Are we the baddies? Photo by Charles Ommanney/Getty Images
![](https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/razib3-100x100.png)
With the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan occurring right on the eve of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we close the final chapter on a generation of foreign policy blunders conceived by the best and the brightest, and executed by the fury of the American military.
Despite some bright moments, like the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 or the rescue of the Yazidis from Mount Sinjar in 2014, the overall story hews more towards farce and tragedy. In the grief and rage following the attacks on the Twin Towers, the US collectively took leave of its senses and embarked on a generational project of warfare that entailed creating two overseas protectorates, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now that inexplicable and indefensible project is over, stillborn and incomplete, as America retreats ignominiously from its obligations, reneging on its lofty promises. After hundreds of thousands of deaths, none of the instigators or cheerleaders for this disaster has suffered any career or reputational loss for their hubris or misjudgment, and almost no one has ever expressed regret.
It began with much more bravado in the early 20th century; wars were waged on two fronts with a casual arrogance that many seem to have forgotten. On 29 May, 2003, a few months after the US invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times declared on The Charlie Rose Show: “suck on this…We could have hit Saudi Arabia…We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq, because we could. And that’s the real truth.”
Meanwhile David Frum, erstwhile speechwriter of George W. Bush, co-authored a belligerently pro-war book with the hyperbolic title An End to Evil in 2004. Before the invasion, Jeffrey Goldberg, now editor of The Atlantic, wrote an article titled “The Great Terror” for The New Yorker, making the case that Saddam Hussein’s regime was engaged in genocide against the Kurds, offering a compelling humanitarian rationale for the invasion of Iraq and Hussein’s overthrow.
Goldberg wasn’t alone at that august magazine, with storied foreign correspondent George Packer also being an invasion supporter. William Kristol, arguably the most prominent turn-of-the-century neoconservative, contributed The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission in early 2003, and predicted a two-month rather than eight-year conflict. At the highest levels of the American government, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney concurred with their advisors that the best way to win the “War on Terror” against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was to invade and conquer a secular nation-state, Iraq. Leading national security lights such as Condoleezza Rice and L. Paul Bremer encouraged Bush and Cheney and then attempted to execute their imperialist vision.
Somehow, all this seemed reasonable to 72% of Americans in 2003. America was the land of promise and possibilities. At the turn of the millennium, the US budget surplus was $230 billion. America was 30% of the world economy, and Russia and China were both considered geopolitical allies. The protracted dispute over the 2000 presidential election actually convinced many that the democratic system in the United States of America was robust even under stress. America at the turn of the century was in the afterglow of Cold War victory, a hyperpower in a world where it was the singular imperial colossus.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribePerhaps those “foreign policy blunders conceived by the best and the brightest” can be best explained by understanding the mindset of those working at the White House at the time – a mindset that was adopted (in somewhat diluted form) by those working in No.10 during the same period.
Back in 2002, Ron Suskind of the New York Times, wrote of an encounter with a senior adviser to George W Bush:
This idea of creating an alternative reality to be shaped and sold to a pliant electorate became the deliberate policy of Bush’s Presidency. They believed that by merely saying a thing – given the US’s position as the only world superpower at the time – they could simply will it into becoming a reality. And so they created “New Realities” – fake news in today’s parlance – and stood by it as objective truth for as long as it was expedient, before moving on to another “reality” as their needs changed.
New Labour realised the dark genius of this approach as they worked their way to power following John Smith’s death. They came to believe that the “perception of the truth” was more important than the actual truth of the matter. Just so long as you could sell it for long enough it might even become real.
A brilliant and forensic account of this deliberate policy of untruth – or manufactured “Truth” can be found in “The Rise of Political Lying” by Peter Oborne. The policy had its roots in post-modern philosophy schools and was used to brilliant effect by some of the academics who were instrumental in shaping the idea of New Labour. That work was carried on by Mandelson and later Campbell to devastating effect.
