Bin Laden and al-Qaida brand of jihadism, post-9/11

In a post yesterday, I quoted Michael Moore saying, "In the end, Bin Laden won."

And I agreed with him, in the sense that Bin Laden had a plan that was evil and surely mad. As I described it, his plan was to pull off a spectacular terrorist attack to which the US would react with domestic repression and foolish military actions against Muslim countries that would generate more of the kind of jihadism he was promoting.

Nelly Lahoud takes a different perspective in Bin Laden's Catastrophic Success: Al Qaeda Changed the World--but Not in the Way It Expected (Foreign Affairs 100:5, Sept-Oct 2021) She is reporting on her research into documents seized by the US during the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which Bin Laden was killed.

The Abbottabad papers include handwritten notes that bin Laden composed in 2002, disclosing "the birth of the idea of 11 September." They reveal that it was in late October 2000, within weeks of the USS Cole attack, that bin Laden decided to attack the American homeland. They also reveal his reasoning at the time: bin Laden believed that "the entire Muslim world is subjected to the reign of blasphemous regimes and to American hegemony." The 9/11 attack was intended to "break the fear of this false god and destroy the myth of American invincibility."

About two weeks after the attack, bin Laden released a short statement in the form of an ultimatum addressed to the United States. "I have only a few words for America and its people," he declared. "I swear by God almighty, who raised the heavens without effort, that neither America nor anyone who lives there will enjoy safety until safety becomes a reality for us living in Palestine and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad." The attack had an electrifying effect, and in the years that immediately followed, thousands of young Muslims around the world committed themselves in various ways to bin Laden's cause. But a close reading of bin Laden's correspondence reveals that the world's most notorious terrorist was ignorant of the limits of his own metier.

She writes that "although bin Laden's correspondence indicates that he was well versed in Islamic history, particularly the seventh-century military campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad, he had only a perfunctory understanding of modern international relations."

That was reflected in the 9/11 attack itself, which represented a severe miscalculation: bin Laden never anticipated that the United States would go to war in response to the assault. Indeed, he predicted that in the wake of the attack, the American people would take to the streets, replicating the protests against the Vietnam War and calling on their government to withdraw from Muslim-majority countries. Instead, Americans rallied behind U.S. President George W. Bush and his "war on terror." In October 2001, when a U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan to hunt down al Qaeda and dislodge the Taliban regime, which had hosted the terrorist group since 1996, bin Laden had no plan to secure his organization's survival. [my emphasis]

Lahoud's article indicates that she is citing a 2002 document on that point. So it's not entirely clear from this account if Bin Laden was pleasantly surprised that the US reaction was more than disruptive domestic protest, or if he was dismayed at a previous miscalculation.

But Bin Laden presumably did not hope for his own organization to be devastated. And, in fact, though there are still terrorist groups that indicate some kind of allegiance to Al Qaida's ideas, as Lahoud recounts, Bin Laden's Al Qaida of 2001 was quickly devasted and disbursed. As she puts it, "the al Qaeda organization was broken, its brand lived on."

Their communications reveal that for the rest of bin Laden's life, the al Qaeda organization never recovered the ability to launch attacks abroad. (The group did carry out attacks in November 2002 in Kenya but was able to do so only because the operatives tasked with planning them had been dispatched to East Africa in late 2000 and early 2001, before everything fell apart for al Qaeda in Afghanistan.) By 2014, bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, found himself more preoccupied with delegitimizing the Islamic State (or ISIS), the jihadi group that eventually overtook al Qaeda, than with rallying Muslims against American hegemony. Still, it is impossible to look back at the past two decades and not be struck by the degree to which a small band of extremists led by a charismatic outlaw managed to influence global politics. Bin Laden did change the world--just not in the ways that he wanted. [my emphasis]

Lahoud also argues, "The Obama administration, for its part, overestimated the positive effects that bin Laden's death and the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would have on the fight against jihadism."

She concludes on a mixed note about the current lagacy of Bin Laden's brand of jihadism:

... Washington and its allies have come to realize (or at least they should have) that an open-ended war on terrorism is futile and that a successful counterterrorism policy must address the legitimate political grievances that al Qaeda claims to champion--for example, U.S. support for dictatorships in the Middle East.

Washington cannot quite claim victory against al Qaeda and its ilk, which retain the ability to inspire deadly, if small-scale, attacks. The past two decades, however, have made clear just how little jihadi groups can hope to accomplish. They stand a far better chance of achieving eternal life in paradise than of bringing the United States to its knees. [my emphasis]

Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 2 of 4)

Bacevich implicitly uses 1991 as the end of the Cold War, a more clearly defined dividing point than the Owl of Minerva can usually identify. He takes the war that year to push Iraq out of Kuwait as the historical demarcation line, a conflict called at the time the Gulf War. (The beginning of the Cold War is conventionally dated somewhere between 1945 to 1948.)

The Emerald City Presidencies

The press and public perception of that war would prove to be a crucial element of the often miserable US experiences with wars the next three decades:

The conclusion of the Cold War showed that the U.S. military could win without fighting. The Persian Gulf War showed not only that America's armed forces could still fight, but that they were seemingly invincible.

So the nation's military narrative added a chapter: After Vietnam there now came Desert Storm. The latter did not expunge the former. Yet the military failure in Southeast Asia now lost much of its relevance. By putting a ragtag Iraqi army to flight, the United States had emphatically "kicked the Vietnam syndrome," as President George H. W. Bush put it at the time. With that, reticence about using force evaporated, especially in elite circles. In a post-Cold War world that awaited shaping, America's manifest superiority in all things military positioned it to do whatever needed to be done.

