The war, Bush announced, would begin with Al Qaeda, but would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” The global war on terror, he said, was the “inescapable calling of our generation.”
The Bush administration used the concept of global terrorists to create a government and a foreign policy which are downright dangerous. According to the Kennedy School's Samantha Power, our justice system has been violated; strong-arming our former allies has alienated them in large part with the result that we can no longer count on them for legitimate needs; "war" allowed an insupportable expansion of executive powers; international laws were ignored or circumvented and weakened; and we may be left with an attitude toward our military that cripples them in the future.
By branding the cause a war and calling the enemy terror, the administration has lumped like with unlike foes and elevated hostile elements from the ranks of the criminal (stigmatized in all societies) to the ranks of soldiers of war (a status that carries connotations of sacrifice and courage). Although anybody taking aim at the American superpower would have seemed an underdog, the White House’s approach enhanced the terrorists’ cachet, accentuating the image of self-sacrificing Davids taking up slingshots against a rich, flaccid, hypocritical Goliath.
In a review in the New York Times of four recent books about elements of military and political strategy -- including the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Power notes that Bush's (and Cheney's) greatest failure from the beginning was to lump together all criminal activities having America and allies as a target as "the war on terror." The results of Bush's policies are not good. We are left with a legacy which may make it far more difficult to counter threats in the future.
The Bush administration’s unwillingness to admit failure causes it to cling to a flawed approach rather than revisit its premises, adopt a new strategy or experiment with new tactics.
The president, apparently, remains determined to treat the American people as if they have no role to play in what will, in fact, be a “global struggle of uncertain duration.” In a January interview with Jim Lehrer, Bush was asked why he hadn’t called for more Americans to “sacrifice something.” He said: “Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.”
The effect of such an attitude is not simply that the American military will continue to bear the lion’s share of the national security burden — a burden, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual practically screams out, the military cannot meet alone. It is that the American public, with little faith in the credibility of the government’s claims, may deny even cleareyed leaders the resources they need to meet the complex demands of neutralizing modern threats.
