauseum?
As Andrew Bacevich, author of the New York Times bestselling book, The
Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, indicates below,
there are indeed lessons to be drawn. They are, in fact, devastating
to the Bush administration, and unless they are grasped, further
disaster is undoubtedly in the offing. (To watch a video of Bacevich
discussing those post-9/11 lessons, click here.) -- Introduction by
TomDispatch editor, Tom Engelhardt

9/11 Plus Seven

By Andrew J. Bacevich

The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment
on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of
9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has
failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to
confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in
favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and
sustainable -- a task that, alas, neither of the presidential
candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.

On September 30, 2001, President Bush received from Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld a memorandum outlining U.S. objectives in the
War on Terror. Drafted by Rumsfeld's chief strategist Douglas Feith,
the memo declared expansively: "If the war does not significantly
change the world's political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim."
That aim, as Feith explained in a subsequent missive to his boss, was
to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam
generally."

Rumsfeld and Feith were co-religionists: Along with other senior Bush
administration officials, they worshipped in the Church of the
Indispensable Nation, a small but intensely devout Washington-based
sect formed in the immediate wake of the Cold War. Members of this
church shared an exalted appreciation for the efficacy of American
power, especially hard power. The strategy of transformation emerged
as a direct expression of their faith.

The members of this church were also united by an equally exalted
estimation of their own abilities. Lucky the nation to be blessed with
such savvy and sophisticated public servants in its hour of need!

The goal of transforming the Islamic world was nothing if not bold. It
implied far-reaching political, economic, social, and even cultural
adjustments. At a press conference on September 18, 2001, Rumsfeld
spoke bluntly of the need to "change the way that they live." Rumsfeld
didn't specify who "they" were. He didn't have to. His listeners
understood without being told: "They" were Muslims inhabiting a vast
arc of territory that stretched from Morocco in the west all the way
to the Moro territories of the Southern Philippines in the east.

Yet boldly conceived action, if successfully executed, offered the
prospect of solving a host of problems. Once pacified (or
"liberated"), the Middle East would cease to breed or harbor
anti-American terrorists. Post-9/11 fears about weapons of mass
destruction falling into the hands of evil-doers could abate. Local
regimes, notorious for being venal, oppressive, and inept, might
finally get serious about cleaning up their acts. Liberal values,
including rights for women, would flourish. A part of the world
perpetually dogged by violence would enjoy a measure of stability,
with stability promising not so incidentally to facilitate
exploitation of the region's oil reserves. There was even the
possibility of enhancing the security of Israel. Like a powerful
antibiotic, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation
promised to clean out not simply a single infection but several; or to
switch metaphors, a strategy of transformation meant running the
table.

When it came to implementation, the imperative of the moment was to
think big. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld was charging his
subordinates to devise a plan of action that had "three, four, five
moves behind it." By December 2001, the Pentagon had persuaded itself
that the first move -- into Afghanistan -- had met success. The Bush
administration wasted little time in pocketing its ostensible victory.
Attention quickly shifted to the second move, seen by insiders as
holding the key to ultimate success: Iraq.

Fix Iraq and moves three, four, and five promised to come easily.
Writing in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol and Robert Kagan got
it exactly right: "The president's vision will, in the coming months,
either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq."

The point cannot be emphasized too strongly: Saddam Hussein's
(nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and his (imaginary) ties to
Al Qaeda never constituted the real reason for invading Iraq -- any
more than the imperative of defending Russian "peacekeepers" in South
Ossetia explains the Kremlin's decision to invade Georgia.

Iraq merely offered a convenient place from which to launch a much
larger and infinitely more ambitious project. "After Hussein is
removed," enthused Hudson Institute analyst Max Singer, "there will be
an earthquake through the region." Success in Iraq promised to endow
the United States with hitherto unprecedented leverage. Once the
United States had made an example of Saddam Hussein, as the
influential neoconservative Richard Perle put it, dealing with other
ne'er-do-wells would become simple: "We could deliver a short message,
a two-word message: 'You're next.'" Faced with the prospect of sharing
Saddam's fate, Syrians, Iranians, Sudanese, and other recalcitrant
regimes would see submission as the wiser course -- so Perle and
others believed.

Members of the administration tried to imbue this strategic vision
with a softer ideological gloss. "For 60 years," Condoleezza Rice
explained to a group of students in Cairo, "my country, the United
States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region
here in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither." No more. "Now, we
are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic
aspirations of all people." The world's Muslims needed to know that
the motives behind the U.S. incursion into Iraq and its actions
elsewhere in the region were (or had, at least, suddenly become)
entirely benign. Who knows? Rice may even have believed the words she
spoke.

In either case -- whether the strategy of transformation aimed at
dominion or democratization -- today, seven years after it was
conceived, we can assess exactly what it has produced. The answer is
clear: next to nothing, apart from squandering vast resources and
exacerbating the slide toward debt and dependency that poses a greater
strategic threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden ever did.

In point of fact, hardly had the Pentagon commenced its second move,
its invasion of Iraq, when the entire strategy began to unravel. In
Iraq, President Bush's vision of regional transformation did die, much
as Kagan and Kristol had feared. No amount of CPR credited to the
so-called surge will revive it. Even if tomorrow Iraq were to achieve
stability and become a responsible member of the international
community, no sensible person could suggest that Operation Iraqi
Freedom provides a model to apply elsewhere. Senator John McCain says
that he'll keep U.S. combat troops in Iraq for as long as it takes.
Yet even he does not propose "solving" any problems posed by Syria or
Iran (much less Pakistan) by employing the methods that the Bush
administration used to "solve" the problem posed by Iraq. The Bush
Doctrine of preventive war may remain nominally on the books. But, as
a practical matter, it is defunct.

The United States will not change the world's political map in the
ways top administration officials once dreamed of. There will be no
earthquake that shakes up the Middle East -- unless the growing clout
of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas in recent years qualifies as that
earthquake. Given the Pentagon's existing commitments, there will be
no threats of "you're next" either -- at least none that will worry
our adversaries, as the Russians have neatly demonstrated. Nor will
there be a wave of democratic reform -- even Rice has ceased her
prattling on that score. Islam will remain stubbornly resistant to
change, except on terms of its own choosing. We will not change the
way "they" live.

In a book that he co-authored during the run-up to the invasion,
Kristol confidently declared, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it
does not end there." In fact, the Bush administration's strategy of
transformation has ended. It has failed miserably. The sooner we face
up to that failure, the sooner we can get about repairing the damage.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations
at Boston University. His bestselling new book is The Limits of Power:
The End of American Exceptionalism.