Obama was able to create realities at will because he was the golden boy in the media’s eyes. There was so little push-back against the narrative it was frightening.
Trump was just a cruder and less politically slick continuation of that policy – insisting something was true, when it often wasn’t, and knowing his supporters would take it as gospel, whilst also understanding that his opponents wouldn’t believe anything he said anyway – so why not lie? With enough momentum behind a thing, a lie could become the truth.
Biden just seems to read the talking points his handlers put in front of them. They even “instruct” him as to which reporters are allowed to put questions to the President.
Perhaps the folks in “the reality-based community” could get back to doing their job and holding the Govt to account. It is quite extraordinary how low the US Media set the bar for Biden – they’ve quite deliberately avoided pointing out his many deficiencies and his obvious cognitive decline. But just being “Not Trump” is no longer enough.
Surely our failure in Afghanistan is proof positive that “created realities” only work up until the point that they come face to face with actual realities on the ground. Could this be the turning point, when everyone finally agrees the emperor is naked? The West can no longer suffer being “ruled by a soft and complacent aristocracy of error”. It’s time to get real again.
Well said.
Hubris – creating one’s own reality.
‘Mandelson” was pure evil, he scoured the world at Blair’s behest, to find massive numbers of unsuitable migrants to create dedicated Labour voters, and to ‘Rub the Right’s Nose in It’ as the wicked Blair said.
They are all evil. The Military Industrial Complex is totally incestuous with the government agencies who regulate and buy from them. Once a Government worker in that area retires they go right to the gravy trough of working for the industry they once regulated and contracted with.
‘Created realities’ work for their creators as long as the creators are never called to account for their crimes. To them the fact that the created realities are so obviously a tissue of lies does not matter as long as they are allowed to keep their money and their freedom.
Excepting the odd scapegoat, the only times that members of the Establishment are called to account is typically after a loss of war or revolution. In other words when that Establishment is overthrown and a new one builds its own foundations. That is why Prince Andrew is allowed to roam his mother’s Balmoral estate. Or Blair to wander through BBC studies as if he were the DG.
I don’t have great objections to the piece.
I was happy when Saddam was toppled. Critics of the Iraq war seem to think Saddam was eternal. He was bound to die at some point leaving the power in the best-case scenario to one of his demented sons or create a power vacuum. There’s also a very disquieting if unspoken world view from the anti-war field: “the Arabs are a bunch of rubes that need a brutal dictator in order to behave”. Things didn’t go sour in Iraq on their own, there was a concerted effort from Syria, Iran, and many private sponsors abroad to make sure a post-Saddam future would be bleak. And let’s not forget the famous “Arab Street”. One cartoon in an obscure French or Danish publication and all of a sudden we see hundreds of thousands of Muslims all over the world demonstrating, but a hundred people murdered while shopping in a market in Bagdad and we have crickets. The silence of millions of Muslims and the MSM were accomplices of the tragedy that unfolded in Iraq.
BUT….That’s just part of the story. The US has fantastic military capabilities but that’s just the tiny tip of the Iceberg in an intervention like Iraq, it’s a NECESSARY condition but it’s not a sufficient condition. And God is in the details and the neocons disregarded the details. History, sociology, knowledge about ethnicities, knowledge about religion, knowledge about the power balances inside Iraq.
An occupation of a place like Iraqi demanded a deep knowledge of all the players involved and deep knowledge of why the Iraq of 2002 came about. People are complicated. Belgium is a country for more than 150 years and yet marriages between French-speaking Belgians and Dutch-speaking Belgians are rare. Swiss works like…well, a Swiss clock and yet in the German part there are no signs in French or Italian and English is the preferred language between different language communities. Why did they assume Iraq was going to be less complicated than Belgium or Switzerland? Local knowledge and History should have been at the centre stage when planning the occupation instead the Neocons had wishful thinking.
