thedrifter
09-09-06, 09:20 AM
Five Years On
There have been far more victories than setbacks since September 11.
Saturday, September 9, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
September 11, 2001, it is often said, was a day that "changed everything." Five years later, it remains to be seen whether that's really as true as it deserves to be.
The significance of events is not always captured at the moment in which they happen: Some, like the American Revolution, grow with time; others, like the French Revolution, diminish. But the meaning of events can be instantly and enduringly obvious, or nearly so. On a cloudless September morning, 19 young Muslim men from four Arab countries combined simple means and fanatical determination to murder nearly 3,000 men and women, most of them civilians who rose that morning never imagining themselves to be at any risk. The killers aimed at famous targets in two great cities, a spectacle for the world to behold. We watched from our offices across the street from the World Trade Center, and every day we gaze at the pit they left behind.
Part of the tragedy is that this wasn't their first strike. Similar deeds by people of similar beliefs had been committed before against American targets, albeit not on U.S. soil. The attacks of 9/11 exposed not just the flaws in airline security but, far more important, our failure to comprehend the nature and scale of the threat we were facing.
Osama bin Laden had declared war on us years earlier, but we insisted on seeing him as a small menace, not unlike Abu Nidal and the terrorists who had hijacked planes or killed Israelis over the previous decades. However, bin Laden is above all a man of ambition, not grievance, and his ambition is to re-establish an Islamic Caliphate after his own fashion, one that can destroy every trace of what the West represents within its own sphere and, someday, in ours, too.
So it seemed to us on September 12, 2001, when we wrote that the attacks intended to "prove that freedom and democracy are not after all the wave of the future." We added that "we can honor yesterday's dead by rallying our diplomatic, moral, financial and as necessary military resources to ensure that that purpose is convincingly defeated."
Today, there is less confusion than before about al Qaeda's purposes, particularly after its vengeful turn on fellow Muslims in Casablanca, Riyadh, Amman and Baghdad. But there remains a great deal of doubt about our own purposes. There is doubt whether the methods employed by the Bush Administration to defeat al Qaeda have worked, or been won at too high a moral and diplomatic price, or backfired by giving would-be jihadis fresh reasons to hate us. There is also too much doubt whether broadening the focus of the war to rogue regimes hasn't been a colossal distraction. And there is a deeper, creeping doubt whether the goal of "convincingly defeating" our enemies is even plausible.
So it's worth taking stock of what has--and hasn't--been achieved in five years. We presume that bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, are alive, probably in the Pakistani hinterland. But we know that Mohammed Atef, the mastermind of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa, was killed in Afghanistan in an American air strike. We know that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, one of the masterminds of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, is in U.S. custody, as is Abu Zubaydah, who allegedly planned the failed millennium attacks. We know the U.S. captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al Qaeda operations chief and mastermind of September 11, as well as his successor, Abu Farraj al-Libbi. We know the U.S. killed al-Libbi's senior deputies, Haithem al Yemeni and Abu Hamza Rabia. We know that Midhat Mursi, author of al Qaeda's explosives manual, is dead.
This is not an exhaustive list. And while we do not know what proportion of al Qaeda's senior ranks are dead or in jail, Zawahiri must write letters to associates to find out whether his messages have aired on al-Jazeera. Al Qaeda has spawned imitators and affiliates, which trade on its radical infamy. But the ability of bin Laden and Zawahiri to plan and execute terrorism seems to have been massively degraded, and it shows in the fact that five years later there has been no major terrorist attack in the U.S., nor any, anywhere, comparable in scale to the attacks of that day.
Nobody likes to tempt fate, so it's only natural that our political leaders would not advertise this fact too loudly. But at least it should temper the criticism of those who claim that the U.S. policy of aggressively interrogating suspects has yielded no credible information, a point President Bush finally got round to making this week. And it is a strong rebuttal to the argument that, by invading Iraq, the Administration lost focus on the terrorist threat and made America less safe.
