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Years Later 10 March of Folly


in the war on terror, were deposed this year, and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh barely survived an assassination attempt.


into the Islamic world, we caused the infection to spread. And now America is coming home with some of our oldest friends alienated. Pakistan, an ally from the fi rst days of the Cold War — Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane fl ew out of Peshawar in 1960 — has turned hostile. Blowback from the mission to kill bin Laden has been severe.


Turkey, a NATO ally that fought beside us in Korea, refused to let Bush use its territory to invade Iraq. Ankara has lately confronted Israel over Gaza, repaired relations with Tehran, and begun to highlight her identity as an Islamic state. The auto- crats of Egypt and Tunisia, our allies


Cairo has allowed Iran’s warships to transit Suez, brokered the unity agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, opened its bor- der to Gaza, and is re-establishing relations with Tehran. American dis- pleasure is politely ignored. Arab attitudes toward us are even harsher than in Bush’s fi nal year. Only 5 percent of Egyptians hold a favorable view of the United States. In Morocco and Jordan, the fi gures are 10 and 12 percent, respectively. In our own country, Iraq cost the Republicans control of both houses of Congress in 2006 and the presi- dency in 2008, as the Democratic Party nominated and elected an anti- war man of the left. Obamacare is thus among the fruits of Bush’s war. And what did we gain? With the Shia regime in Baghdad tilting to Iran, Muqtada al-Sadr a rising power, Sunni, Shia, and Kurd still at sword’s point, and terrorism returning, was that war worth it? Was it wise to invest 10 years of blood and trea- sure trying to build a modern nation out of Afghanistan? Or was that, in author-historian Barbara Tuchman’s phrase, “The March of Folly”? Where did we go wrong? What brought us to the point, 10 years after 9/11, where we are heading home with the future of Afghanistan and Iraq in doubt?


For both these wars, George W. Bush bears full responsibility. For he was the indispensable man in expand- ing the mission in Afghanistan from taking down the Taliban and kill- ing bin Laden to nation-building in the Hindu Kush. And he was the


Marvel Comics released A Moment of Silence benefit issue, honoring the heroes and victims of 9/11.


indispensable man in launching an invasion of Iraq that none of his pre- decessors whom this writer served — Nixon, Ford, Reagan — would have launched. Nor would Bush’s father, who ordered Gen. Schwarzkopf to halt at the Iraqi border after 100 hours of ground fi ghting in Desert Storm, have done so.


So why did George W. do it? A rare blend of moral arrogance, ideology, and ignorance of history produced what Gen. William Odom called “the worst strategic disaster in U.S. history.”


For Bush, 9/11 was a road-to- Damascus experience.


As he had been spontaneously


converted in midlife to evangelical Christianity, the attack of 9/11 so seared itself into his soul that he became a different man. Consider: In November 1999, candidate Bush had repudiated the “indispensable nation” triumphalism of the Clintons and Madeleine Albright.


“Let us have a foreign policy that


refl ects the American character,” he had said at the Reagan Library, “The modesty of true strength. The humil- ity of true greatness.” Debating with Al Gore, Bush went further: “The United States must be humble . . . in how we treat nations that are fi guring out how to chart their own course.” Hearken now to the post-9/11


Bush. “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators [have] weapons of mass destruction,” said Bush, “Deterrence is less likely to work against rogue states willing to take risks, gambling with the lives of their people.” Yet containment and deterrence had worked with Mao and Stalin, far greater monsters than the petty tyrants Bush faced. Not only were the core foreign policy doctrines


SEPTEMBER 2011 / NEWSMAX / 9|11: A DECADE LATER 63


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