Since the Attack What has Transpired

Fifteen years after the bloodbath of 9/11, American foreign policy is still mired in its calcified tenets and dangerous delusions. The consequences are obvious. Iran, the world's principal state sponsor of terrorism and long an avowed enemy of the United States, has filled the vacuum of our ignominious withdrawal from the Middle East, even as the mullahs move ever closer to acquiring nuclear weapons. Russia, Iran's improbable ally, bombs civilians in Syria, kills the Syrian fighters we have trained, intimidates its neighbor Ukraine, strengthens its take-over of the Crimea, and unremittingly pursues its interests with disregard for international law and contempt for our feeble protests. Iraq, for which thousands of Americans bled and died, is now a puppet state of Iran. Afghanistan is poised to be overrun by the Taliban in a few years, "ISIS/al Qaeda 2.0, continues to inspire franchises throughout the world and to murder European and American citizens." So much for the belief, frequently heard in the months after the attacks of 9/11, that "this changes everything." The smoking ruins and 3000 dead surely had awoken us from our delusions that the "end of history" and a "new world order" had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, "a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak," as President George Bush once said. The following decade seemed to confirm this optimism. Didn't we stop Saddam Hussein’s aggression against his neighbors? Didn't we punish the Serbs for their unappeasable depredations in the Balkans? With American military power providing the muscle, the institutions of international cooperation like NATO would patrol and protect the network of new democracies that were set to evolve into versions of Western nations and enjoy such godsends as individual rights, diplomatic freedom, leisure and prosperity, broad-mindedness for minorities, equality for women, and a benevolent secularism. The gruesome mayhem of 9/11 should have alerted us to the fact many Muslims didn't get the memo about history's demise. Indeed, long before that tragic day in September, we had been warned that history still had some unpleasant surprises. Theorists of neo-jihadism for decades had laid out the case for war against the infidel West and its aggression against Islam. Is it not the nature of Islam to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations and extend its power to the entire planet. Do you think Islam, it’s Ayatollah’s and Mullah’s, who study jihad not understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world? This religion is not one of peace, otherwise its writings who paint a different picture. Does not Islam say: “Kill all the unbelievers." Were we not forewarned by jihadists that a religious war would come? But few of those responsible for our security and interests had ears to hear or eyes to see. Not even when the words became bloody deeds did we listen. The bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, which killed 241 servicemen. The humiliating televised abuse of our dead soldiers in Mogadishu, followed by our withdrawal. The first World Trade Center attack, an operation inspired by al Qaeda and traditional jihadist doctrine. And the last warning came in October of 2000, when the destroyer Cole was attacked by a fishing boat loaded with explosive. Yet during these two decades of attacks that proved the jihadists' words were not just bluster, we did little in response. We interpreted the attacks as crimes, not battles in a war, and reflections of poverty, autocracy, or vague "evil," rather than as the fulfillment of Allah's divine commands. Instead, Clinton launched cruise missiles that made a lot of noise but accomplished nothing, limited as those attacks were by timid rules of engagement. His foreign policy was internationalist and idealist, seeing the spread of democracy and the promotion of human rights as paramount in foreign affairs. America's presence needed to be reduced in the world, and the use of force should be a last resort, and even then carefully calibrated to avoid international condemnation and American casualties. "Dialogue" and "outreach" were preferable! The wages of that delusion were the burned and dismembered bodies in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. This history is worth reviewing, for all these mistakes, these failures of imagination, these indulgences of naïve idealism, these sacrifices of our security and interests to political advantage, all comprise the "everything" that 9/11 was supposed to "change." But here we are, fifteen years later, with a similar history of folly. I am of the opinion, George W. Bush pursued a delusional program of democracy promotion in Iraq and Afghanistan, with little appreciation for the profound cultural differences between Islam and the West. But he at least left his successor a stabilized Iraq, which Obama quickly abandoned just to fulfill a campaign promise and assert his progressive agenda. Did not Obama draw "red lines" in the sand that were not to be crossed, only to do nothing when they were crossed, and to sacrifice this country's credibility in his pursuit of the disastrous deal with Iran, disregarding several decades worth of American blood? Was not ISIS allowed to flourish in the vacuum created by our withdrawal, creating a bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning “war of all against all”?  1.      Perhaps worst of all, Obama has turned jihad denial into a fatal disease. He is not alone in this delusion, for "religion of peace" and "nothing to do with Islam" have been mantras chanted by our foreign policy savants going back to the Iranian Revolution. At present those devotees of Jihad, all have grounded their violence and aggression in Islamic scripture and tradition. Our self-righteous Western analysts and advocators dismiss the jihadists' explication as a "hijacking" or "distortion" of the "true" Islam, presuming to understand the Islamic faith better than devout Muslims do. So we half-heartedly fight an enemy whose name we cannot even say, and whose religion of violence we desperately distort into a religion of peace and tolerance. Meanwhile, like Bill Clinton, and now Obama we use bombs and drones having an appearance or manner that is appealing on television. Let us call it what it is, telegenic marketing tools to hide our failure of nerve and short-sighted political calculations.  So fifteen years later, we still sleep. And don't expect things to change after November. Neither candidate has shown any indication he or she is willing to make the hard decisions required to destroy ISIS and reaffirm American prestige. Trump issues vague threats about "bombing the s---" out of ISIS, while Hillary chatters about "smart power" and "coalitions," doubling down on Obama's failing policy. But no one proposes using the mind-concentrating levels of force, including troops as well as bombs, necessary to repair our broken foreign policy in the Middle East. Too many voters are in an isolationist mood, sick of wars and casualties, and concerned more about jobs and the economy. Being both a retired career Army Officer, who served in two conflicts and a retired North Carolina teacher, I to, am concerned about the state of the nation, its moods, its casualties of war, jobs and the economy. The attacks on 9/11 supposedly "changed everything." When it comes to foreign policy, they changed nothing.  Do you, the reader, like me tremble to think how much worse the destruction and death will have to be to wake us up?