In the Wake of Bush’s Failures

War A new book reveals the hubris and ignorance that turned the War on Terror into a disaster. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images All the Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror, by Peter Bergen with David Sterman, W.W. Norton & Company, 401 pages. No one can forget seeing the Twin Towers collapse and the Pentagon burn. We were glued to televisions and radios before the advent of smartphones. We were terrified, confused, wounded, and, as the initial shock began to subside, vengeful. Our collective sense of safety from foreign attack was shattered not by an invading army but by 19 hijackers, mostly Saudis who had entered the country legally. In a surreal sequence of events lasting about two hours, the suicide pilots murdered 2,977 people in New York, Washington, and a Pennsylvania field. But against whom to direct our wrath? In a stirring address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush correctly identified the jihadist organization al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden as the perpetrators. Yet the coming war, Bush made clear, would not be confined to striking bin Laden’s remote Afghanistan base. It would be global—but morally simple—as the president divided the world into two camps. “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” Bush declared. The Taliban, Afghanistan’s fanatical Islamist rulers, were up first: Hand over bin Laden or be destroyed. From our vantage a quarter-century later, the GWOT—the awkward acronym for the Global War on Terrorism—appears misbegotten from the start, setting the world’s lone superpower on a course of intractable calamities and moral opprobrium. Launching an open-ended crusade that, as Bush put it, “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated,” was the height of hubris. It is therefore unsurprising that Washington is sinking into another abyss in the Greater Middle East today, fighting a new “preventive war,” this time against Iran, “the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.” It would require a whole book to compile all the lessons that went unlearned. Enter Peter Bergen, a vice president at the Washington think tank New America and leading expert on al-Qaeda and global jihadism. In All the Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror, Bergen attempts to identify the missteps, miscalculations, and missed opportunities on all sides. His account relies on hundreds of interviews, extensive U.S. national security documents, the 470,000 files recovered at bin Laden’s Pakistan hideaway, and the published memoirs of key decision-makers. Bergen was part of the CNN crew that interviewed al-Qaeda’s leader in 1997 in a hut in Afghanistan’s eastern mountains. More than a decade before that, back in 1983, Bergen traveled to Pakistan to produce a documentary about Afghan refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion. He also made a film on Afghanistan’s civil war (1992-96) that examined the growth of jihadist training camps. Few Western journalists are as experienced navigating Afghanistan’s tortured landscape. The Bush administration’s follies began months before 9/11. Top officials repeatedly failed to act on warnings such as this one presented to the president on August 6: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” Thus, the hijackers slipped through not just as the result of an “intelligence failure;” rather, Bergen’s account reminds us that 9/11 was also the result of a policy failure (specifically, a failure to prioritize). No senior Bush officials, many of whom had spent decades in government, asked the FBI “to locate suspected members of al-Qaeda who might be in the United States,” Bergen writes. “This was far from an abstract concern: Ahmed Ressam, who had trained at a jihadist camp… had been stopped at the U.S.–Canada border in mid-December 1999.” (When he was caught, Ressam had been carrying explosives as part of a plan to blow up a Los Angeles airport.) “Bin Laden had also repeatedly made public statements to leading American media organizations warning of attacks on the United States,” writes Bergen. He should know: During their 1997 sit-down, the terrorist leader had called for a holy war against the U.S. Bush’s cabinet, Bergen notes, “didn’t understand that a group like al-Qaeda—which wasn’t backed by any of the states that the Bush team worried most about, such as Iraq—might indeed be a serious danger to the country.” During a White House meeting convened to discuss terrorist threats, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, asked, “Why are we beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden?” One of Bergen’s most trenchant insights is that the administration’s ignorance of the enemy led to its excessive response, including the use of torture at secret CIA black sites. At the same time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted both the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions to be “light footprints” followed by a speedy withdrawal. This explains the absence of serious or realistic plans for the day after in Kabul and Baghdad. Law, order, governance—who needs them? Bergen also concludes the torture program gleaned almost no useful information and did not prevent any imminent terrorist attacks. The criminally incompetent Bush team did not have a monopoly on miscalculations. Bin Laden himself misjudged his enemy as he fantasized about driving the U.S. military out of the Middle East. Here Bergen punctures another myth: Al-Qaeda’s leader did not, in fact, hope the 9/11 attacks would provoke Washington into invading Muslim countries. On the contrary, bin Laden saw himself as their liberator. He misread history, to say nothing of his network’s capabilities. This time, the U.S. would not cut and run as it had done in Lebanon in the ’80s or