<p> The War on Terror as History By Julian DelGaudio, Ph.D. September 13, 2006</p><p>Not for quotation without the permission of the author.</p><p>Introduction</p><p>1How will historians understand the War on Terror? What are the major issues that historians will debate in attempting to explain what happened and why? Basically, there are five issues to think about in studying The War on Terror. These five issues have dominated the debate since 9/11. I call them the semantic issue, the continuity issue, the deliberation issue, the issue of motives, reasons, and causes, and the value judgment issue.</p><p>1. The semantic issue. </p><p>1By what terms are we use to understand what happened? </p><p>1. The first phrase is “War on Terror” itself. </p><p>This was the description used by the President and his administration immediately after September 11, 2001. What does this phrase mean? Let’s deconstruct the phrase. Is it a war? Well, on its face it is unlike conventional war, which historically meant a military conflict between nation states. The group that carried out the attacks on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers in NYC was a non-state entity, made up of nineteen radical Islamic fundamentalists who hijacked four airplanes from east coast airports filled with jet fuel. This low-technology operation differed from any previous attack against the continental United States, with the exception of the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Often compared with Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was actually different because Hawaii was a US colony at the time. Interestingly, the 1993 attack did not generate a “War on Terror” on the part of the Clinton administration, although it did generate an effective response. The evening after the 9/11 attack, President Bush declared that his government would make no distinction between terrorists and the nations that harbored them. This linkage is what enabled the Bush administration to initiate conventional military operations, first against the Taliban government in Afghanistan beginning in October 2001, then against the government of Saddam Hussein beginning in March 2003. The administration also demanded and received a substantial increase in military spending from Congress. The administration never sought and did not receive a declaration of war against either of these opponents. Instead, the administration based its actions on its own declaration of a “War on Terror.” It received from Congress only vaguely worded resolutions authorizing the President to take steps to defend America. Later, members of the President’s staff added Global to the phrase, as in “Global War on Terror.” This represented an attempt at inflation of the threat. </p><p>On the other side of the phrase, there is the word terror. The dictionary tells us terror is a noun referring to extreme fear. To use extreme fear to intimidate people for political reasons constitutes a weapon of terror. Hence, the literal meaning of a “War on Terror,” would be a campaign against the use of extreme fear to intimate people for political reasons. The US Army manual’s official definition of terrorism describes it in similar terms as the calculated use of violence to attain goals. Defined in this way, many governments, including the United States, are practitioners of terrorism. But the US doesn’t intend to fight itself or change its own practice. So the “War on Terror” has the political virtue of defining terrorism as a weapon of those who oppose the US. Does it make more sense to call the campaign a War on Al Qaeda? Yes, that at least has the virtue of identifying the people or group responsible for the events of 9/11. But in labeling the conflict a “War on Terror,” the Bush administration has the luxury of operating from a much more expansive list of enemies. So far the war on terror has been primarily a war to topple unfriendly regimes, whether they sponsor terrorists or not. In making war against unfriendly regimes, attempting to impose new political forms on these countries, or threatening still other nations with such actions, the Global War on Terror might be given a different name: The American attempt to globally manage the Post-Cold War world.1 </p><p>If shifting terminology is the case, so are shifting analogies or perspectives on the WOT. In 2001, punish the perpetrators of 9/11 and their state sponsor. In 2003, liberate Iraq (a WWII analogy); In 2006, a Global Ideological struggle (A Cold War analogy). Is the WOT about stopping terrorists, liberating mankind, or winning an existential and ideological struggle for freedom?</p><p>2One thing that is true of historians, they often used terms interchangeably, as if they referred to the same thing. This imprecision will not doubt make for much confusion in the future.</p><p>2. The Continuity Issue. </p><p>This question is especially important in terms of the relationship between US foreign policy during the George W. Bush presidency compared to what had happened in the period before 2001. How were the conflicts with non-state entities to be periodized? </p><p>2a. Did the events of 2001 culminate earlier developments and trends or were they a break with earlier developments, trends and events? Did Bush’s post-2001 foreign and domestic policy with regards to terrorists have their origins and antecedents in processes located in the preceding period or was it something entirely new? b. American historians will probably divide into two schools of thought on the problem. 1 My thinking has been influenced by Noam Chomsky, “The New War on Terrorism,” Fact and Fiction, Nov. 2001. 