Column: The Wrong War, Again
Six months before September 11, 2001, terrorism expert and future Mideast potentate L. Paul Bremer III said the Bush administration “seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism.” It has “a window of opportunity” to understand and organize against the threat – not just “stagger along until there’s a major incident” – and “they’re not taking advantage of it.” (We await Senator Bill Frist’s call for a comparison of Mr. Bremer’s past and present statements, as required of the Richard Clarkes of the world.)
As we know, the administration never did seize the day. Surrounded by Star Wars-Sino-big-picture-obsessed Cold Warriors who couldn’t be bothered with piddling threats, George W. Bush passed the hours trimming presidential shrubs in bumpkin-patch Crawford. Leadership at its finest, as advertised.
But enough of the past, argue Mr. Bush’s defenders. It’s time to move on. Though W. can’t think of any, mistakes were made – well, mostly by the Clinton administration – and the important thing is to focus on the here and now. Beating this dead horse of accountability only weakens the nation. The commander in chief now understands the threat – there’s no doubt about that – so for heaven’s sake let him concentrate on it. We’ll all be better off.
As arguments go in stressful times, it’s not an altogether bad one. There is a certain twisted logic to it.
There’s also a problematic catch, it is a big one, and it is this: Bush is still misreading what threatens America. His intellectual laziness remains undisturbed – something once boasted about, now vigorously denied – and the defect abets a terrorist presence in perpetuity.
“Al Qaeda hates us,” he mused for the umpteenth time in identifying the threat after his unrecorded, untelevised untestimony before the 9/11 Commission. “Al Qaeda hates us” and “we are still vulnerable.”
True, he got the predicate adjective right. But, according to informed literature, he got the pronoun – the perpetrator – almost certainly wrong. He just can’t seem to get up to speed.
Osama bin Laden’s criminal operation, writes the London Observer’s Jason Burke in his finely researched Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, was “merely a transient phase in the history of Islamic militancy.” Bin Laden is as good as toast, his time “has passed,” and he remains influential in the Islamic world only in symbolic terms.
The extreme difficulties we face today go “far beyond the deeds or words of one man or one small organization,” writes Burke. America’s much deeper and continuing problem – indeed, the world’s continuing problem – is a “broad-based, multivalent, diverse movement” of radical Islamic activism scattered across the globe, in “Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kashmir, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and elsewhere.”
The movement is fed fundamentally by the growing socioeconomic chasm between Islamic rich and poor. The result is rage. As Jason Burke further notes in a typically understated British way, and as Richard Clarke has noted in a typically loud American way, our invasion of Iraq has only intensified the rage and heightened the threat.
Yet the president of the United States believes, and would have you believe, that we’re vulnerable because of an isolated, withering outfit known as al Qaeda. Kill it and you kill the problem. It’s that simple – and the simplicity endangers Americans by catering to a mental image of some sort of ultimate V-Day. That isn’t going to happen; not, at least, by military means. The longer we misperceive the threat, the longer it will persist.
When Bush was fighting the wrong war before 9/11 – the first wrong war; not the wrong war in 2003 and then again in 2004 – Paul Bremer said “the folks in the press ought to be pushing” to set the administration straight. Say it again, Paul, now that you’re just about off the payroll. Then again, and again….
© Copyright 2004 P. M. Carpenter
Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.