Somalia in the ’90s. Bergen, who also penned a 2021 biography of bin Laden, takes us inside the jihadists’ minds to understand their motivations and aims. Al-Qaeda attacked not because its leader hated miniskirts, action movies, and civil liberties, but because he opposed U.S. foreign policy. Yet he had nothing to offer “occupied lands” except endless violence, and his “movement” would soon fall out of favor among initially sympathetic Muslim populations. This was because al-Qaeda and its affiliates were causing the deaths of thousands of ordinary Muslims, especially in Iraq, where the Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi helped incite a bloody Sunni–Shia civil war. Missed opportunities to wind down the war abound across the last twenty-five years. Bergen contends the U.S. should have made peace with the Taliban when it was defeated in late 2001. But, as mentioned, Bush had already ruled out such a move. The administration, Bergen observes, “was deep in either-you-are-with-us-or-against-us mode, and there was also a pronounced desire for revenge, which is rarely a basis for making smart judgments.” Combined with the failure to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001—a consequence of “the confusion about the objectives of the Afghan war”—this was the Bush team's first momentous blunder of the GWOT. Counterfactual scenarios are never certain, but Bergen reasonably posits that had bin Laden been caught just three months after 9/11, a wholly unnecessary invasion of Iraq might have been avoided fifteen months later. It could have really been “Mission Accomplished.” So, did the United States get anything about the GWOT right? Are there any wins—for either the U.S. or the societies in which it intervened—visible in the wreckage? SEAL Team Six eventually caught up to bin Laden in Abbottabad in 2011, and by then the U.S. had killed or captured thousands of suspected militants in multiple theaters, although at an appalling cost in civilian casualties. Thousands of U.S. service members and private contractors had also been killed or maimed by then. By early 2019, what Bergen praises as a “counter-sanctuary” strategy of deploying “a limited number of U.S. military advisors working with local ground forces backed by American airpower and intelligence” put an end to ISIS’s territorial caliphate. But ISIS only existed because the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. Iraq remains troubled today, although it does hold regular elections. There have been no mass-casualty attacks by foreign terrorist groups in the United States since 9/11, but this may have more to do with tighter airport security than anything else. Even so, the “shoe bomber” (2001) and the “underwear bomber” (2009) got through to their seats only to fumble their detonation devices when the planes were in midair. New technologies like drones increasingly allowed commanders-in-chief to liquidate individual terrorists without the need for ground troops, though drone warfare was hardly cost-free. Faisal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber in 2010, told investigators he was motivated by revenge for U.S. drone strikes in the Muslim world, as Bergen notes. Bergen also cites a New America data-tracking project that estimated civilian casualties were in the low hundreds during President Barack Obama’s drone wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. (Some independent watchdog groups argue the death toll was much higher, with regular airstrikes killing thousands more.) Whatever the figures, Bergen acknowledges “armed drones have made the distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ considerably fuzzier and have lowered the threshold for U.S. presidents to conduct military operations around the world.” Rather than making possible his pivot to Asia, drones kept Obama occupied elsewhere. Bergen does not conceal his contempt for the Trump and Biden administrations when his chronological narrative reaches the U.S.–Taliban “peace deal” and ensuing withdrawal from Afghanistan. Possibly because of his long attachment to the country, Bergen still believes Afghanistan could and should have been saved. Unanswered is why something like 100,000 Afghan Army soldiers were—after twenty years—still unable to do the job of a few thousand U.S. troops and several thousand contractors to hold the Taliban at bay. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox The author’s faith in American power, notwithstanding the disastrous mistakes he documents in more than 300 pages of text, is this sturdy book’s only serious weakness. By focusing on presidential decision-making, Bergen neglects larger structural forces that shaped the U.S. response to al-Qaeda’s act of mass murder. That is, a hegemonic superpower, left reeling from a surprise attack, could not resist taking on an old challenge repurposed for the modern world: taming the “savage” frontier. The ideology of primacy is a structure. Because superior powers tend to exert overwhelming force in asymmetrical power relations, the U.S. would seek national regeneration through violent conflict in a poorly defined mission. Debacles were thus inevitable. But Bush and his successors did not have to deviate “from the thrust of existing policy,” as the historian John Dower put it in his 2017 study, The Violent American Century. Prosecuting the GWOT “involved unleashing a warfighting machine already primed and experienced in overseas interventions, including intensive bombing, covert operations, and practices on the ‘dark side,’” Dower wrote. While the enemies may change with the times, from Soviet communism during the Cold War to jihadists after 9/11, the structures endure. If we’re interested, an analysis of those structures can tell us why a president who promised to keep the U.S. out of unnecessary wars finds himself trapped in yet another one.