1. One school of thought will deny any continuity with earlier history. They will stress the events of 9/11/2001 as an "aberration" which decisively changed the historic course of US foreign policy compared to previous assumptions and practice. This is the point of view of the current administration and it is reasonable, indeed predictable, that many historians will accept this point of view on face value. What this point of view maintains is that 9/11 represents an historic break with the past. President Bush recently sketched this position in a speech before the VFW when he called the War on Terror the “first war of the 21st century? He went on to explain:</p><p>To understand the struggle unfolding in the Middle East, we need to look at the recent history of the region. For a half century, America's primary goal in the Middle East was stability. This was understandable at the time. We were fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and it was important to support Middle Eastern governments that rejected Communism. Yet, over the decades, an undercurrent of danger was rising in the Middle East. Much of the region was mired in stagnation and despair. A generation of young people grew up with little hope to improve their lives, and many fell under the sway of radical extremism. The terrorist movement multiplied in strength, and resentment that had simmered for years boiled over into violence across the world. Extremists in Iran seized American hostages. Hezbollah terrorists murdered American troops at the Marine Barracks in Beirut and Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Terrorists set off a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. Al Qaeda blew up two U.S. embassies in East Africa and bombed the USS Cole. Then came the nightmare of September the 11th, 2001, when 19 hijackers killed nearly 3,000 men, women and children. In the space of a single morning, it became clear that the calm we saw in the Middle East was only a mirage. We realized that years of pursuing stability to promote peace have left us with neither. Instead, the lack of freedom in the Middle East made the region an incubator for terrorist movements. The status quo in the Middle East before September the 11th was dangerous and unacceptable, so we're pursuing a new strategy. (Transcript, President Bush’s Speech 88th Annual American Legion National Convention, August 31, 2006). </p><p>The key points of this position then are 1. First the US pursued “stability” in the Middle East. 2. But stability masked stagnation, resentment and a festering radical extremism, which produced violence. 3. Therefore, extreme radicalism has compelled Americans to rethink their relationship to this region and the world and to assume role of global leader in the war against terrorists. </p><p>Many pro-Administration academics have taken up this point of view, among them William Shawcross and Kenneth M. Pollack.2 What these defenders of the Bush administration share in common is an embrace of the doctrine of pre-emptive war: the argument that governments have the right to respond with pre-emptive attacks to any immediate threat in the new post-September 11 era. Thus, discontinuity justifies new and more reckless foreign policy conduct.</p><p>32. Another school of thought may want to go in a different direction. To these historians, the US war on terror was only the latest phase in a pattern of American imperialism. Their research program sets out to accomplish two things: </p><p>2 William Shawcross, Allies: The U.S., Britain, and Europe in the Aftermath of the Iraq War, Public Affairs, 2003. Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, Council on Foreign Relations Books, 2002. a. First, show how the “first war of the 21st century” is a continuation of a generally expansionist history with roots back to the colonial period, if not to Great Britain before. Americans had practiced imperialism for three hundred years before the War on Terror. The only difference was imperialism had involved the take over of territory that had been contiguous. Fact that territory was contiguous and taken in a piecemeal fashion had given to US expansion a kind of naturalness. Americans poached a bit here, a bit there, but the cumulative effect was continental. The incremental nature of process made it appear inevitable, organic. Or in language of the time, God's will or Manifest Destiny. By 1860 United States had added 18 states to the original 13, and in addition possessed the Utah Territory, the New Mexico Territory, the Oregon Territory, the Minnesota Territory, and the unorganized territory of the Louisiana Purchase. These acquisitions equaled a ten fold increase in the jurisdiction of the United States. Such expansionist efforts continued after 1865. In 1867, Secretary of State William Steward purchased Alaska from the Czar of Russia. A similar effort to buy San Domingo Island from Spain by President Grant failed in the 1870s. In the 1880s, however, the US government negotiated naval base rights to Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. In the decades before 1898, slowly but surely Americans were looking outward. In 1898, the first phase of an overseas American empire came into place with the acquisition of territories in both the Caribbean and the Pacific. A pattern of interventions followed from 1898 until 1914 in the Caribbean, effectively turning the region into an American lake. American expansionism did not end in 1914, but rather grew. While American political leaders agreed with President Woodrow Wilson that formal imperial controls should be dropped, succeeding American governments practiced informal empire, built mainly on economic domination and military intervention. This approach reached its zenith in the world order created after World War Two. With the on-set of the Cold War, the United States entered into formal military alliances with foreign governments, stationed major quantities of troops in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, and built military bases around the world. In tandem with the militarization of US foreign policy after 1941, the Americans created a covert operations capability that was used repeatedly to overthrow governments deemed unfriendly to US economic or security interests. By 2000, the sun never set on the American flag.