The new conventional wisdom on 9/11: We have created a decade of fear. We overreacted to 9/11 — al-Qaeda turned out to be a paper tiger; there never was a second attack — thereby bankrupting the country, destroying our morale, and sending us into national decline.
The secretary of defense says that al-Qaeda is on the verge of strategic defeat. True. But why? Al-Qaeda did not spontaneously combust. Yet, in a decade, Osama bin Laden went from the emir of radical Islam — jihadi hero after whom babies were named all over the Muslim world — to pathetic old recluse, almost incommunicado, watching shades of himself on a cheap TV in a bare room.
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What turned the strong horse into the weak horse? Precisely the massive and unrelenting American War on Terror, a systematic worldwide campaign carried out with increasing sophistication, efficiency, and lethality — now so cheaply denigrated as an “overreaction.”
First came the Afghan campaign, once so universally supported that Democrats for years complained that President Bush was not investing enough blood and treasure there. Now, it is reduced to a talking point as one of the “two wars” that bankrupted us. Yet Afghanistan was utterly indispensable in defeating the jihadis then and now. We think of Pakistan as the terrorist sanctuary. We fail to see that Afghanistan is our sanctuary, the base from which we have freedom of action to strike Jihad Central in Pakistan and the border regions.
Iraq, too, was decisive, though not in the way we intended. We no more chose it to be the central campaign in the crushing of al-Qaeda than Eisenhower chose the Battle of the Bulge as the locus for the final destruction of the German war machine.
Al-Qaeda, uninvited, came out to fight us in Iraq, and it was not just defeated but humiliated. The local population — Arab, Muslim, Sunni, under the supposed heel of the invader — joined the infidel and rose up against the jihadi in its midst. It was a singular defeat from which al-Qaeda never recovered.
The other great achievement of the decade was the defensive anti-terror apparatus hastily constructed from scratch after 9/11 by President Bush, and then continued by President Obama. Continued why? Because it worked. It kept us safe — the warrantless wiretaps, the PATRIOT Act, extraordinary rendition, preventive detention, and, yes, Guantanamo.
Perhaps, says the new conventional wisdom, but these exertions have bankrupted the country and led to our current mood of despair and decline.
Rubbish. The total costs of “the two wars” is $1.3 trillion. That’s less than one eleventh of the national debt, less than one year of Obama deficit spending. During the golden Eisenhower 1950s of robust economic growth averaging 5 percent annually, defense spending was 11 percent of GDP and 60 percent of the federal budget. Today, defense spending is 5 percent of GDP and 20 percent of the budget. So much for imperial overstretch.
Yes, we are approaching bankruptcy. But this has as much to do with the War on Terror as do sunspots. Looming insolvency comes not from our shrinking defense budget but from the explosion of entitlements. They devour nearly half the federal budget.
As for the Great Recession and financial collapse, you can attribute it to misguided federal policy pushing homeownership through risky subprime lending. To Fannie and Freddie. To greedy bankers, unscrupulous lenders, naïve (and greedy) homebuyers. To computer-enabled derivatives so complicated and interwoven as to elude control. But to the War on Terror? Nonsense.
9/11 was our Pearl Harbor. This time, however, the enemy had no home address. No Tokyo. Which is why today’s war could not be wrapped up in a mere four years. It was unconventional war by an unconventional enemy embedded within a worldwide religious community. Yet in a decade, we largely disarmed and defeated it, and developed — albeit through trial, error, and tragic loss — the means to continue to pursue its remnants at rapidly decreasing cost. That is a historic achievement.
Our current difficulties and gloom are almost entirely economic in origin, the bitter fruit of misguided fiscal, regulatory, and monetary policies that had nothing to do with 9/11. America’s current demoralization is not a result of the War on Terror. On the contrary. The denigration of the War on Terror is the result of our current demoralization, of retroactively reading today’s malaise into the real — and successful — history of our 9/11 response.