This is key to understanding Bacevich’s understanding of what the book’s subtitle describes as the US squandering its Cold War victory and the destructive hubris that was integral to it. Freed from the balance-of-power considerations of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the policy limits imposed by the negative public view of the Vietnam War, the US could now indulge in war after war without the prospect of a major domestic political backlash.

Bacevich quotes a prime example of the American Exceptionalist rhetoric characteristic of the Emerald City era, this one from Colin Powell in 1992:

No other nation on earth has the power we possess. More important, no other nation on earth has the trusted power that we possess. We are obligated to lead. If the free world is to harvest the hope and fulfill the promise that our great victory in the Cold War has offered us, America must shoulder the responsibility of its power. The last best hope of earth has no other choice. We must lead.

In reality, the enormous popularity that President G.W. Bush enjoyed in 1991 after the successful conclusion of the war with Iraq did not prove sufficient to get him re-elected against Bill Clinton in 1992.

As the Owl of Minerva can now clearly see, the “successful” conclusion of the First Gulf War actually meant continuing low-level air war of the US against Iraq, punctuated by the big escalation of the very unfortunately named Operation Desert Fox in 1998. (See: Andrew Corseman, The Military Effectiveness Of Desert Fox: A Warning About the Limits of the Revolution in Military Affairs and Joint Vision 2010 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 02/16/1999)

It led further – by the conscious decision of the Cheney-Bush Administration with the explicit support of leading Democratic Senators including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry – to the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, whose very deadly consequences are still playing out in 2020. The Iraq War also dramatically increased the regional power of Iran by removing the balancing power of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led Iraq. And, of course, at the time Bacevich’s book appeared in January 2020, the US was on the verge of war with Iran.

Bacevich traces the broad path of US wars and assertions of military dominance through the Clinton Administration and its interventions in the Balkan Wars:

In the ceaselessly updated chronicle of the American military experience, the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns - Operation Deliberate Force, lasting just three weeks in the late summer of 1995, and Operation Allied Force, spread across seventy-eight days in the spring of 1999-have long since been crowded out. Both featured what military theorists were then calling "precision bombing." In both cases, American air forces operated at high altitudes and faced negligible resistance, with U.S. losses all but nonexistent.

... during Clinton's eight-year tenure as commander in chief, these were the only victories the U.S. military was able to claim. As such, at least for a time, they shaped American expectations regarding the use of force. Here, it seemed, was evidence that the United States had solved the riddle of making armed might politically purposeful. [The military idea of] Full-Spectrum Dominance was no longer a theory. Bosnia and Kosovo made it fact.

While stressing this feature of the Clinton Administration that continued the hubristic direction of Emerald City, he makes it clear that the Bush-Cheney Administration took a qualitative (and bad) next step:

The central theme of Bill Clinton's tenure in office had been globalization. The central theme of George W. Bush's tenure became war, which some in his administration conceived as a sort of complement to globalization - another approach to bringing the world into conformity with American preferences. While Clinton had dabbled in war, the events of September 11 prompted Bush to embrace it wholeheartedly. Wars that still today follow their meandering course ultimately consumed his presidency.

The name devised to justify those conflicts-the Global War on Terrorism - amounted to an exercise in misdirection. … As an explanation for U.S. policy after 9/11, terrorism comes nowhere near to being adequate. Indeed, much like the shelling of Fort Sumter in 1861 or the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon served less as a proximate cause for war than as a catalyst. [my emphasis]

And he describes the various arrogant assumptions that flourished in the Bush-Cheney foreign policy that “went altogether off the rails”, a task which Bacevich was diligently performing in real time during that Presidency in his published work and public appearances:

The Bush Eschatology struck me even then as vainglorious, if not altogether blasphemous. Yet by no means did it signify a fundamental change in the trajectory of post-Cold War American statecraft. On the contrary, it reaffirmed in the strongest possible terms the premises underlying those policies. [my emphasis]

Noting that he himself voted twice for Obama as President, he carefully points out what he sees as Obama’s positive accomplishment. But Obama did not break from the four elements that Bacevich identifies as characterizing the Emerald City era, despite the symbolically transformative nature of the election of the first African-American President.

Obama “saved globalized neoliberalism”, he writes, but did not substantively transform it. “Sadly, the mendacity and malfeasance that had paved the way for the Great Recession went essentially unpunished.” Through policies like his escalation in the Afghanistan War, the failure to fully extricate American troops from Iraq, his extensive use of drone attacks, and the 2011 intervention in Libya, Obama modified but did not fundamentally alter the kind of militarized global dominance approach of the post-1989 era.

He has a particular criticism of this moment in the Libya intervention when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about the torture-murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi by rebels:

On March 19, Western air attacks on the Gaddafi regime commenced. By October, the regime had collapsed and Gaddafi himself was dead. On national TV, a laughing Clinton bragged, "We came, we saw, he died."

Yet liquidating Gaddafi no more settled the matter than the fall of Baghdad ended the Iraq War. His ouster merely paved the way for a years-long civil war. As Libya descended into anarchy, the United States largely washed its hands of further responsibility. Years later, Clinton was still insisting that the intervention she had done so much to promote exemplified "smart power at its best," the apparent measure of merit being not the results achieved but the dearth of U.S. combat casualties.

... I also found her premature and unseemly victory dance regarding Libya indicative of someone possessed of a dangerously deficient understanding of war. [my emphasis]

Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City

Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies

Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective

Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”