Paul Bremmer was given total power in the reconstruction of Iraq, and he destroyed the region by losing the peace and making it more endless war instead. That such a horrible man could be given that power is insane – in WWII MacArthur had that power in Japan and did Increadably well by rebuilding Japan as Japanese, not American, but de-militarized, and he used soft power to achieve that, (like giving the women the vote, and giving the farmers their land ownership, which he took from from the aristocrats. He created Democracy wile Bremmer created War-Lords and corruption)
Such a simple thing, win the peace – but instead these Neo-Liberals, war hawks, yet with Liberal American Values they feel they can force on others, did such harm.
An occupation of a place like Iraqi demanded a deep knowledge of all the players involved and deep knowledge of why the Iraq of 2002 came about…
Mmm. The Romans occupied almost all the known world 2000 years ago without much of that “deep knowledge”. They were simply ruthless in imposing their will. They were, however, deeply mindful of why they wanted to rule other places and didn’t get deflected by, for example, campaigns for hearts and minds or by trying to plant democracy.
It’s still effective, as China’s current imposition on the Uighurs and its previous success with Tibet shows.
It is a sad truth that politicians hardly ever pay for their past f*** ups. Merkel, who was celebrated as the greatest female leader of a Western Democracy, praised by Obama and the left wing MSM, damaged her country and her party by terribly short sighted decisions, which will destroy Germany’s industrial power and the lives of millions of her country men. Same goes for Tony Blair, the smiling face and man of empty words, involving the U.K. in needless wars, opening the doors to millions of emigrants and nearly exchanging the pound for the Euro, to place himself and the U.K. in the centre of a corrupt and undemocratic EU. Now he is shuffling in millions from speeches and his foundations.
Blair was out to socially Engineer UK, with no mandate, he just for ever changed the demographics, and unerringly chose the least suitable of migrants purposefully – Like the equally evil Biden, to make a vast number of future voters for ever on the welfaire rolls, and so captured as Left voters.
Essentially the article says that the US did, and still does, look inward and sees the rest of the world in terms of itself. Unintended consequences are inevitable and no one gets held to account. I tend to agree. A lot happens for no better reason than “I can so I will”. Small events have huge ramifications. Bush’s desire to finish what his father started in Iraq. Trump’s candidacy in response to Obama’s ridiculing him at the correspondent’s dinner.
Not mentioned: The Axis of Evil, championed by Wolfowitz and other pro-Israeli Jews, which argued that attacking Iraq was a step on the way to attacking Iran, sworn enemy of Israel. The Axis of Evil gained real traction in Congress and with the evil Cheney, master of the President. Not mentioned: the lobbying and manipulations of the weapons lobby led by General Dynamics, Northrop and eagerly followed by the rest, who funded re-election campaigns left and right to prolong and even extend the war or wars – the more, the better. Not mentioned: the fact that the Governor of Florida, home of the 2000 dead-heat and the hanging chads was the brother of George W Bush. How convenient ! And how different history would have been if Al Gore had become President in 2000, rather than the confused, and easily-dominated George W Bush. It’s a tragic chain of events, which, make no mistake, has ended the American 100 years of dominance, and ushered in something else – call it a new world order.
It’s incorrect to say nothing has changed. Something very large and important HAS changed. America doesn’t run the world any more.
I would be interested in how Gore would have responded to 9/11. I thought invading Iraq was a major mistake at the time and I believe I was right. My country is run by fools, though. Look at Biden. My brother actually called me and told me I was in favor of the invasion. He voted for Obama and Biden.
Plus (is it safe to say) the US has finally and irrevocably lost whatever respect it had left in the world and I think that is a big deal and a sad thing – because the world still needs a ‘hedge’ against the global goals of China and every other tyrant on the planet.
A good article by Razib Khan who never fails to impress. I love his podcast too.
I suspect far, far darker truths will out in time about this 20 year disaster… “Yo Blair, we’re gonna bring peace to the whole damn region, one way or another… Oil and “Our way” across the whole darn ME, Tony!” “Hell-Yeah, GW! …It really is an amazing thing we’re going to do, and it’ll be us two that are remembered forever”.