</p><p>2. Second, as these developments relate to the Middle East, the historians who take this line of analysis are likely to point to earlier US interventions as evidence that the US did not pursue “stability” in the fifty years prior to 2001. Indeed, in the case of Iran in 1953, Iraq in 1963, and Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US very effectively pursued destabilization using covert operations. The short term benefits were evident when the government of Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrow and replaced by the Shah of Iran, when the CIA supported a 1963 coup that first put the secular Baath party in power, and when the Mujahedeen succeeded in driving the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Stability might characterize US relations with nations such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia during periods of the last fifty years, but the US did not change its relationships with these nations after 2001. They remained bulwarks of authoritarianism in the region unchallenged by the US war on terror. If we look more closely at the US-Iranian experience we find that stability doesn’t adequately characterize US conduct their either.</p><p>3. Iran: US foreign policy since 1979 toward the Middle East has shown confusion and inconsistency. But also a steady movement toward greater military presence in the region largely in response to the “loss of Iran.” 1979 is the critical year because that was the year the key US ally in the region was overthrow, the Shah of Iran. Iran under the Shah had been the principle ally of the United States in the region in the post-Vietnam era. Indeed, many of the same contractors who find their services well compensated in Iraq today (Flour Corporation, Halliburton), and who had been the contractors servicing the Government of South Vietnam in the era of the Vietnam War, were handsomely compensated by the Shah’s government when US foreign policy elevated the Shah to star status after 1973. Over the last six years of the Shah’s regime, American foreign military and economic aid poured in. But the resulting modernization produced such a profound backlash that the Shah was forced into exile and the Iranian Revolution succeeded in placing an Islamic fundamentalist regime in power, a regime bitterly hostile to the Shah’s creator and provider, the United States. </p><p>4. Post-Iranian Revolution. In the wake of the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. These events dramatized to American military planners that the US, in the words of Richard Clarke, “had little military presence in the Indian Ocean or Persian Gulf.” (Clarke, Against All Enemies, p. 38). Since 50% of the world’s oil resources reside in this region, American military planners set to work “to develop the military capability to project force into the region and to create bases into which those forces could be sent.” (Clarke, p. 38).</p><p>At the Pentagon a new military planning office was created called the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF). This organization later evolved into Central Command or CENTCOM. Negotiations were launched with Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Although none of these nations was willing to approve US military bases in their countries, they did agree secretly to improve their air bases to be able to accommodate US aircraft in a crisis, and to pre-position war materials in their countries. The Saudi’s especially agreed to create overbuilt/overstocked facilities, an agreement that led to the first US civilian contractors on sacred lands. Under President Reagan, there was the failed attempt to counter Iranian influence over Hezbollah in Lebanon following the Israeli invasion of that country in 1982. From Great Britain, the US acquired the Island of Diego Garcia, and quickly built an airstrip capable of landing B-52s. It was also during this period that the US government moved toward “strategic cooperation” with Israel. Strategic cooperation meant cooperative military training and material pre-positioning short of a formal military alliance. Israel was an attractive ally because it was seen as a surrogate weight to Iran in Lebanon. Reagan had briefly flirted with military intervention in Lebanon, but quickly withdrew after Hezbollah agents killed 241 marines in a truck bombing in Beirut. The deepening strategic relationship came at a price: it inflamed some Arabs and served as a recruiting device for Islamic fundamentalists hostile to the state of Israel. Reagan and George Herman Walker Bush had more success using the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein against the Iranians from 1982 until 1990. They did this by removing Iraq from the State Department’s list of terrorist countries, sending Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1983 with a promise to provide Iraq with intelligence on Iranian troop movements, and extending Iraq full diplomatic relations in 1984. These efforts and others enabled the US to check prevent the Iranians from defeating Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War of 1982-1989. On the other hand, President Reagan also said he would never negotiate with terrorists, but then went right ahead and did so in what came to be called the Iran-Contra Scandal. Reagan’s one decisive action against terrorism was the bombing of Libya in 1986. Thus, President Reagan’s anti-terrorist record was hardly consistent or decisive. </p><p>5. Afghanistan Covert Operation. In 1982, Reagan authorized