What We Got Right in the War on Terror

[Valin]

Commentary/Contentions:

Abe Greenwald
September 2011

1. Closure

On May 1, 2011, U.S. Navy SEALs put one bullet through the chest and one through the head of Osama bin Laden—nine years, seven months, and 20 days after al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people in the name of Islam. Historical eras are rarely framed as neatly as this. Though not precisely a decade after 9/11, the secret mission in Pakistan on May 1 was close enough to impose some poetic shape on the period in which the United States first fought back against Islamist terrorism.


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It was the Freedom Agenda of the George W. Bush administration—delineated and formulated as a conscious alternative to jihadism—that showed the way. Indeed, the costly American nation-building in Iraq has now led to the creation of the world’s first and only functioning democratic Arab state. One popular indictment of Bush maintains that he settled on the Freedom Agenda as justification for war after U.S. forces and inspectors found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The record shows otherwise. “A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East,” he said before the invasion, in February 2003. “Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both.”

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As the dream disappeared, some inapposite answers to that question emerged, particularly on the left. Less than two weeks after the attack, the late Susan Sontag wrote in the New Yorker, “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” She went on:


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The question to ask today is not whether we believe in closure. What matters is whether our enemy is as ready to call it a day as we are. “This clearly is a defeat for the U.S. in Afghanistan, and the start of the return of the Taliban, [its leader] Mullah Omar, and an Islamic sharia state,” said one senior Taliban fighter in response to Obama’s drawdown announcement. “We can’t believe that in the short time of 10 years, the Taliban are forcing the superpower of the century to pull out its troops.”

To a holy army avenging a centuries-old wrong, 10 years is a short time. To a superpower interrupted in the comfort of its unipolar moment, the same 10 years has been an endless, fraught, and painful decade. Indeed there is today a sense among some Americans that the fighting of the last decade was, finally, unnecessary—that it somehow could have been avoided, and that our winding down now will bring an overdue peace. If that delusion prevails, we will have circled fully back to our pre-9/11 state of vulnerability.
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