The war in Iraq is alternately criticized as a major strategic blunder, something the U.S. should never have done in the first place; or as a tactical fiasco, a worthy enterprise incompetently executed. We would have more sympathy with the second argument if the history of all warfare were not a (retrospective) study in far greater "incompetence," from Grant's Wilderness campaign to the needless slaughter of Marines at Peleliu. We've cited many of the Administration's mistakes over the last four years, going back even before the war to its (largely the CIA's) reluctance to trust and work with all but its own favored Iraqi exiles. But these columns aren't about to support a war only to back away when things get rough. The mistakes in Iraq at least have some hope of being corrected.
The deeper Iraq argument is that the U.S. should never have gone to war against a country that "posed no threat," a point supposedly proved by the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Charles Duelfer's definitive post-mortem report on Iraq's WMD painted a different picture: Saddam maintained weapons programs that were in "material breach" of U.N. resolutions. And he intended to reconstitute his former programs as soon as the sanctions regime was lifted, something he was well on his way to accomplishing thanks to the global bribery scheme that was the U.N.'s Oil for Food program.
But the notion that Saddam posed no threat beyond WMD capabilities is wrong, and in hindsight the Administration miscalculated politically by emphasizing WMD as it did. That error owed largely to the pressure it was under to take the case for war to the U.N., where Saddam's violations of his disarmament obligations served as an actionable cause of war. But the real WMD in Iraq's arsenal was Saddam himself, the threat he posed to his people and his neighbors, and the misbegotten conceits he inspired in a region hungry for a new Saladin or Nasser, someone to redeem Arab honor by standing up to the West.
This was the boil that most needed to be lanced if there was to be any hope that the societies from which the September 11 hijackers hailed could be meaningfully reformed. Saddam in power meant U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, a chief grievance in bin Laden's fatwa against America. It also meant $25,000 checks for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and the costly maintenance of the no-fly zones and the preservation of U.N. sanctions, which the war's current critics once told us were the cause of thousands of Iraqi deaths from malnutrition and the dearth of medical supplies.
Saddam in power meant that virtually no other Arab problem, such as Syria's occupation of Lebanon, could be addressed, let alone resolved. In short, Saddam in power locked the Arab world--and America's involvement in it--into shapes and patterns that were the source of so many of its political and social ills, and that could only be broken by his removal. And, to a remarkable extent, that is just what happened in the two years after the war.
Consider where things stood a year ago on the fourth anniversary of September 11. Israel had just withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, a territorial concession never achieved throughout the seven years of the Oslo peace process. The Palestinian Authority was democratically led by Mahmoud Abbas, not Hamas. Lebanon had just been freed from 29 years of Syrian occupation, and the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad was facing a potentially regime-changing investigation into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had gone to Cairo to demand political change; Mr. Mubarak responded by agreeing to a multiparty presidential vote that, while rigged, was a step forward from the previous uncontested referenda on his rule. And despite terrible violence and plenty of second-guessing by the global commentariat, Iraqis freely ratified the most liberal and democratic national constitution in Arab history.
The last year has seen some setbacks, which go far to explain the overglum mood surrounding the current anniversary. Yet it is by no means clear that those failures owe to some flaw in the overall U.S. strategy as opposed to tactical mistakes and the simple fact that we are fighting a determined, resourceful enemy that is itself adapting to our moves. The victory for Hamas, the troubles in Iraq, the uncertain outcome in the recent war in Lebanon, and above all the renewed aggression of Iran all pose major challenges. Mr. Bush's party may pay a price for those setbacks in November, though the President has begun to fight back, as he shows in our interview today.
We're glad he is doing so, because the great challenge for this presidency is to remind Americans that the threat they face is undimmed even as the events of September 11 recede in memory. The costs of responding to 9/11 have been many, and the temptation is strong to think we can withdraw from Iraq, or from the larger Middle East without consequence to our own security. The abiding lesson of that day five years ago is that this is a dangerous illusion.
On September 12, 2001, we wrote with some optimism about the "resilience" of modern industrial democracies. That resilience has been proved time and again the past five years, and the challenge is to prove it again for the next five, or 50, if that's what victory requires.