Dr K, we UNDER-reacted to 9-11. Afghanistan was a good first step; pacifying Saudi Arabia, where we already had 25,000 troops and from whence all but one of the hijackers hailed, would have made a logical second. Had we closed down Saudi petroleum exports and thus shut off A-Q's funding, Syria and Iran would likely have followed Libya’s lead and given up their WMD programs.
As to the “current mood of despair and decline”, this is rightfully laid at the feet of the American Left, which after the summer of 2002 has relentlessly flogged America for its conduct in these conflicts and for its alleged crimes towards the Arab world, doing all it can to hobble our national interests. Shame on them.
With a decent sense of national pride and of the need to prevail, America and her allies could have cleaned out the hellholes of the Middle East in a year or two. We would be commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9-11 from a vastly safer and friendlier world.
Dr Robert, we couldn't "pacify Saudi Arabia" while leaving Iran and Iraq, the other two major Middle East oil suppliers, in hostile hands. At least the Saudi regime would sell Europe oil. Iraq made absolute sense in terms of strategy: centrally located, with whom we were still at war, and defeatable.
"On the contrary. The denigration of the War on Terror is the result of our current demoralization, of retroactively reading today’s malaise into the real — and successful — history of our 9/11 response."
Al Qaeda defeated? In name only.
The tentacles of the movement are still actively creating havoc in every country in the world.
If P.T. Barnum were alive today he would be saying, "There's a jihadi born every minute".
Rumsfeld knew what he was saying about the "long, hard, slog".
This war goes on in different venues with different names, but it's the same enemy. And it's adapting.
'Our current difficulties and gloom are almost entirely economic in origin, the bitter fruit of misguided fiscal, regulatory, and monetary policies that had nothing to do with 9/11.'
I concur. Especially monetary policies circa Nixon's floating of the exchange rate in 1973.
The Arab world has always been it's own cesspool, until they made it our national interest. Confusing the two, and a failure to recognize the difference, is the hapless conflation of political posteuring, economic illiteracy and moral turpitude.
Again, in your incomprehensible incivility, have missed my point. I agree with Dr Krauthammer’s analysis that whomever conflates our present economic doldrums with the war against terror is wrongheaded. And it is in our National interest to fight those who are determined to destroy us physically or culturally. That is, in your words, my ‘cesspool’.
You, sir, are a bounder.
I have to agree with Dr. Robert. We totally under-reacted to the attacks of 9/11/01. We as a nation to this day still refuse to identify our true enemy, which is the ideology of Islam. And I make no distinctions between moderate or radical Islam. As Thomas More reminds us the "moderates" ongoing silence in light of the "radicals" actions is tacit agreement. They all want the same thing, all Jews dead, and everyone else Muslim, otherwise they cannot have paradise. Islam is diametrically opposed to Western Civilization. Remember when Mohammed graduated from plain brigandage to jihadi he could have drawn from any of the pillars of Western civilization: Roman Law, Greek Philosophy (science) or Judeo-Christian philosophy. Yet Mohammed rejected them all, and not only that, set himself in absolute opposition to them. we ignore this at our continued peril.
Complete surveillance of a population by its government is also good.
Once an "enemy" is identified it must be fought in perpetuity.
The obvious fact that these measures require a disproportionate share of national treasure and are inherently unsustainable must be discounted as "Rubbish!"
Thanks Charles. You make a close examination of policy over the past ten years unnecessary.
Roboturk @ 11:01, when an "enemy" commits a murderous atrocity upon a nation's civilians in an attempt to bring down said nation's economy, the enemy (no quotes, mind you) must be utterly, fully, ruthlessly and totally crushed, destroyed and defeated.
We did this to Japan and Germany in 1945. They have been our allies ever since.
Because of left wing cowards with views like yours, we have not done so to the Arabs. So we continue to fight a diffident battle.
focusing on the Cost of the war alone is a Static exercise, we must think Dynamically.
Did defeating Al-Qaeda and their Sponsor regimes 'make us safer' by reducing their ability to commit more 9/11's? here and abroad against American Interest? If so, how much money did that save us?
9/11 by itself cost the US Economy $1 Trillion dollars.
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