“We’re fighting terrorism in Iraq so we don’t have to fight it at home.”
— President BushYeah? Tell that to the British!
If the president truly believed what he said, and he might have, then he must be shocked and disoriented by the suicide bombings on one of those distinctive London buses and the city’s subways.
It may be helpful then to go back to the beginning of the war against al-Qaida and its allies, to see how we arrived at this point, and determine if we’ve strayed from the original strategy for fighting the war.
Remember, the FBI and CIA did not know the name al-Qaida until 1996, and the first presidential speech declaring a “war on terror” was in April of that year.
Compared to the 40-year Cold War, we haven’t been at this very long. We won that war by containing the Soviets with steely self-control — never firing a shot — while the arsenal of democracy strengthened us and socialism weakened them. In 1990, the empire imploded, fell over dead.
With the continental menace of the USSR no longer filling the screen, our intelligence agencies began to see small but deadly vermin were infecting the Middle East.
In the early 90s the CIA kept hearing the name Usama or Osama bin Laden, whom they described as a rich boy playing at terrorism, a financier of radical groups. But neither the outgoing Bush administration nor the incoming Clinton team had terrorism high on its priority list.
The Republican Congress in 1995 was also nonchalant about the threat of terrorism, refusing to pass a measure that would have cut off the flow of “charitable” funds for terrorist organizations. This, despite the first World Trade Center bombing and 18 Americans killed in the Khobar apartment building blast in Saudi Arabia.
As the threat became more apparent, a Bush holdover, Richard Clarke, became the counterterrorism director, the budget grew from $5.7 billion in 1995 to $11.1 billion in 2000, and President Clinton spoke out.
In a speech at Georgetown University, the president declared “a war on terror.” He said, “Terrorism is the enemy of our generation, and we must prevail.” But I want to make it clear to the American people that while we can defeat terrorists, it will be a long time before we can defeat terrorism.”
After coordinated attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, President Clinton asked his National Security team to deal with al-Qaida. “Listen,” he said, “retaliating for these attacks is all well and good, but we gotta get rid of these guys once and for all.”
A comprehensive plan was developed to eliminate al-Qaida and, in JFK’s phrase, to begin the long, twilight struggle against terrorism itself. Lacking the urgent anger of 9/11, the plan wasn’t executed, and was passed on to the new administration in 2001.
Understandably wanting to put their own stamp on the plan, and diverted by the controlled chaos of transition, a full-scale assault on al-Qaida was only a paper plan on September 11, 2001.
The savage drama of that day had one good consequence: The United States could at last focus on a state sponsor of the al-Qaida vermin — the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
With the whole world cheering us on, even sympathetic Islamic nations, we at last had the opportunity to eliminate al-Qaida, and build a secure, unified Afghanistan as a Middle Eastern model of democracy.
But an uninvited demon kept rising at White House meetings to obscure the clarity and simplicity of that vision. The demon was Iraq.
At the very first meeting of Cabinet deputies to deal with al-Qaida and the Taliban, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz insisted that Saddam Hussein must be behind the 9/11 attacks.
Though the FBI, the CIA and State Department said they could find no evidence of a connection to Saddam, the specter of Iraq would not die. It grew and grew until it became an obsession.
So here we are, our soldiers dying by the hundreds and innocent Iraqis by the tens of thousands, searching for an honorable way out, and trying to remember why we went there in the first place.
Two explanations — that the war prevents terrorism and Iraq was tied to 9/11 — won’t stand up anymore. The dead in London, and those who are yet to die from terrorism on American soil, mock those excuses.
