A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

by Glenn Greenwald

  The more military and intelligence resources we are forced to pour into waging wars against countries that have not attacked us—Iraq has consumed the vast bulk of American military force, intelligence resources, and political attention, to say nothing of its financial drain—the weaker we become, the less able we are to track and combat Al Qaeda and the other terrorist groups that actually seek to harm us. Turning Iraq into a chaotic caldron of anarchy and violence filled with seething anger toward the United States is exactly the environment in which Al Qaeda thrives.

  Other than the very rare circumstance where there is a state that is actively aiding a terrorist group devoted to attacks on the U.S.—as the Taliban government in Afghanistan was aiding Al Qaeda—conventional war-making as a tool to combat terrorism is entirely counterproductive. War cannot possibly have any effect on anti-American Islamic fanaticism other than to inflame, increase, and strengthen it.

  And, indeed, by the beginning of January 2007, it became almost universally recognized that the threat posed by the terrorists was not a justification for invading Iraq; rather, that threat was an argument against doing so. In January 2007, Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff reported:

  Intel director John Negroponte gave Congress a sobering assessment last week of the continued threats from groups like Al Qaeda and Hizbullah. But even gloomier comments came from Henry Crumpton, the outgoing State Department terror coordinator. An ex-CIA operative, Crumpton told Newsweek that a worldwide surge in Islamic radicalism has worsened recently, increasing the number of potential terrorists and setting back U.S. efforts in the terror war. “Certainly, we haven’t made any progress,” said Crumpton. “In fact, we’ve lost ground.” He cites Iraq as a factor; the war has fueled resentment against the United States.

  That assessment merely confirmed a prior, definitive report from the Bush administration, described by the New York Times in September 2006:

  A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

  The classified National Intelligence Estimate [NIE] attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in

  Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

  The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the

  Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government [emphasis added]. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

  The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

  Numerous sources had told the Times about the contents of the NIE, which “are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence.” Thus, these conclusions emanated from the Bush administration, and are the consensus of the same intelligence community that the administration had spent the last several years purging of all dissidents.

  FUELING THE ENGINE OF TERRORISM

  The most effective weapon wielded by George Bush for bludgeoning any possibility of rational debate has been the all-purpose, all-justifying label terrorist. Despite the ongoing existence of a serious terrorist threat, that term has been so crassly and transparently manipulated for political purposes by the president and his supporters that it has become virtually impoverished of real meaning.

  Throughout the 2004 presidential election, the Bush campaign endlessly wielded this rhetorical tactic by defining the Iraqi insurgents not as Iraqis resisting foreign occupation but as “terrorists.” With that premise in place, those who favored the war in Iraq by definition favored fighting the terrorists, while those who opposed the war by definition wanted to “surrender” to the terrorists—and as a result, real debate over the war, as intended, became impossible. After all, terrorists are the people who flew those planes into our buildings. Who could oppose waging war on them—the terrorists?

  But once safely re-elected, the president in 2005 gave one of the types of speeches he delivers periodically that seems designed to pass along to Americans the tutorial he received about what is going on in Iraq. In doing so, he clearly acknowledged that the vast, vast majority of people whom we are fighting in Iraq are not terrorists at all, but merely Sunni “rejectionists” who favor a system of government that preserves long-standing Sunni privileges:

  A clear strategy begins with a clear understanding of the enemy we face. The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists. The rejectionists are by far the largest group. These are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, who miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein—and they reject an Iraq in which they are no longer the dominant group.

  The president is right, of course, that “a clear strategy begins with a clear understanding of the enemy we face.” That is precisely why the constant invocation of “fighting terrorists” as a justification for invading Iraq was such a deceitful rhetorical tool, and it is why America was led so astray. Astonishingly, even into 2007, war supporters continue to manipulate the terrorist threat in brazenly dishonest ways in order to justify their conduct. Joe Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press after the president’s January 2007 “surge” speech, looked into the cameras, and told Americans:

  I think the consequences for the Middle East, which has been so important to our international stability over the years, and to the American people, who have been attacked on 9/11 by the same enemy that we’re fighting in Iraq today, supported by a rising Islamist radical super-powered government in Iran, the consequences for us, for—I want to be personal—for my children and grandchildren, I fear will be disastrous. That’s why I want to do everything I can to win in Iraq [emphasis added].