the formation and arming of a guerilla army as part of a classic Cold War operation against the USSR following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up a failing secular Marxist government there. The “proxy war,” as CIA planners called it, was designed to militarily and financially drain and provoke a crisis in the USSR. The Reagan administration worked with the Saudi and Pakistan governments and other Arab states in a joint operation. The American government was spending $600M a year at its peak in 1987. Stringer missiles, provided by the Pentagon, were the key to the success of the Mujahedeen in driving out the Soviets and toppling its client state. But the operation also came with a grave cost. Though the US spent billions there, it had few direct ties with the Afghanis. Arab volunteers were recruited by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, under the management of an Islamic radical named Osama Bin Laden, who used his position to recruit Islamic Fundamentalists into a new non-state entity calling itself Al Qaeda. The withdrawal of the USSR led to immediate US disengagement, leaving Afghanistan to sink into a civil war, which eventually produced an Islamic Fundamentalist Taliban government. The US also cut its ties with Pakistan over its nuclear weapons program. </p><p>What the Iranian Revolution and the Afghan Covert Operation demonstrated to the Islamic Fundamentalist section of the Arab world was that both the US and the USSR could be defeated. That emboldened them. What this analysis should make clear is that it wasn’t the pursuit of “Stability” in the Middle East that produced 9/11. It was rather the clumsy efforts of American policy makers to deal with the anger directed toward them as a result of the Iranian Revolution, and the unintended consequences of their Cold War related covert operation in the Afghan theater.</p><p>6. The Gulf War of 1991. Having done so much to build up Iraq during the Iran-Iraq conflict, Washington was officially surprised when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, claiming to reunite an historic province to its ancient lands. The Bush I administration read the invasion as a direct threat to Saudi Arabia, and sent Dick Cheney, the Secretary of Defense, on a mission to convince the House of Saud that it should allow US troops into their kingdom to deter an attack. The royal family agreed on the condition that US forces would leave as soon as the threat ended or whenever ordered to do so by the king. George H. W. Bush (Bush I) orchestrated a brilliant diplomacy against the Iraqis. Not only did Bush I create a genuine global coalition of over 100 nations, he also operated within the constitution by getting a Congressional authorization, and a UN resolution calling for the liberation of Kuwait. Likewise, Bush I’s generals needed only 100 hours to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait and decimate their retreating forces as they scrambled across the western Iraq desert. Bush I also respected his UN mandate. When it was evident US forces could easily advance toward Baghdad and deal Saddam’s Republican Guard a crushing blow, thus perhaps toppling Hussein’s government, Bush I ordered a halt to the advance. It wasn’t just that Bush I abided international law and opinion. He recognized an American occupation of an Arab country would alienate Arab allies, and in all likelihood produce a Shiite majority who would create an Islamic state. Bush I, in other words, had very good reasons for embracing the status quo ante bellum. With Hussein still in power, there remained the dilemma associated with his government’s ambitions in the area of weapons of mass destruction. Yet, in failing to topple Hussein, Bush I created the necessity of keeping US military forces in Saudi Arabia, “for protection.” In fact, the US negotiated agreements to keep US forces with five other countries in the region as well: Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE. Thus, Bush I had achieved a long-term goal of the US military. But it was precisely this presence that angered Islamic Fundamentalists such as Osama Bin Laden. His protests against the US presence in the Holy Land led to his flight to Sudan in 1991. If the United States had only sought “stability” in the region, perhaps Bin Laden would not have been turned into an enemy. It was that the search for stability had issued in a drive for a permanent military presence by the US in the region that produced an unexpected and undesirable consequence. </p><p>Clinton and the War on Terror</p><p>7. Terrorism and the Clinton Administration. Within two years the FBI would uncover a terrorist network operating in the United States that would assassinate the right wing leader of the Jewish Defense League, Rabbi Meir Kahane, and make the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. The February 1993 bombing of the WTC occurred 38 days after a new Democratic President took office. The FBI investigation revealed the Kahane assassin to be El Sayyid Nosair, a veteran of the Afghan mujahedeen, and linked to Bin Laden by way of the Afghan Services Bureau, which Bin Laden had set up. Though they did not know it at the time, the Clinton administration had stumbled on to an International network of terrorists. Events in Somalia in late 1993 underscored the challenge and raised a question the Clinton administration would struggle for three years to answer: who was training the terrorists and the private militias that made their appearance at this time?3</p><p>3 Ironically, no one blamed the Administration of George H. W. Bush for failing to do more to stop the attack on the WTC, which had to have been planned for months in advance, as would be the case eight years later when 9/11/01 occurred and the Republican attack machine immediately blamed