Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series)

In writing this book, I had the indispensable help of several new and much-valued friends. My book agent, Stuart Krichevsky, runs an impressively tight business ship but is never too busy to talk through problems or compare notes about the joys and agonies of watching our respective sons learn to play the astoundingly difficult game of baseball. My publicist, Jenny Powers, is a marvel at gently but effectively putting importuning journalists in their place, as well as in getting me to the right place at the right time, and doing so with a smile even when my forgetfulness is driving her to distraction. At Free Press, Dominick Anfuso and Maria Bruk Aupérin worked with me patiently to tame a good deal of vituperative prose that otherwise might well have prevented the arguments of an already very much nonmainstream analysis from getting a decent hearing. I offer my sincere thanks to each of them.

I also wish to thank a number of writers, historians, and commentators—most of whom I have never met—who have had the moral courage to argue that the status quo in U.S. foreign and military policy toward the Islamic world is not adequately protecting America and must be changed. I do not agree with all of what these men write, and, I am very confident, none of them will agree with all I have written here, and several will disagree with a good deal of it. But be that as it may, I have consistently learned from these men, they have caused me to rethink my own positions many times, and they are driving a debate that may yet save America and the West from their governing elites’ mulish, self-serving, and ultimately self-immolating devotion to the status quo. May I offer my thanks and admiration, then, to Ralph Peters, Mark Steyn, Tony Blankley, Abd al-Bari Atwan, Peter Bergen, T. X. Hammes, Patrick Buchanan, Bruce Hoffman, Martin van Creveld, Robert Pape, Robert D. Hormats, Omar Nasiri, Samuel Huntington, Marc Sageman, and Walter A. McDougall.

And after spending a career focused on foreign states and entities, I am slowly relearning and trying to apply the lessons taught by America’s founders and their constructive successors—especially by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and William T. Sherman—and by the two Europeans who best taught Americans about the great difficulties in founding and then enduringly protecting a republic, Niccolò Machiavelli and Alexis de Tocqueville. The lessons these men taught are timeless; we ignore them at our own and our children’s peril.

Finally, I alone am responsible for all that follows.

Preface

Introduction

Author’s Note

Part I: Getting to 9/11

Chapter 1: Readying bin Laden’s Way: America and the Muslim World, 1973–1996

Chapter 2: Fighting Islamists with a Blinding Cold War Hangover, 1996–2001

Part II: Six Years of War,
2001–2007

Chapter 3: Afghanistan—A Final Chance to Learn History Applies to America

Chapter 4: Iraq—America Bled White by History Unlearned

Chapter 5: And the Islamists’ Fire Quietly Spreads

Part III: Where Stands the War?

Chapter 6: “The bottom is out of the tub”: Taking Stock for America in 2008

Chapter 7: “O enemy of God, I will give thee no respite”: Al-Qaeda and Its Allies Take Stock

Part IV: Where to from Here?

Chapter 8: A Humble Suggestion—America First

Epilogue: An Abiding Uniqueness

Notes

Bibliography

Perhaps the easiest task in today’s America would be to write a book maintaining America’s current illusions by assigning President George W. Bush’s administration responsibility for all of America’s international troubles since September 11, 2001, and then advance the delusional argument that all will be well once Mr. Bush returns permanently to his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Such a misinterpretation is superficially supportable because several moments in Mr. Bush’s presidency will forever reside in the thankfully small compartment of U.S. history reserved for the infamous. The unprovoked invasion of Iraq surely is one such event, as is Vice President Dick Cheney’s reptilian contention that Americans who criticize U.S. foreign policy are “validating the strategy of the terrorists.”
¹
In addition, the thought of what history will say about Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Department of Defense ought to make his relatives shudder down to their latest generation.

There is a great danger, however, in simply heaping abuse on Mr. Bush and his lieutenants because it was on their watch that the much ballyhooed and nearly beatified “bipartisan approach” to post–Cold War foreign policy played out its string and collapsed. Rather than crafting a paradigm appropriate to the new era in America’s foreign relations, President Bush—always his father’s son—launched a last, desperate, and ultimately futile attempt to keep the Cold War–era policy consensus on track and running toward a revamped version of his dad’s vague but clearly silly vision of a New World Order. No effort was spared before the 2003 Iraq war. All the traditional buttons were pressed—prewar congressional support, extensive UN consultations, and intricate coalition-building—but to no avail. The fact that this effort now lies in smoldering ruins has less to do with the competence of President Bush and his colleagues (although, to be sure, competence was not the administration’s common virtue) and more to do with the reality that America’s bipartisan governing elite is both unprepared and unwilling to deal with the world as it is, rather than as they want it to be or think it should be. Because of their profound and willful ignorance—there is no kinder or gentler description that applies—America has traveled a path that has seen the lethal nuisance originally presented by Sunni militants transformed into an existential threat that is poised to strike at the core of our social and civil institutions in a way that could change our collective lifestyle for many decades, perhaps forever.

