Announcing that Gen. David Petraeus would replace the
defenestrated Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of the war in
Afghanistan, President Obama was emphatic in saying that this was
a change in people, not in policy.
That policy, which Obama described in a February 2009
interview with Jim Lehrer, was “that is that we make sure that
[Afghanistan is] not a safe haven for al-Qaida, they are not able
to launch attacks of the sort that happened on 9/11 against the
American homeland or American interest.” And that was George
Bush’s goal. The strategy Bush chose to accomplish it — and the
one Obama is continuing — is nation-building, also known as
“counterinsurgency” in military lingo.
By the end of August, over 100,000 U.S. troops will be
engaged in the counterinsurgency campaign and in less than a year
the final curtain will begin to fall on the greatest wartime
mistake America has made since Lyndon Johnson put Robert McNamara
in charge of the Vietnam War: the strategy of
nation-building.
Though he campaigned against it, President Bush embraced
nation-building in January 2003 when he chose a nation-building
plan for post-war Iraq authored by Colin Powell and George Tenet
over the plan for a brief invasion written by Donald Rumsfeld and
Richard Myers. And, by default, nation-building was decided upon
for Afghanistan as well.
We are now close to the end of the ninth year of our
counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan and success — as
defined by Bush and Obama — is nowhere in sight.
In two years, nation-building will have failed conclusively
in Afghanistan. The impermanence of its accomplishments in Iraq
are already all too evident. The post-election stalemate between
the incumbent Maliki and apparent winner Allawi has continued
since March, accompanied by ever-increasing violence by a
resurgent al-Qaeda.
In two years, Republicans will have to decide on a
candidate to oppose Obama’s attempt to win a second term.
This will necessitate an argument between conservatives and
neocons, the latter’s belief in nation-building being one of
their defining characteristics. The outcome of that argument will
determine the immediate future of conservatism and, in all
likelihood, the outcome of the 2012 election.
Neocons — according to an August 2003 Weekly
Standard article by the late Irving Kristol, credited as the
godfather of neoconservatism — define themselves differently
from traditional conservatives.
Kristol described a cognitive dissonance that characterizes
neocons. First, he said, neoconservatives like to stimulate
economic growth by cutting taxes. But their emphasis on economic
growth leads them to embrace governmental spending far more than
small-government conservatives do. He rejected Hayek’s thesis
that we are on a “road to serfdom” and said that “…sometimes we
must shoulder budgetary deficits as the cost (temporary, one
hopes) of pursuing economic growth.” This was George Bush’s “big
government conservatism” and it failed comprehensively.
The neocons’ belief in nation-building — they being the
most ardent advocates of it — wasn’t mentioned by Kristol though
he admitted that foreign policy was (when he wrote) the media’s
focus on neoconservatism. He claimed that “there is no set of
neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of
attitudes derived from historical experience.”
Nation-building is the most prominent — and most important
— part of the neocon doctrine. And the decision to pursue it is
the principal reason that we are losing in Afghanistan, Iraq is
falling apart, and the real enemy — the terror-sponsoring
nations — have grown stronger. If conservatives are going to
recover from the Bush years and regain the White House,
nation-building must be a focal point of the argument for the
future of conservatism.
WE ARE CLOSING IN on the ninth anniversary of 9-11. U.S.
combat forces are supposed to be out of Iraq altogether by
summer’s end, though more are being sent to Afghanistan to
complete the “surge” the president ordered.
But nowhere — in Iraq, Afghanistan or the score of other
places where the war George Bush called the “global war on
terror” is being fought — are we winning.
Why? What have we gotten so wrong?
The answer to that question is that we have gotten very few
things wrong. But those few are the only ones that are
important.
George W. Bush made three mistakes which altered the course
of American history and from which we may not recover because
Barack Obama is compounding them.
First, President Bush never defined the enemy clearly and
correctly: we are at war with the nations that sponsor Islamic
terrorism and the religion-cum-ideology which propels
them.
Second, and the inevitable consequence of the first, we
have mistaken the terrorist groups as the enemy and — despite
overwhelming evidence of their responsibility for the deaths of
American troops — we have never attacked the terror-sponsors or
even exacted a price for their actions.
Third, and with equally disastrous effect, Bush sunk us
neck-deep in the neocons’ self-imposed quagmire of
nation-building.
Nine days after 9-11, addressing a joint session of
Congress, Bush seemed to have it right. In his speech to a joint
session of Congress he said, “Our war on terror begins with
al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every
terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and
defeated,” and “Every nation in every region now has a decision
to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”
But in that speech he sowed the seeds of mistake and drift. He
added, “The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying,
in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not
our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our
enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government
that supports them.” The cognitive dissonance in that statement
led Bush astray. Our “many Arab friends,” especially the Saudis,
are a principal funding source for terrorist groups. The Saudis
are also, through an international group called the Muslim
Brotherhood, conducting an ideological insurgency in America.
Other Arab states such as Syria openly sponsor terror while the
rest turn a blind eye to it. And though Iran is Persian not Arab,
it is the principal terrorist nation on the planet.
If Bush had meant what he said, the Saudis would have been
forced to stop sponsoring terrorism and both the Iranian
kakistocracy and Assad’s Syria would only be bad memories. But he
never took action, far less decisive action, against any of
them.
Terrorists only have global reach if they are sponsored and
supported — and given safe harbor [- by nations.
Bush quailed at the idea of engaging the Islamists in the
ideological half of the war they wage against us. Islam —
radical or otherwise — is as much an ideology as a religion: an
integrated system of beliefs intended to form the basis of
government. To defeat the terrorist groups — and to divorce the
terror-sponsoring nations from their chosen mission — the
ideology has to be attacked and defeated just as communism and
Nazism were.
Though some in his administration wanted to fight the
ideological war (such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and
successive Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gens. Richard
Myers and Peter Pace) the president was unwilling. So that
battlefield was abandoned to soft euphemisms about Islam.
Bush refused to prosecute the ideological war. And now
Obama intends to surrender outright.
Our young president apparently lacks the courage of Harry
Potter, the fictional young wizard who dared say the name of his
ultimate enemy, “Voldemort,” aloud. The “National Security
Strategy” is a presidential statement to Congress required of
each new administration. The terms “jihad” and “Islamic
extremism” are banned from the one Obama is about to release. How
can you defeat that which you lack the courage to name?
You can’t. And if you won’t fight the ideological war and
don’t fight the source of terrorism, you can’t win at all. George
Bush must bear much of the blame, but he wasn’t the first
president to fail to take action against the state sponsors of
terrorism.
With agonizing consistency, almost every president since
Thomas Jefferson — who sent the navy to “chastise the Tripolitan
pirates” — has failed to act against the terror sponsoring
nations. Jimmy Carter’s presidency ended with that failure and
Ronald Reagan, having recovered the Tehran hostages, bailed out
of Beirut after the Marine barracks bombing without punishing the
Iranian government for sponsoring it.
Bill Clinton’s casual attitude toward the terrorist threat
certainly helped al-Qaeda grow to the existential threat it
proved itself to be on 9-11. But in Afghanistan from the
beginning, and in Iraq dating back even before the U.S. invasion
of 2003, George Bush failed to confront and destroy the terror
sponsors. He accepted the neocons’ way of war.