Ellie
There have been far more victories than setbacks since September 11.
Saturday, September 9, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
September 11, 2001, it is often said, was a day that "changed everything." Five years later, it remains to be seen whether that's really as true as it deserves to be.
The significance of events is not always captured at the moment in which they happen: Some, like the American Revolution, grow with time; others, like the French Revolution, diminish. But the meaning of events can be instantly and enduringly obvious, or nearly so. On a cloudless September morning, 19 young Muslim men from four Arab countries combined simple means and fanatical determination to murder nearly 3,000 men and women, most of them civilians who rose that morning never imagining themselves to be at any risk. The killers aimed at famous targets in two great cities, a spectacle for the world to behold. We watched from our offices across the street from the World Trade Center, and every day we gaze at the pit they left behind.
Part of the tragedy is that this wasn't their first strike. Similar deeds by people of similar beliefs had been committed before against American targets, albeit not on U.S. soil. The attacks of 9/11 exposed not just the flaws in airline security but, far more important, our failure to comprehend the nature and scale of the threat we were facing.
Osama bin Laden had declared war on us years earlier, but we insisted on seeing him as a small menace, not unlike Abu Nidal and the terrorists who had hijacked planes or killed Israelis over the previous decades. However, bin Laden is above all a man of ambition, not grievance, and his ambition is to re-establish an Islamic Caliphate after his own fashion, one that can destroy every trace of what the West represents within its own sphere and, someday, in ours, too.
So it seemed to us on September 12, 2001, when we wrote that the attacks intended to "prove that freedom and democracy are not after all the wave of the future." We added that "we can honor yesterday's dead by rallying our diplomatic, moral, financial and as necessary military resources to ensure that that purpose is convincingly defeated."
Today, there is less confusion than before about al Qaeda's purposes, particularly after its vengeful turn on fellow Muslims in Casablanca, Riyadh, Amman and Baghdad. But there remains a great deal of doubt about our own purposes. There is doubt whether the methods employed by the Bush Administration to defeat al Qaeda have worked, or been won at too high a moral and diplomatic price, or backfired by giving would-be jihadis fresh reasons to hate us. There is also too much doubt whether broadening the focus of the war to rogue regimes hasn't been a colossal distraction. And there is a deeper, creeping doubt whether the goal of "convincingly defeating" our enemies is even plausible.
So it's worth taking stock of what has--and hasn't--been achieved in five years. We presume that bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, are alive, probably in the Pakistani hinterland. But we know that Mohammed Atef, the mastermind of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa, was killed in Afghanistan in an American air strike. We know that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, one of the masterminds of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, is in U.S. custody, as is Abu Zubaydah, who allegedly planned the failed millennium attacks. We know the U.S. captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al Qaeda operations chief and mastermind of September 11, as well as his successor, Abu Farraj al-Libbi. We know the U.S. killed al-Libbi's senior deputies, Haithem al Yemeni and Abu Hamza Rabia. We know that Midhat Mursi, author of al Qaeda's explosives manual, is dead.
This is not an exhaustive list. And while we do not know what proportion of al Qaeda's senior ranks are dead or in jail, Zawahiri must write letters to associates to find out whether his messages have aired on al-Jazeera. Al Qaeda has spawned imitators and affiliates, which trade on its radical infamy. But the ability of bin Laden and Zawahiri to plan and execute terrorism seems to have been massively degraded, and it shows in the fact that five years later there has been no major terrorist attack in the U.S., nor any, anywhere, comparable in scale to the attacks of that day.
Nobody likes to tempt fate, so it's only natural that our political leaders would not advertise this fact too loudly. But at least it should temper the criticism of those who claim that the U.S. policy of aggressively interrogating suspects has yielded no credible information, a point President Bush finally got round to making this week. And it is a strong rebuttal to the argument that, by invading Iraq, the Administration lost focus on the terrorist threat and made America less safe.