President Clinton. On this point see the highly amusing, but deadly accurate account by Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, Dutton, 2003, pp. 108-109. To his unheralded credit, Clinton immediately moved to make counter-terrorism a priority. The post- Cold War world required a new counter-terrorism policy. Clinton put Richard Clarke in charge of the effort. Within two years Clarke had drafted and coordinated Presidential Decision Directive-39, “US Policy on Counter-terrorism.” The PDD outlined four positions: no concessions, offensive and defensive actions to reduce terrorist capabilities, coordination of law enforcement, intelligence, and military and diplomatic tools, and an effort to prevent Weapons of Mass Destruction acquisition or capability from being transferred from states to non-state entities. This last item showed that the administration was still looking for state sponsors of terrorism. Throughout the 1990s that sponsor was Iran. They hadn’t yet grasped that it was the new networks that were the real danger.</p><p>Nevertheless, Clinton’s government did capture, try, convict, and imprison those responsible. Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah. Clinton tripled FBI counter-terrorism funding, and twice strengthened crime bills with more stringent antiterrorism legislation. His administration also conducted the first simulations involving local, state, and federal officials efforts to coordinate in the case of a terrorist attack. A stockpile of drugs and vaccines was also put in place.</p><p>Clinton’s efforts to get government and congressional buy in on combating terror weren’t entirely successful. His proposed doubling of counter-terrorism funding from $5.7B to 11.1B was turned down by Congress in 1995. His executive order to block terrorist transfers of funds was blocked by the Treasury, the FBI, and the Republican Congress that same year. It wasn’t until 1996 that the CIA established a station dedicated to investigating a Bin Laden network. Once in place it uncovered sleeper cells in over 50 countries and it learned the network’s name: Al Qaeda, a construction term for the foundation or base of a building for the making of a global theocracy, the Great Caliphate. This information enabled his government to thwart some twenty planned attacks in the US and elsewhere.</p><p>Richard Clarke’s account of the emergence of Al Qaeda on the radar of the Clinton administration shows an actual state of war had existed between the Islamic fundamentalist group and the US since the summer of 1998. In the summer of 1996, Bin Laden sent a public letter to Saudi King Fahd denouncing US troops in Saudi Arabia. From that point, it was only a matter of time before Al Qaeda declared war on the US and its Arab allies. They issued their declaration in February 1998. In August, the embassies of Tanzania and Kenya were bombed, killing 257 and wounding five thousand, including the deaths of 12 Americans. The attack on the Cole in Yemen followed in October 2000, killing 17 sailors. </p><p>This “state of war” produced three counter-actions by the Clinton administration, the first phase of what is now called the “war on terror.” Clinton ordered attacks on Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan using cruise missiles. He approved a program to ferret out and destroy Al Qaeda’s system of finance. And Clinton ordered Bin Laden’s assassination. The Clinton administration also moved to address the need for a national policy on terrorism, increase anti- terrorism funding, and initiated a Homeland Protection program. By December 2000, at Clinton’s direction, Clarke had formulated a comprehensive plan to break-up Al Qaeda cells and arrest their personnel. Clarke would present this plan to the new administration in January 2001. Thus, in eight years, the Clinton Presidency undertook the most systematic anti-terrorist of the pre-9/11 presidents.4</p><p>Ironically, in 2001 the Bush administration thought Clinton’s administration was obsessed with Al Qaeda and “rather odd.” (Clarke, p. 225). Thus, Bush II initially reversed direction. The National Security Adviser, Condi Rice, had Clarke’s Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG) demoted from briefings to the NSC principals, the Secretary of Defense, State, CIA Director, to their deputies. Rice, Clarke tells us, was focused on National Missile Defense, the Kyoto Treaty and Iraq. Though Clarke worked with George Tennent to get a NS Presidential Decision to approve for a war on Al Qaeda, Rice frustrated the effort. Finally, Clarke was able to brief the principals at a meeting on September 4, 2001, seven months after his request. </p><p>Bush II and the War on Terror</p><p>8. Post 9/11 Policy of the Bush Administration. Bush’s responses to 9/11/01 actually finally re- aligned his administration’s policies on terrorism with the Clinton policy. Al Qaeda officially became the central target of the US government. </p><p>What should have How Not to Fight the War On Terror been done Right War Wrong War: The Wrong War: Wrong War: Iraq War on Freedom Afghanistan Strengthen Patriot Act 2001; US CIA agents to US invaded Iraq in March 2003. Homeland Security NSA Domestic Afghanistan on Wiretapping 2001; September 27, 2001. Enemy Special Forces Combatants, 2002. November 2001. UN resolution directed NATO to intervene.