Journalist Peter Bergen is back again with another book about terrorism, just in time for the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It’s a history of the failed strategies of successive American presidents who have prosecuted our “Global War on Terror,” or GWOT, since that fateful day.
The administration of George W. Bush earns a lashing from Bergen for both downplaying the threat of al Qaeda before the attacks, and then failing to respond to them in a strategically coherent way. These are arguments Bergen has made before in previous books on the same subject. The critique of the administration opening a questionable second front in Iraq, so shortly after launching a war to drive al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, is not exactly new soil, either. Thrashing Bush for his “Mission Accomplished” moment is gratuitous at this point, too.
The author grants Bush grudging praise for his “surge” in Iraq, calling it a “gamble that paid off.” And one gets a fleeting sense of admiration for the elimination of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. But he hammers “Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in the first place.”
President Barack Obama gets somewhat better treatment from Bergen, but the author is also quick to assert that “the differences between Bush and Obama were far less pronounced than either their critics or their cheerleaders believed when it came to waging war on jihadist groups.” If anything, Obama widened the GWOT with “military operations of various kinds in seven Muslim countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.” Indeed, Bergen calls Obama the “drone president.” During the Bush years, there was one CIA drone attack in Pakistan every 61 days. During the first two years of Obama’s presidency, there was one every four days.
Obama, of course, was the president who eventually eliminated al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, even against the guidance of his own vice president, Joe Biden, who would later claim to support “Operation Neptune Spear.” With that achievement, Obama tried to wind down the GWOT, but to no avail. The meteoric rise of the Islamic State, an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria that Obama initially called a “jayvee” squad of terrorists, forced the reluctant president to wade back into the war without end. By 2016, the U.S. coalition had killed an estimated 45,000 Islamic State fighters, but the group continued to fight on. So much for ending the war.
Donald Trump ultimately ended the war with the Islamic State, having disbanded the group’s so-called caliphate. But the president also initiated a process of dealmaking with the Taliban that would ultimately be consummated by his successor, Joe Biden. Bergen calls this, with no small amount of snark, “the art of the giveaway.” The ill-advised deal was brokered from start to finish by the duplicitous and terror-financing Qatari regime, which hosted a Taliban “embassy” with blessings from successive presidents beginning with Obama.
Of course, it was Biden who brought this deal to its final and calamitous conclusion. Inexplicably, he ordered the withdrawal of the U.S. military before our diplomats and civilian allies in Afghanistan could leave. The deadly terrorist attack at Abbey Gate, on the tarmac of the Kabul airport in August 2021, was the result. That chaotic scene drew obvious comparisons to America’s similarly disastrous exit from Saigon in 1975. Today, the Taliban is back in control of Afghanistan after two decades of feckless battles, squandered aid, and dead soldiers.
Trump’s return to the White House for a second term has nudged Bergen’s narrative in new directions. The author takes aim at the president’s use of the word “terrorists” to describe narcos and gangs in Latin America. Bergen also slams him for the war in Iran, which he compares to Bush’s war of choice in Iraq, and is “based on false claims.” This, of course, ignores the decades of terrorism sponsored by the Iranians, including the support that Tehran provided to the very terrorists America fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. Bergen gives this short shrift throughout his book.
In the end, the failed wars of the GWOT led to the deaths of some 7,000 service members and a financial cost of roughly $6 trillion. This does not include the more than 40,000 injuries and the loss of faith in America’s warfighters, not to mention its political leadership. In short, the “long war” has taken an enormous toll.
One shortcoming of the book is scope. Bergen’s book begins with the failings of George W. Bush. But the story of American presidents and their struggles does not begin there. The failings of Bill Clinton deserve greater scrutiny. He was the first president to deal with the transnational terrorist group we now know as al Qaeda, beginning with its first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, not to mention the subsequent attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000. And Clinton treated terrorism as a tactical challenge.
In fact, if Bergen really wanted to examine the history of failed presidential policies toward terrorism, he might have reached as far back as Lyndon B. Johnson, who was forced to grapple with the first hijacking of a plane by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1968. More than three decades of pre-9/11 counterterrorism policy undeniably informed the decisions of Bush and his successors.
Even more puzzling is why Bergen completely sidestepped the entire question of modern terrorist ideology in the Muslim world and the minority interpretation of Islam that informs it. The motivation for “jihadists” and “Islamists” (two words he uses throughout the book) is never explained. Admittedly, this topic provokes heated controversy and debate. But America’s failures in this asymmetric war must be viewed through this lens. While the names of the terrorist groups continue to change, the enemy’s religiously motivated refusal to surrender has not. This explains much about America’s inability to win.
As for policy prescriptions, Bergen offers few. He contends that better “day after” plans are needed in future wars. And “above all, American presidents must correctly judge and establish the kind of war upon which they and the nation are embarking.” That’s thin gruel for a country still searching for answers 25 years after the worst ever terrorist attack on American soil.
All The Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror
by Peter Bergen
W.W. Norton, 401 pp., $32.99.
Jonathan Schanzer is executive director of Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Read the full article here
