From the beginning, the rhetoric, at least, was over the top. Three days after those towers tumbled, President George W. Bush framed the incredible scope of what he'd instantly taken to calling a "war." As he told the crowd at a Washington national prayer service, "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." From the first, it seemed evident to the president: America's target wasn't anything as modest as the al-Qaeda terrorist network, but rather evil itself. Looking back, this was undoubtedly the original sin. Call something -- in this case, the response to the acts of a small jihadist group -- a "war" and sooner or later everyone begins acting like warriors.
Within 24 hours of the attacks, the potential target list was already expanding beyond Osama bin Laden and his modest set of followers. On September 12th, President Bush commanded his national counterterror coordinator, Richard Clarke, to "see if Saddam did this... look into Iraq, Saddam." That night, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the president and the entire cabinet, "You know, we've got to do Iraq... There just aren't enough targets in Afghanistan... We need to bomb something else to prove that we're, you know, big and strong..."
Nonetheless, Afghanistan -- and its Taliban rulers -- became the first military target. Bombs were dropped and commandos infiltrated. CIA spooks distributed briefcases of cash to allied warlords and eventually city after city fell. Sure, Osama bin Laden escaped and many of the Taliban's foot soldiers simply faded away, but it was still one hell of a lightning campaign. Expected to be brief, it was given the bold name Operation Enduring Freedom and, to listen to the rhetoric of the day, it revolutionized warfare. Only it didn't, of course. Instead, the focus was soon lost, other priorities (Iraq!) sucked the resources away, venal warlords reigned, an insurgency developed, and... and 16 years later, American troop levels are once again increasing there.
Over the days, the months, and then the years that followed, the boundaries of the Global War on Terror both hardened and expanded. In his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush ominously included Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea (though he left out "liberated" Afghanistan), in what he called "an axis of evil." Who cared, by then, that none of those countries had had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks? In a flash the president conflated all three in the public mind, ultimately constructing a self-fulfilling prophesy. Saddam would be toppled and Iraq occupied 15 months later and, had it not been for the ensuing chaos, Iran and North Korea might have been next. Unsurprisingly, both countries intensified their bellicosity and grew all the more interested in nuclear weapons programs.
So much followed the 9/11 attacks that it's no small thing to sum up: the Patriot Act, warrantless domestic wiretapping, Guanta'namo, Abu Ghraib, a Taliban resurgence, an Iraqi civil war, drones as global assassins, the Arab Spring, the overthrow of Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi and the collapse of his country, the Syrian bloodbath, the worst refugee crisis since World War II, and that's just to begin a list.
In short, U.S. policies have left the Middle East in chaos: perhaps a million dead, Iran empowered, and radical Islamists resurgent. Meanwhile, this country has become a garrison state, forever at war, its military budget doubled, its populace seemingly indifferent, and its warrior caste shattered -- physically and mentally. Sixteen years have passed and Washington is no closer to its goal (whatever that was). Retired general David Petraeus, our nation's prodigal "hero," has now ominously labeled the Afghan War (and by implication the rest of the war on terror) a "generational struggle."
Few, to be honest, even remember the purpose of it all. Keep in mind that Army recruits today were perhaps two years old on 9/11. And so it goes.
Lost Opportunities
It didn't have to be this way. Nothing about it was predetermined. Much of the necessary information -- certainly the warning signs of what was going to happen that September 11th -- were already there. If, that is, one cared to look. History is contingent, human beings have agency, and events result from innumerable individual decisions. The CIA, the FBI, and even the Bush administration knew (or should have known, anyway) that an attack of some sort was coming.
As the 9/11 commission report painfully detailed, none of those agencies collaborated in a meaningful way when it came to preventing that day's attacks. Still, there were warnings ignored and voices in the dark. When Richard Clarke, counterterror czar and a Clinton administration holdover, requested through official channels to deliver an emergency briefing for Bush's key foreign policy officials, it took four months just to arrange an audience with their deputies. Four more months elapsed before President Bush received a briefing titled, "Bin Laden determined to strike the U.S." Unimpressed, Bush quickly responded to the briefer: "All right... you've covered your ass now."
Barely more than a month later, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were burning.
Whatever else it did, 9/11 presented the United States with an opportunity, a Robert Frost-like fork in a divergent path. And we Americans promptly took the road most traveled: militarism, war, vengeance -- the easy wrong path. A broad war, waged against a noun, "terror," a "global" conflict that, from its first moments, looked suspiciously binary: Western versus Islamic (despite Bush's pleas to the contrary). In the process, al-Qaeda's (and then ISIS's) narratives were bolstered.
There was -- there always is -- another path. Imagine if President Bush and his foreign policy team had paused, taken a breath, and demonstrated some humility and restraint before plunging the country into what would indeed become a war or set of wars. There were certainly questions begging to be asked and answered that never received a proper hearing. Why did al-Qaeda attack us? Was there any merit in their grievances? How did bin Laden want us to respond and how could we have avoided just such a path? Finally, which were the best tools and tactics to respond with? Let's consider these questions and imagine an alternative response.
Why They (Really) Hated Us
Americans and their government were inclined to accept the most simplistic explanation for the terror attacks of 9/11. As George W. Bush would assure us all, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda just "hate us for our freedoms." The end.
Something about the guilelessness of that explanation, which was the commonplace one of that moment, never quite seemed right. Human motivations and actions are almost always more complex, more multifaceted, less simpleminded than that. While Bush boiled it all down to "Islamic" fundamentalism, even a cursory look at bin Laden's written declaration of "war" -- or as he called it, jihad -- demonstrates that his actual focus was far more secular and less explicitly religious than was suggested at the time. Couched between Koranic verses, bin Laden listed three all-too-worldly grievances with America:
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