The only thing I would dispute is the use of “the brightest and the best”.
Best at lying, maybe. Dangerously close to faking integrity,almost certainly. What an accolade.
It doesn’t seem like it was always this bad. The Neocons and their foreign policy have really hit rock bottom here. The failures of the US empire are clear and obvious. I do wonder if covid is biowarfare and a last gasp by the empire to consolidate as much power as possible. There is no accountability anymore for the powerful and it wasn’t just the neocons. Nobody was fired after 9/11. In fact men like Chertoff and Alexander were treated like heroes! They went on to sell the airport scanners making millions. Looking at the amount of money spent on intelligence nothing made sense. They blame Trump being elected on the Russians and Putin. I mean if that happened shouldn’t they all be fired? What is their intelligence budget compared to the Russians? When the liberals and media were screaming this the whole time my reply was if the US intelligence services are really this horrible with the size of their budgets we need to fire them. Hell outsource it to Russia for a quarter of the cost!
If you want to be amused see if you can find the news clips right after Russia intervened in Syria. The talking heads in media in DC and the politicians they are interviewing can’t make sense of it. They thought they ruled the world. Who do these Russians think they are? Do they not understand we had a regime change operation in progress?
We have new failures taking place today. 18 months and the world is still in a panic. Australia has gone full blown police state and we are told we need to “build back better”. Where is the building? Where is the better? There doesn’t seem to exist any competency to make this happen or solve the supposed virus problem. If they had “cured” covid with the marvelous MRNA vaccines they might have something to talk about. It becomes clearer by the day this isn’t going to happen. Instead one has to wonder if the intention really is to turn the world into one big Australia.
A lot of people made a lot of money out of the wars. They control much of the MSM. They control the politicians. To them George W Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are puppets who deserve ample remuneration.
The Americans did in 2003 what they probably really wanted to do in 1991: go all the way to Baghdad. In the first Gulf War of 1991, the coalition of the willing, under the auspices of the U.N., kept Kuwait the name of the game.
America probably would not have ultimately let Iraq fester under a dictator while next door to it another country was developing the materials with which it could make nuclear devices.
The Kosovo conflict, in which only two American servicemen were killed (in a helicopter crash), in 1999, saw the Americans operating extremely successfully in combat and in ultimately preventing further major conflict in the Balkans. The coming to the aid of the Kosovars was probably an intervention that some policy experts in the West wished had happened to the citizens of Basra when they rose up against Saddam soon after Iraqi forces had been run out of Kuwait.
The gassing of 5,000 Kurds at Halabja in northern Iraq in 1988 laid down a long-term fear in the West of future gas attacks to come, from the Iraqi regime under Saddam.
I seem to recall that there was a relative calm in late 2003 and into the first half of 2004 in Iraq. But then so many random suicide bomb attacks hit the country, the indiscriminate nature of which stoked a fear and anger that must have been akin to how people living in the south-east of England felt when Doodlebugs (V-1s) and V-2 rockets fell about them without much warning. Did most ordinary Iraqis resign themselves at some point to going along with the American programme for the country? Only for revenge and resentment, stoked by the cult of the suicide bomber, to take over them? The invasion and war were supposed to be over, by 2004. Had the invasion or liberation of Kuwait been quickly followed by a charge up to Baghdad, in 1991, then that would have been a full five years before al-Qaeda came to prominence in 1996, with an attack on US military personnel’s residence in Saudi Arabia. At the end of a long Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, the Americans might have sustained some level of goodwill from most Iraqis, weary as they would have been, in 1991 — had the coalition gone all the way to Baghdad (just as the Allies went all the way to Berlin in 1945).
Read ’em and weep. Meanwhile, there’s a 21st-century ahead of us that cries out for recovery from 20’th century adventurism.
Joe Biden watched it all from a promontory of power. Perhaps he understands those dynamics thoroughly enough to initiate some corrective strategies. . . which he has, apparently, already undertaken.
Excellent.