The war in Iraq is alternately criticized as a major strategic blunder, something the U.S. should never have done in the first place; or as a tactical fiasco, a worthy enterprise incompetently executed. We would have more sympathy with the second argument if the history of all warfare were not a (retrospective) study in far greater "incompetence," from Grant's Wilderness campaign to the needless slaughter of Marines at Peleliu. We've cited many of the Administration's mistakes over the last four years, going back even before the war to its (largely the CIA's) reluctance to trust and work with all but its own favored Iraqi exiles. But these columns aren't about to support a war only to back away when things get rough. The mistakes in Iraq at least have some hope of being corrected.
The deeper Iraq argument is that the U.S. should never have gone to war against a country that "posed no threat," a point supposedly proved by the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Charles Duelfer's definitive post-mortem report on Iraq's WMD painted a different picture: Saddam maintained weapons programs that were in "material breach" of U.N. resolutions. And he intended to reconstitute his former programs as soon as the sanctions regime was lifted, something he was well on his way to accomplishing thanks to the global bribery scheme that was the U.N.'s Oil for Food program.
But the notion that Saddam posed no threat beyond WMD capabilities is wrong, and in hindsight the Administration miscalculated politically by emphasizing WMD as it did. That error owed largely to the pressure it was under to take the case for war to the U.N., where Saddam's violations of his disarmament obligations served as an actionable cause of war. But the real WMD in Iraq's arsenal was Saddam himself, the threat he posed to his people and his neighbors, and the misbegotten conceits he inspired in a region hungry for a new Saladin or Nasser, someone to redeem Arab honor by standing up to the West.
This was the boil that most needed to be lanced if there was to be any hope that the societies from which the September 11 hijackers hailed could be meaningfully reformed. Saddam in power meant U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, a chief grievance in bin Laden's fatwa against America. It also meant $25,000 checks for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and the costly maintenance of the no-fly zones and the preservation of U.N. sanctions, which the war's current critics once told us were the cause of thousands of Iraqi deaths from malnutrition and the dearth of medical supplies.
Saddam in power meant that virtually no other Arab problem, such as Syria's occupation of Lebanon, could be addressed, let alone resolved. In short, Saddam in power locked the Arab world--and America's involvement in it--into shapes and patterns that were the source of so many of its political and social ills, and that could only be broken by his removal. And, to a remarkable extent, that is just what happened in the two years after the war.
Consider where things stood a year ago on the fourth anniversary of September 11. Israel had just withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, a territorial concession never achieved throughout the seven years of the Oslo peace process. The Palestinian Authority was democratically led by Mahmoud Abbas, not Hamas. Lebanon had just been freed from 29 years of Syrian occupation, and the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad was facing a potentially regime-changing investigation into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had gone to Cairo to demand political change; Mr. Mubarak responded by agreeing to a multiparty presidential vote that, while rigged, was a step forward from the previous uncontested referenda on his rule. And despite terrible violence and plenty of second-guessing by the global commentariat, Iraqis freely ratified the most liberal and democratic national constitution in Arab history.
The last year has seen some setbacks, which go far to explain the overglum mood surrounding the current anniversary. Yet it is by no means clear that those failures owe to some flaw in the overall U.S. strategy as opposed to tactical mistakes and the simple fact that we are fighting a determined, resourceful enemy that is itself adapting to our moves. The victory for Hamas, the troubles in Iraq, the uncertain outcome in the recent war in Lebanon, and above all the renewed aggression of Iran all pose major challenges. Mr. Bush's party may pay a price for those setbacks in November, though the President has begun to fight back, as he shows in our interview today.
We're glad he is doing so, because the great challenge for this presidency is to remind Americans that the threat they face is undimmed even as the events of September 11 recede in memory. The costs of responding to 9/11 have been many, and the temptation is strong to think we can withdraw from Iraq, or from the larger Middle East without consequence to our own security. The abiding lesson of that day five years ago is that this is a dangerous illusion.
On September 12, 2001, we wrote with some optimism about the "resilience" of modern industrial democracies. That resilience has been proved time and again the past five years, and the challenge is to prove it again for the next five, or 50, if that's what victory requires.
Ellie