The Failure of the "War on Terror"

I enjoy reading Richard Reeves, partly because he finds these odd surveys and polls that don't get much play in the news (including a recent one on historian's opinions of President Bush.) In this column he discusses a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and and Press (in collaboration with the Council on Foreign Affairs.) The poll indicates that by and large, Americans are gradually turning away from involvement in world affairs:

"Opinion leaders have become less supportive of the United States playing 'a first among equals' role among the world's leading nations. ... As the Iraq war has shaken the global outlook of American influentials, it has led to a revival of isolationist sentiment among the general public."

A striking 42 percent of poll respondents among the general public agreed with this statement: "The United States should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own."

That is about the highest number in recent decades for the "isolation" index used in national polling -- higher than it was after the war in Vietnam, higher than it was after the end of the Cold War.

The explanation for this profound change is actually pretty simple. As many Americans see an increasing cost in involvement in the affairs of other nations, they begin to believe that the cost is too high, and that we should be less involved overseas.

Which brings me to my larger point. In many respects, President Bush's global "war on terror" is a failure. It is not a failure because we should not be waging a campaign against terrorists and their supporters. It is a failure because of the means by which the Bush administration has chosen to carry that campaign out.

1. The Invasion of Iraq: Whatever you thought of the merits of the invasion of Iraq, it's impossible to argue that it was not in some sense a distraction from the campaign against Taliban and Al-Qaeda holdouts in Afghanistan. If you believe the insiders, the Bush administration had it's eyes on Iraq before the war in Afghanistan was even declared. One of the results of this inability to keep the eye on the ball was the failure to capture Bin Laden, the very architect of the 9/11 attacks. Presently, the Bush administration seems resigned to accepting a permanent low-level insurgency against the Taliban in Afghanistan. They have no choice, as we hardly have the ability to put an end to it.
2. The Occupancy of Iraq: Again, whatever you may have thought of the merits of invasion, it is obvious the occupation and democratization of Iraq has not gone according to plan. The occupation has not only been longer, more violent, and costlier then it could've been, but more importantly, then it needed to be. As a result the American public has begun to tire of the news of ceaseless casualties and suicide bombings, and calls for withdrawal that would have been unthinkable only a year ago now define the debate on Iraq. As a result we may end up leaving Iraq before the terrorists elements represented by Zarqawi and the foreign jihadists are contained.
3. The Detention Policies: Even if you consider that these policies may have garnered some actionable intelligence (the proof of which is impossible to obtain because the administration either won't release it, or it doesn't exist) there's no doubt that they have done nothing but damage America's credibility the world over. Hundreds have been detained in Guantanamo Bay with little or no rational standard for determining who belongs there and why (witness the release of many of these prisoners by and administration which claimed to be holding vicious terrorists and murderers.) As far as anyone knows, there's no long-term plan for what to do with these prisoners. They cannot be tried in American courts, they cannot be released to other nations without being imprisoned, tortured or killed, and they cannot realistically be kept forever in Guantanamo. Then there are the "ghost" detainees, being held in secret prisons in other countries, possibly against the law of those countries. Then there are the "extraordinary renditions", where prisoners in our custody are turned over to dubious "allies" for torture and interrogation. Then there are the known detentions of American citizens and the unkown detentions of legal and illegal immigrants, over which the executive claims absolute authority to detain even for life. As a result, the United States finds itself facing the indefinite imprisonment of "enemy" or "unlawful" combatents the world over, with no real plan for how to deal with them beyond extracting all possible useful and useless information.
4. The Intelligence Policies: As we've learned in the last several days, President Bush authorized the NSA to collect intelligence on American citizens without court approval of any kind. In addition, the Pentagon is maintaining a database on anti-war groups, and the FBI spends valuable time and energy infiltrating domestic anti-war and left-leaning groups and causes. If these acts have gained any actionable intelligence, we wouldn't know, because the Bush administration refuses to tell us. The father of all of these programs of course is the Patriot Act. Little did we know at the time that it was only the beginning of the various means in which the administration would seek to collect intelligence.

An important result of every single one of these policies, has been the negative backlash that has accompanied them around the world and at home. We have damaged our credibility with other nations, making is such that those nations are reluctant to cooperate with us in our "war on terror." Backlash here at home threatens to dismantle the very programs that Bush says are protecting us from terrorists. As a result we now have a nation that is questioning the wisdom of the occupation in Iraq, and if the poll above is to believed, questioning the very involvement of American in affairs overseas. Such a result can hardly help us encourage democracy overseas. But the most important result is that if these policies have aided us in the "war on terror", the Bush administration won't tell us. It's far more likely actually that they've hurt us. Instead of "draining the swamp" in Afghanistan, we drove the Taliban from power but have allowed them to continue to carry out their attacks on U.S. soldiers, Afghan civilians, and the Afghan government. Bin Laden hides supposedly somewhere in the Pashtun, almost certainly biding his time until another terrorist operation can be carried out. Iraq has been the scene of incredible carnage almost from the instant the insurgency began, and it has drawn terrorists, jihadists and suicide bombers to Iraq like flies to a honeypot. Our intelligence organs at home seem at least as concerned with the threat of domestic terrorism in the form of paint being thrown on fur coats, as with the threat of foreign terrorists sneaking in from overseas. Bush has promised that his goal is to keep America safe. But it is impossible to argue that any of the acts of his administration over the last four years has in any way made us safer. Considering the willingness of the Bush administration to trumpet the uncovering of even the most insignificant of terrorist plots (think the "Lackawanna Six" ) one must assume that there have simply been no terrorists caught plotting any signficant attacks in or on American since 9/11. Does that mean that they aren't there? We just don't know.

Simply put the Bush administration policies have been a failure. If we are any safer we don't know it, and all the evidence points to exactly the opposite conclusion.