For the purposes of this book the term
bipartisan governing elite
is used to describe the inbred set of individuals who have influenced, contributed ideas to, drafted, and conducted U.S. foreign policy for the past thirty-five years. Within that group there are politicians, journalists, academics, civil servants, military officers, pundits, preachers, and untold numbers of thespians, philanthropists, and do-good organizations. Some are Republicans, others Democrats; some are evangelicals, others atheists; some are militarists, others pacifists; some are purveyors of Western civilization, others are multiculturalists. Our bipartisan governing elite’s social, political, economic, and religious philosophies are numerous and diverse. But they all conduce to one motivating factor: an unquenchable ardor to have the United States intervene abroad in all places, situations, and times. Some of the elite prefer diplomatic intervention, others military; some prefer humanitarian activities, others covert action; and some prefer foreign aid mixed with Christian proselytizing, others prefer aid meant to break down traditional religious conventions, such as funds for family planning in conservative Muslim states. From Hillary Clinton to Franklin Graham, from John McCain to George Soros, and down to the elite’s lowest-ranking man or woman, all share in one near-religious belief in the role of the United States in the world. The mix of philosophies and tools brought to an intervention may vary, but unrelenting intervention itself is the lodestone of America’s bipartisan governing elite.

Because of our elite’s allegiance to intervention and its intense aversion to substantive change—do not confuse their “embrace the change” rhetoric with a desire for genuine change—America today lives in what can be described as a prolonged Cold War hangover, an environment in which our elites’ perception of the world seems to have frozen stiff on the day the Berlin Wall fell. On that day, though perhaps not for much longer, the United States did indeed stand as the world’s only superpower, ready to undertake the elder Mr. Bush’s dream of building the New Jerusalem. Sadly and inexplicably, the first Mr. Bush and his two successors failed to see that with the Cold War’s end, the major keeper of world peace and order—the U.S.-USSR rivalry, and especially the sainted doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)—had exited the scene, ushering in a steadily rising tide of pervasive international disorder that has deposited the world in a new age of barbarity. It is now clear that MAD provided much of the world with a halcyon half-century of substantial peace and gradually increasing prosperity—Pax Atomica, if you will—as well as with the glittering, still-dominant, but utterly fatuous illusion of a coming age of eroding nationalism and increased international cooperation and comity. We now are living through the last stages of Pax Atomica’s peace and prosperity, but America’s governing elite has thus far done its best to patch up and maintain the illusion that the old girl still has lots of life in her. She does not.

U.S. politicians, generals, academics, and pundits can, I think, be forgiven for being a bit intoxicated and Pollyanna-ish during the first, heady post-Soviet years. The emotional and psychological release from the end of a fifty-year nuclear standoff unavoidably gave birth to a certain reality-defying giddiness. But who would have expected this normal reaction to harden into an apparently permanent mindset? Well, Osama bin Laden apparently did.

In September of the fifth post–Cold war year this lanky and quiet Saudi Arabian declared war on the United States. Bin Laden’s Anglo-American–like formal declaration of war—an action the U.S. Congress has found passé since 1941, notwithstanding quaint but indisputable constitutional requirements—received little notice in Washington’s halls of power. In his treatise bin Laden provided a well-honed needle that ought to have deflated the West’s post-Soviet/New World Order balloon. Without so much as a courteous apology to the history-ending Francis Fukuyama, bin Laden, in twelve densely written pages, carefully explained that history had resumed, that the Muslim religion was alive, thriving, and angry, that the Cold War’s limits to worldwide conflict had been sundered, and that war-to-the-finish had reassumed its traditional and proper station in human affairs. In short, bin Laden announced that many Muslims were less interested in building a New Jerusalem than in conquering Israeli-occupied Old Jerusalem. Bin Laden’s declaration should have been required reading for all U.S. policymakers and citizens (it did not become widely available to the latter for almost a decade), and it should have been compared and contrasted with Fukuyama’s
The End of History and the Last Man.
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Bin Laden had the better, more historically accurate, and commonsense end of the debate then; he dominates the debate now.