  By January 2007, it was unfathomable to hear anyone telling Americans that in Iraq we were fighting “the same enemy” who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. As the president himself acknowledged two years earlier, the anti-U.S. insurgency is composed predominantly of Iraqis who want to eject the United States from their country. And the civil war that has been raging in Iraq has been a sectarian conflict between Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis. Yet Senator Lieberman knows that this sort of deceitful rhetoric has successfully precluded rational debate about our country’s most pressing issues, and he thus continues to cling to the hope that Manichean invocations of the terrorists will obscure the catastrophe that he and his Bush-supporting comrades have unleashed.

  But there is, at long last, a growing recognition that waging more wars does not make us stronger or more secure. It does exactly the opposite. Those who want to pursue our failed policy in Iraq indefinitely or who want to attack more countries are not people who are “strong on security.” They are gradually, though inexorably, destroying our security through a mindless militarism that becomes more reckless and crazed the more it fails. And this bloodthirsty militarism becomes more desperate as the sense of weakness and humiliation felt by its proponents—including those in the White House—intensifies.

  If George Will can announce that John Kerry was right about how best to deal with terrorism and that the Bush approach does nothing but exacerbate it, then perhaps we can soon reach the point where national journalists will understand that there is nothing “strong” or “serious” about clamoring for more and more wars. Nor is there anything “weak” about opposing warmongering and instead advocating more substantive, rational, and responsible methods
for combating terrorism.

  Anyone rational can see that our invasion of Iraq did not make us more secure. Nor will attacking Syria and/or Iran or fueling more proxy wars in the Middle East make us any safer. Quite plainly, those measures have had, and will continue to have, the opposite effect. Meanwhile, we neglect the genuinely effective methods for protecting against terrorism because those methods are boring and unappealing and unexciting to the increasingly crazed neoconservative warriors looking for militaristic glory and slaughter for its own sake. Untold benefits will accrue if journalists can finally understand that whatever adjectives accurately describe such individuals, “strong” is not one of them.

  The Manichean cartoons that overrode virtually all substantive and responsible debate during the Bush presidency obscured a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the president’s approach to the world. Since the 9/11 attacks, the president has insisted upon two fundamentally inconsistent propositions, namely, that (a) we are called upon to spread democracy, because doing so is morally right, consistent with God’s will, and an effective tool for eradicating terrorism, and (b) the imperative of the first proposition is so overwhelming that we pursue it regardless of international objections or world opinion.

  Let us stipulate that this second principle is valid—i.e., that if a country is forced to choose between taking measures to protect its citizens or being popular in the world, its leaders have the obligation to choose the former over the latter. If there is but one way that a country can defend itself from external threats, negative world opinion engendered by such a course is an insufficient reason to forgo it. That is true not only for the United States, of course, but for all countries. A government’s first obligation is to protect its citizens from genuine dangers posed by others, not to protect its international reputation. At a very high level of generality, that is all fair enough.

  But in the specific case of the moralistic imperatives underlying the Bush worldview of national security, the twin pillars of that approach are plainly, and quite dangerously, in conflict. To spread democracy around the world, while at the same time inflaming anti-Americanism, is the very model of self-defeating behavior.

  In December 2006, Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez was overwhelmingly re-elected. Opposition to the United States played a significant role in his successful campaign. According to the Associated Press account of Chávez’s victory, Chávez repeatedly promised “a more radical version of socialism and [to] forge a wider front against the United States in Latin America.” Chávez is one of the most anti-American leaders on the planet. He made world headlines months earlier when, during a speech before the United Nations and in violation of all diplomatic decorum, he referred to President Bush as Satan while pantomiming that he was waving away the smell of sulfur left by Bush, who had addressed the General Assembly from the same podium the day before. Chávez’s flamboyant, indecorous attack on the U.S. president obviously did not impede his electoral prospects. To the contrary, his resolute anti-American rhetoric almost certainly bolstered his popularity among his citizens.

  Over the last two years, anti-American factions, including those whom the president has identified as “terrorist groups,” have become increasingly popular in their countries—even ascending to power as a result of victories in the precise democratic elections which the Bush administration worked to bring about. The Palestinians democratically elected Hamas leaders. The Lebanese have elected Hezbollah to play a major role in their parliamentary government. The Iranian-allied militias in Iraq are substantially represented in the democratically elected Iraqi government, and the so-called Iranian Hitler, the stridently anti-American president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was himself democratically elected.

  If the leaders whom we are supposed to hate so much—including even those we are told are the terrorists—continue to be elected democratically, that fact would seem to negate the ostensible premise of the Bush foreign policy—namely, that America-loving allies will magically spring up all over the democratic world and help us fight terrorism.