</p><p>4 National Review writer Byron York wrote after 9/11 that Clinton’s “record is a richly detailed manual on how not to combat terrorism.” To which Al Franken has retorted, if you remove one word “not,” you have an accurate statement. Launch a Global Patriot Act flaws US withdrew forces Iraq was not a threat. Not an ally Effort to Counter “War on before nation was of Islamic fundamentalists; No Al Qaeda Ideology Librarians.” secure. NATO WMD. Iraq is an oil rich Arab remains. state. Bush lost the ideological Target countries war with this invasion. producing Islamic fundamentalists: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and Iran. Combat the roots NSA Domestic 1. Bush attacked the Administration miscalculated of terrorism in key Wiretapping right enemy but did 1. The ease of transformation countries violates law. so too slowly and of Iraq. 150K troops to inadequately, as a liberate; 30K troops for result Taliban and Al occupation. Qaeda leaders 2. Resistance movement escaped. underestimated. Adminstration relied 3. Purged Baathists. on the Northern 4. Coalition of the Willing Alliance until inadequate. December 2001, 5. Subverted American image failed to seal border. in Middle East. 6. Fostered “terrorism.” Gave 2. Economic aid to Al Qaeda the propaganda rebuild Afghanistan fuel it needed. too little, too late. 7. Strengthened Iranian Islamic Fundamentalism in region. Hence, a strategic error of the first magnitude. Enemy Combatants violates domestic and international law. Padilla case.</p><p>3. The Deliberation issue. 11a. Historians will debate how self-consciously the War on Terror was fought. Were the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran?) the result of calculated decisions or were they impulsive? Had the Bush administration wanted to transform the Middle East or had this role been thrust upon it? </p><p>11b. To argue that it was self-conscious was to claim it had been planned and directed by people with a vision of an American dominance of the Middle East. Was this an elite vision or had it been something most Americans shared. In other words was the Middle Eastern empire the creation of a conspiracy of men in positions of power or was it the expression of an Imperial minded democracy--a people's imperialism. In any event, somebody wanted it and saw to it that it happened. </p><p>The evidence for a planned attack on Iraq is very good. Richard Clarke’s account of the events following 9/11 tells us on September 12, 2001, President Bush took Clarke aside and told him, “See if Saddam [Hussein] did this. See if he’s linked in any way.”5 The next day Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfovitz pressed for attacks on Iraq because Rumsfeld believed there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan, and Wolfowitz predicted Afghanistan would turn into a quagmire. Both wanted to overthrow Hussein’s regime, which they viewed as a cakewalk, but had to be reminded that an overthrow would require a large invasion force. Clarke had been combating Wolfovitz’s claims to Iraq’s responsibility for terrorism since the administration had taken over in January. A division between the Department of State and Pentagon had produced a proposed phrased strategy of increasing pressure and aid to an exile opposition, but not direct action to change the Iraq regime. 9/11 didn’t immediately change this situation. At a meeting at Camp David on September 15, 2001, Bush and his cabinet voted to attack Afghanistan only, because to attack Iraq would make the US look like the bad guy and alienate US allies.</p><p>It was only the crushing initial blow the US delivered to Afghanistan that changed the situation. President Bush ordered planning for an invasion of Iraq in late November 2001, according the Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, whose unprecedented access allowed him to look at the decision-making process within the administration from November 2001 until March 2003. Bush directed Rumsfeld to keep secret new war planning toward Iraq. The President sought to avoid a domestic and international uproar over this plan. Bush told Woodward, “it would look like I was anxious to go to war. And I am not anxious to go to war. War was my absolute last option.” 6 Yet, Bush continued to hide his thinking from the American people. In his famous “Axis of Evil” State of the Union address of January 2002, he later explained to Woodward, North Korea and Iran were added to the Axis to provide cover for the Iraq war planning. In May of that same year, during his visit to Europe, Bush three times stated categorically, “I have no war plans on my desk.” Thus, Bush set in motion a process that hid a process of war planning for a pre-emptive war against Iraq. Bush publicly justified a doctrine of pre-emptive war in a speech to the U.S. Military Academy on June 1, 2002. </p><p>5 Clarke, Against All Enemies, p. 32. 6 Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 3. Bush’s embrace of unilateral preventive war was a deliberate, but a dangerous thing. This doctrine, more than anything else, is what sets Bush’s conduct of foreign policy apart from that of his predecessors. In effect, it set the United States up as the world judge, jury and executioner and other countries predictably distrusted him because of his pretensions. The rejection of containment and deterrence as the basis of US foreign policy represented a fatal turn in American foreign policy. Previous post-WW II presidents had explicitly considered this strategy. President Truman had a Secretary of the Navy named Francis Mathews who gave a speech appearing to call for preventive war against the Soviet Union. Truman called him in at once and said that he did not want to hear about preventive war. President Eisenhower was asked in a press conference by Scott Reston of the New York Times what he thought a preventive war and he said he would not listen to anyone advocating preventive war. President Kennedy did not launch a preventive war. He believed with President Truman and Eisenhower that preventive wars were illegal. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy refused the opportunity to wage a preventive war and the U.S. was far more threatened by the missiles in Cuba than they were by alleged WMDs in Iraq. Recently, a meeting of many of the former officials involved in the Cuba Missile Crisis was held in Havana. At a news conference at its end, the principals were asked to compare Kennedy and company with Bush. Wayne Smith, the top U.S. diplmat in Havana in the late 1970s said, “Today’s crisis is not being handled in the same careful, prudent way.”7 The fact that Bush embraced the pre-emptive war doctrine, points toward another possible interpretation of Bush’s conduct. Bush acted impulsively.</p><p>12c. To argue that Bush acted impulsively was to claim the war had been less the result of planning, and more the result of bungling and emotionalism. It was neither logical nor inevitable. Others may have wanted it, but it happened because of a flaw in the quality of leadership of the man in the White House. Bush is routinely represented as a decisive leader. But he is also known as a leader of little intellectual curiosity and depth. In other words, the President is decisive, but dumb, and the quality of his decisions reflects this. In the case of Iraq, the President seemed incapable of entertaining any restraints on his conduct, once 9/11 happened. Woodward’s account of why Bush embraced this doctrine points to the impact of 9/11. 9/11 convinced the president that it was his sacred duty to protect the American people. It also changed his thinking on Saddam Hussein, who became more threatening, a greater madman (because he was alleged to be willing to give WMD to terrorists), a user of WMDs, and an aggressor toward Kuwait. In short, Hussein became someone toward whom previous containment policy could not successfully work. Bush also told Woodward that he targeted Iraq because, “he was looking for other places where we could show that the war on terror was global.”8 None of these reasons are particularly compelling. Kuwait had happened twelve years </p><p>7 My thinking on this point has benefited from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., War and the American Presidency, 2004. For Smith’s quote see, Reuters, “Former Officials Fault Bush on Handling of Iraq Events,” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2002, p. A 10. 8 Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 26. earlier, as had Saddam’s use of chemical and biological weapons. The case of WMD proved to be utterly false even before the invasion. </p><p>Observers of those around the President have also commented on the role of emotionalism in other senior members of the administration. Secretary of State Powell described to Bob Woodward the state of mind of Vice President Cheney following an NSC meeting on September 6, 2002:</p><p>Powell detected a kind of fever in Cheney. He was not the steady, unemotional rock that he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the run-up to the Gulf War. The Vice President was beyond hell-bent for action against Saddam. It was as if nothing else existed.9</p><p>This evidence implies a failure on the part of the two senior leaders of the U.S. government to give proper weight to history, experience, and rational thought, and to think through a complex problem with a cool, deliberate head.</p><p>134. The Issue of Motives, Reasons and Causes </p><p>This area of analysis looks at institutional or structural factors shaping the choices of decision-making, the motives of those at the levers of power, and the formal reasons they give for the actions they take. Why did US foreign policy in the Middle East undergo a reorientation? What were the major forces bringing it about? What motives did President Bush and his cabinet have in taking the country in the direction they steered? What ideological pronouncements did they issue? How did they justify their actions?</p><p>13a. Looking at institutional or structural factors, economic factors occupied a major place in the analysis of some historians. </p><p>131. Noam Chomsky is certain you couldn't begin to understand modern American foreign policy without appreciating the role of markets, investments, and raw materials as the cause behind the Americans drive to be the global manager. Chomsky likes to quote George Kennan, a State Department Director of Planning after WWII. Kennan noted that the US consumes 40% of the world’s resources, but represents only 6% of its population. That imbalance required that the US be prepared to force other peoples to give us access to our god-given resources. The Middle East does contain a strategy resource, oil. While Afghanistan is not oil rich, Iraq and Iran are major oil producers. A key structural feature of US foreign policy involves controlling access to Middle Eastern oil according to critics of US foreign policy.</p><p>2. Another variant on this theme is the role of the military-industrial-prison-complex, which has benefited from “war profiteering” as a result of the War on Terror. Critics such as Robert Greenwald 9 Ibid., p. 175. in his documentary, “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers,” have documented that Flour Corporation, Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR, Blackwater (mercenary services), Titan, and CACI (prison services) have benefited financially from the invasion. In the case of the first two, Greenwald shows how these contractors were around during the Vietnam War as well. These contractors shifted their base of operations to the government of the Shah of Iran during the 1970s.10 The fact that the Vice President was a corporate official working for Halliburton before the 2000 election, and retains investments (in trust) with that company, and was the most vociferous proponent of the invasion of Iraq, is bound to raise suspicions of his motives. Cheney clearly played a key role in convincing the President to invade Iraq, as is evident by an episode Woodward relates where it was Cheney who arranged for the President to meet a group of Iraqi exiles who told the clearly impressed President toppling Hussein would make him the liberator of the Iraqi people and win their unimaginable thanks.</p><p>3. Still another variant on the institutional nature of US foreign policy would point to the executive branch’s ability to loose itself from institutional checks and balances in order to pursue an imperial agenda. Many examples abound, but the most prosaic connected to the War on Terror was the secret way in which, in preparation for the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon spent $700 million dollars on infrastructure enlargements in Kuwait at Al Jaber and Ali Al Salem Air Bases without seeking Congressional approval or notification. When Woodward asked Bush about this, he replied tersely, “Right, Yup.”11</p><p>14 14b. A second set of causes were related to ideological factors. </p><p>1. In this interpretation, the late 20century witnessed the rise of certain ideas compelling Americans to embrace colonial ventures. Foremost among these was the rise of Conservative Christianity and its alliance with the State of Israel.</p><p>5. The Issue of Value Judgments </p><p>Focus on two issues: Intentions and consequences. </p><p>14a. Analysis of intentions. </p><p>141. The best of intentions. Apologists for empire. </p><p>Bush’s formal statements explaining the intentions behind US foreign policy are well documented. His State of the Union address for 2002 offers a clear statement of these ideological commitments:</p><p>10 Robert Greenwald, Director, “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers,” 1 hr. 3 mins. Brave New Films, 2006. 11 Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 137. I believe the U.S. is the beacon for freedom in the world. And I believe we have a responsibility to promote freedom that is as solemn as the responsibility is to protecting the American people, because the two go hand-in-hand. Now, it is very important for you to understand that about my presidency.</p><p>After giving this speech, Bush told Woodward:</p><p>Freedom is God’s gift to everybody in the world. I believe that. As a matter of fact, I was the person that wrote the line, or said it . . . And I believe we have a duty to free people. I would hope we wouldn’t have to do it militarily, but we have a duty.12</p><p>2. Critics of intentions argument: two types: a. The road to hell is paved with good intentions argument. Henry Adams’ comment about Robert E. Lee is relevant here: “Most of the harm in the world is done by good men.” This perspective points to the role of hubris in US foreign policy. “Imperial Hubris represents a way of thinking American elites acquired after . . . WW II. It is a process of interpreting the world so it makes sense to us, a process yielding a world in which few events seem alien because we Americanize their components.” After 9/11 Bush reduced bin Laden to a criminal, a gangster, whose actions could not possibly be a response to US actions in the Muslim world. Bin Laden simply “hated us for our freedoms.” Such leaders could not see how their “benign intent blocks a re-evaluation of US foreign policy. Instead, leaders redouble efforts to explain the intent of the foreign policies. This erroneously defines situation as a “communications problem,” typically requiring more public relations spin.13 b. Critics who deny the administration’s good intentions and instead make a case for presidential deception, dishonesty, and chicanery. Probably the foremost critics in this camp are John Dean and Robert Scheer. </p><p>153. Analysis of consequences. </p><p>It is not enough to look at intentions. It is also important to evaluate policies by their consequences. What could be more American than to ask about the effects of a certain line of conduct? After all, isn’t that what American pragmatism amounts to? When we ask what the effects or consequences were of the Bush war on terror, a number of issues are palpable.</p><p>151. Destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq.</p><p>12 Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 88, 89.</p><p>13 See Anonymous (Michael Scheuer), Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, 2004. 2. War on Freedom at home. 3. Decline of American influence abroad. 4. Raid on the treasury. 16 5. Has it increased or decreased US security? A chorus of Bush’s critics have claimed that the War on Terror, as Bush has fought it, is “unfocused,” and a “detour” from the real fight with Al Qaeda.</p><p>Conclusion</p><p>Study of US foreign policy since 1979 show the War on Terror represents the way US foreign policy makers have constructed an image of those who oppose US presence in the Middle East, whether non- state and state entities. It represents both continuity and change in American policies toward that region, but this policy cannot be adequately described as a change from “stability” to democratic transformation. The war did not begin in 2001, and the Bush administration had to come around to embrace earlier policies it had initially ignored. While there were those in the administration who wanted a “war on terror,” the war they got was the result of an impulsive decision by the President, brought on by an emotional reaction to 9/11. What is newly minted is the doctrine of pre-emptive war. 9/11 clearly served as a green light for that dangerous foreign policy innovation. There is a tension in the motives, reasons and causes behind the war. Democratic transformation does not adequately represent the formal reason for US policy in the region. We may never know the motives or causes for the war. But we do know that the war on terror has been an effective domestic political tool for the Republican Party and for a destructive thrust into two Middle Eastern countries, as great cost to those societies and to civil liberties at home. </p>