While bin Laden delivered the clear and substantive message that the war he was initiating against the United States, and the countries choosing to take its side, was a defensive reaction to specific U.S. foreign policies and their impact in the Muslim world, American leaders have since 1996 floundered around almost comically in trying to defend elements of American life that are not under attack—liberties, freedoms, and elections. Indeed, their campaign to defend these unattacked elements of America’s political and social life is one of the strongest indicators of the still-dominant Cold War mindset: these were the things we defended against the hated Bolsheviks; therefore they must be under attack again. The absurdity of the debate between bin Laden and U.S. policymakers is palpable and generally unfolds as follows: Bin Laden issues a starkly specific attack on a U.S. foreign policy, and Washington responds with defiant words defending a right or liberty that bin Laden has not mentioned and that has nothing to do with his assertion. Thus, bin Laden says: Get U.S. forces out of the Arabian Peninsula; Washington responds: You will not prevent our women from going to school. Bin Laden says: Stop supporting Russia’s genocidal war in Chechnya; Washington responds: You will not disrupt our elections. Bin Laden says: Stop supporting the tyrannical Arab police states that oppress and torture; Washington says: Freedom is on the march for Arabs. While bin Laden and his lieutenants must shake their heads in frustration over the blatant deafness of U.S. and Western leaders, they have taken full advantage of that self-imposed and possibly fatal handicap.

This book, then, is not an attempt to minutely analyze each event of America’s post-9/11 war with Islamist militancy. It rather seeks, first, to reconstruct how the United States found itself with an untenable set of foreign policies and national-security strategies on the day of the attacks on New York and Washington. And second, it tries to understand, explain, and assess the costs of the U.S. government’s stubborn and obviously losing rearguard action to maintain these catastrophically deficient policies and strategies. This book began life entitled
From Pandora’s Box: America and Islam After Iraq.
I chose the title because I initially thought there was something credible to the claim that the disaster that has occurred in Iraq—and Afghanistan as well—amounted to a set of amazing, unintended, and unpredictable consequences. Well before I completed researching, however, it was clear to me that while I was definitely telling a story of unintended consequences, it most assuredly was not a tale of unpredictable consequences. A person and a nation may not intend to cause untoward consequences by their actions, but only a fool assumes that the consequences of all his actions can only be positive for everyone concerned. Enter America’s bipartisan governing elite.

In reviewing the years since 1973, and especially those since the 9/11 attacks and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, it will, I believe, become clear that the negative events that have unfolded for America may have been unintended but were in no sense unforeseeable. The unwinnable insurgencies we now face in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rock-solid hatred of U.S. foreign policy among a huge majority of Muslims and many non-Muslims as well, the flood of heroin entering the West from Southwest Asia, the rising tide of militancy across the Islamic world—surely none of these were the intentions or expectations of U.S. policymakers. Only madmen and perhaps a few neoconservatives and Israel-firsters would have sought these consequences, but anyone with an average knowledge of history could have foreseen most of them.

Given predictable consequences, and assuming no malign intent, U.S. political leaders and policymakers from both parties between 1996 and 2007 must stand guilty of willful historical ignorance, a paucity of common sense, and, as I have argued before, a disastrous degree of intellectual hubris. The interlocking of this historical ignorance, sparse common sense, and galloping hubris is in all individuals, countries, and eras a fatal combination. America’s full-bore war with the Islamic world today is the result of exactly that combination of attributes in our bipartisan governing elite. Since 9/11 there has been a war between two opponents. On one side are the Islamists, fighting in deadly earnest for fully explained reasons and limited objectives; on the other is the United States, grandly assuming inevitable victory over a foe that exists only in its mind. It was this stark reality that prompted me to retitle the book
Marching Toward Hell.

One final word. This book is about pointing fingers at the unnecessary and self-defeating U.S. mistakes—political, diplomatic, military, and intellectual. As such it is a fairly unrelenting discussion and analysis of negatives. America has, of course, scored victories since 9/11, but almost all have been of a tactical nature and redound to the credit not of U.S. leaders but of the military and intelligence personnel, men and women, who serve, in military terms, at the level of colonel and below. These individuals have shown initiative, courage, and a deep and abiding concern for the security of Americans and their country. They have taken life-risking actions that more senior careerists would have avoided like grim death. They have helped defend America but have not advanced their careers. There surely is a story to be told about these heroic individuals who spent their blood to buy time for America, but it will not be told here. Why? Because their undeniable substantive and admirable tactical victories have not advanced America’s strategic position in the war against al-Qaeda and the Islamists since they have occurred within the context of a national-security strategy, which is the common handiwork of the first Bush, Clinton, and current Bush presidencies, that creates enemies faster than they can be killed and that finds America in a worse position today than it was on 9/11. Indeed, the lives of those who died on 9/11 and all those who have since died battling al-Qaeda–led forces have been squandered uselessly because of the arrogance-and ignorance-powered failure of their leaders. It is the story of that failure that this book will tell.