  More to the point, it is infinitely more likely that anti-American leaders will continue to be democratically elected if the U.S. persists in conduct seemingly designed to make much of the world resentful and suspicious of us. If we operate on the premise, as we have during the Bush presidency, that we must not be concerned with world opinion (as the president defiantly boasted during the 2004 State of the Union speech: “America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country”), and if we continue to insist that our Crusade against Evil is so righteous and necessary that we are entitled to set our own rules, violate long-standing treaties, and trample on conventions we have long touted, then intense anti-Americanism is simply inevitable.

  It is, after all, basic human nature for a person to become resentful toward those who explicitly and even boastfully disdain his opinions and concerns. And when arrogant behavior of that sort is systematically engaged in by a country that is the strongest military force on Earth—and therefore is incapable of being restrained—that antipathy will be exacerbated by magnitudes. Resentment by the weak toward the strong is also a natural human reaction, but it can be constrained and managed, even virtually eliminated, when strength is used responsibly and in accordance with agreed-upon principles. But when the strongest applies its strength to impose its will without regard either to the viewpoints of others or to any set of recognized conventions and norms, resentment will be at its maximum peak of intensity.

  The results of this imperial mind-set are as predictable as they are threatening to U.S. security. The BBC’s World Service commissioned a worldwide survey of attitudes toward twelve major nations, and its findings, released in March 2007, revealed the following:

  Israel, Iran and the United States were the countries with the most negative image in a globe-spanning survey of attitudes toward 12 major nations. Canada and Japan came out best in the poll, released Tuesday….

  Israel was viewed negatively by 56 percent of respondents and positively by 17 percent; for Iran, the figures were 54 percent and 18 percent. The United States had the third-highest negative ranking, with 51 percent citing it as a bad influence and 30 percent as a good one. Next was North Korea, which was viewed negatively by 48 percent and positively by 19 percent.

  American standing in the world under the Bush presidency has tumbled so drastically that we are now sandwiched between Iran and North Korea in terms of how the world perceives us.

  If the United States continues to be overtly belligerent and essentially indifferent to world opinion, then pro-American candidates will increasingly have difficulty getting elected anywhere in the world, thereby subverting the central goal we claim we have of eliminating anti-American resentment by spreading democracy. The president’s homage to democracy has obscured this destructive contradiction at the heart of our national conduct since 2001. Certainly many additional issues account for Chávez’s support in Venezuela, Hamas’ electoral victory among the Palestinians, etc., but those whose foreign policy vision consists of alienating our allies, changing other countries’ governments at will, and invading whomever we want should not really be that surprised when anti-American sentiment is a potent campaign tool.

  Independently, engaging in such resentment-inducing behavior is almost certain to fuel the extremist beliefs that motivated the 9/11 attackers. Consider the president’s own explanation for why 9/11 occurred: “anger and resentment grew, radicalism thrived, and terrorists found willing recruits.” Similarly, the president himself said in a September 2006 interview with the Wall Street Journal ’s Paul Gigot: “But in the long run the only way to make sure your grandchildren are protected, Paul, is to win the battle of ideas, is to defeat the ideology of hatred and resentment.”

  The president’s own premises demonstrate that policies which alienate most human beings on the planet and inflame hatred toward the United States—such as invading and bombing other countries or making a flamboyant showi
ng that the U.S. can and will do whatever it wants regardless of world opinion—seem guaranteed to exacerbate the threat of terrorism like virtually nothing else could.

  Of course, this contradiction disappears if all we really mean by “democracy” is a country run by leaders who obey America’s dictates even if their power has nothing to do with elections. And whatever it is that is driving our foreign policy, a premium on democracy does not seem, in reality, to be high on the list, given that some of our most important allies (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, arguably China) are profoundly undemocratic, while some of our worst enemies and even some of the “terrorist enemies” themselves have been democratically elected. But one thing that ought to be clear is that democratic elections do not inherently produce governments friendly to the U.S.

  Numerous other irrational and even internally contradictory premises were simply overlooked, by consensus, during the war intoxication that drove the country to support invading Iraq. The Middle East is characterized by centuries-old conflicts, sectarian factions, and competing interests, yet all of that was dismissed by the president’s simplistic embrace of the moralistic premise that Saddam was Evil and therefore had to be destroyed.

  Iran, for instance, has long been the prime enemy of Iraq, and is now routinely cited by the president himself as the greatest threat to peace in the region, if not the world. Yet in the 1980s, Iraq and Iran waged vicious war for eight years, and they served to contain each other’s regional ambitions. The greatest impediment to increased Iranian power was the Ba’athist regime in Iraq—the one that George Bush, driven by a moralistic mission rather than geopolitical considerations, removed. Predictably, as Time’s Joe Klein reported: