Terrorism and Iraq: The Connection Neither Liberals nor Conservatives Want to Talk About
On September 11th, the United States was attacked by terrorists with connections to the Taliban-controlled state of Afghanistan. The United States declared a War on Terror, and sent soldiers first to Afghanistan, then to Iraq.
It has become a near automatic response for conservatives to equate the War on Terror with the War on Iraq. This is in spite of the fact that the only ties between Iraq and the terrorist attack on the United States have been manufactured, invented or distorted beyond all recognition. The shifting rationales, the public deceptions, and the conduct of our government has led some liberal commentators to postulate that attacking Iraq after 9/11 was as if we had attacked Mexico in response to Pearl Harbor.
But that’s an insulting oversimplification.
There was a logical connection between the War on Terror and the War in Iraq; it’s just not a rationale that conservatives or liberals want to talk about.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States was left bewildered. The question most asked was: Why do they hate us? The question most asked of the intelligence community was: Why didn’t you see this coming?
It was clear that the US had insufficient intelligent assets in the Middle East. We didn’t have enough translators. We didn’t have enough spies. We didn’t have enough ears and eyes on the ground sympathetic to our nation. Our entire apparatus was designed to fight a Cold War that we’d already won.
While nothing would ever explain, justify or excuse the brutal murder of almost 3,000 civilians by the evil henchmen of Osama bin Ladin, it was vital to identify and combat the atmosphere and political environment that enabled and emboldened this terrorist act so we could stop it from ever happening again.
The terrorists were able to play on the deep sense of grievance and helplessness in the Middle East. It is true that during the 1990s, the United States’ attempts to broker a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians helped encourage moderate Muslim voices. As the global economy expanded into global communication, we were increasingly considered to be an honest broker. (And perhaps that is why Osama bin Ladin chose to strike.)
But in spite of our progress, there was still a deep held distrust of our motives, and a resentment of U.S. hypocrisy in foreign policy. The United States was seen as a country that would tolerate dictators and oppression – and that was a public relations problem that had helped cost us in blood.
The NeoCon Plan
The plan to invade Iraq was part of a strategy intended to heal those wounds, and to strike at the very heart of the cultural influences that breed terrorism.
The idea was to liberate an Arab state; to prove that we could be a force for good in the Middle East. And what better target could there be than Saddam Hussein, a figure that the world had united against just a decade before?
We would be greeted as liberators; we would improve the lives of the people in the Middle East and show the compassionate face of America. We would help establish a democracy right in the middle of the region, which would allow us to have eyes and ears on the ground, all while winning hearts and minds.
On paper, this NeoCon plan not only reads like a liberal manifesto on nation-building, but is, arguably, an entirely rational response to terrorism.
Liberals don’t want to admit this because in spite of giving immediate and unwavering support for the War in Afghanistan, this administration has done everything in its power to vilify them as being soft-on-terror. They’re so tired of wondering if the administration is stupid or evil, they won’t even give credit for honorable intentions.
Meanwhile, conservatives don’t want to admit to this real connection between terrorism and the Iraq War, because their president has so completely undercut the rationale, that it may no longer be relevant.
What Went Wrong
To be fair, part of the problem was timing. Perhaps, if the United States had approached the subject of Iraq as part of a broad strategy to combat the root causes of terrorism in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with a compelling explanation as to how we intended to help the whole region, the world would have joined us.
But by the time we brought it up at the UN, a year later, the pricklier personalities in the administration had already launched a political jihad against the UN that made cooperation unlikely. Instead, we made the choice to go to war with a so-called Coalition of the Willing of which Albania is its twelfth largest member. This was the start of a series of disastrous foreign policy decisions that have turned any rational connection between Iraq and terrorism on its head.
The world did not unite behind our effort to oust Saddam Hussein, and our invasion came to be seen as a direct violation of international law. Our stubborn, defiant public policy stance as we entered Iraq contributed to an impression that it was nothing more than our addiction to oil that motivated us. However unfair that impression might be, the fact that our forces seized the oil ministry but did little to protect Iraq’s cultural resources from looting did not help matters.
Our reputation as an honest broker in the Middle East has been all but shattered during the latest conflict between Israel and Lebanon. And our ambivalent response to the abuses in Abu Graib, combined with our criminal behavior at Guantanamo Bay, has not encouraged moderate pro-American voices in the Middle East. It has smothered them.
Instead of attacking the root causes of terrorism, instead of transforming the region into a hostile place for terrorists, instead of establishing a secure base of operations for Americans to keep an eye out for threats, we have destabilized the region and made the world less safe for Americans.
We have also diverted desperately needed resources so that all other attempts at fighting terrorism are shortchanged.
Conservatives have now abandoned the phony rationales for the War in Iraq in favor of the new, seemingly pragmatic, ‘we have to fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t fight them here’. But that only makes sense if there are a finite number of terrorists that we could kill, and if were we not breeding more of them every day. Our own State Department admits to a sharp increase in global terrorism since our efforts began. So if Iraq still has any connection to the War on Terror; the connection is that Iraq seems to be losing us that war.
Neocons may have once offered a rational relationship between the War on Terror and the War in Iraq, but that rationale no longer exists. We may need to finish what we started in Iraq for the sake of the Iraqi people, but let’s not pretend that what we’re doing there has a thing to do with defeating terrorism.
Not anymore.
