US' failing wars on terror

ALL THE PRESIDENTS’ WARS: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror

By Peter Bergen

Published by Norton

401 pages $32.99 

Quite early in All the Presidents’ Wars, the journalist Peter Bergen’s chronicle of the “war on terror,” the reader is likely to conclude that the groups of American officials who have presided over the past two and a half decades of conflict in West Asia consist of idiots, fools or knaves. The further one progresses into this damning and meticulously researched book, the more this assessment seems confirmed. 

In fairness, the war on terror hasn’t been an unmitigated catastrophe. The development of advanced weaponised drones facilitated the killing of Qaeda leaders at long range and with little risk. American military commanders also eventually adopted counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq that proved very effective, even if they failed to change the ultimate outcome of that conflict. And while it is difficult to get all hopped up over something that didn’t happen, the fact is that there hasn’t been a large-scale terrorist attack on American soil since September 11. 

 

Bergen is distinctly suited to tell this sprawling story. A veteran journalist, professor and Cable News Network (CNN) national security analyst, Bergen had his first major brush with history in early 1997 when he journeyed to Afghanistan as part of a CNN team that was interviewing an Islamic extremist then barely on anyone’s radar: Osama bin Laden. In the years since, he has written or edited a dozen or so books on the themes of terrorism and counterinsurgency. 

He also is in possession of a formidable Rolodex. In the wake of fiasco, there is nothing more likely to get an American government official to blab to a journalist than the fear that one’s bureaucratic rivals are already doing so. It is testament to both Bergen’s tenacity and the sheer number of fiascos under discussion here that his collection of interview subjects runs to over 500 people. 

The result is less an edge-of-your-seat narrative than a steady accretion of revealing anecdotes and insider details that transport the reader from surprise to a peculiar sense of wonderment at the scale of the ineptitude. 

Bergen delivers a particularly scorching portrait of the way George W Bush groped for pretexts to invade Iraq after 9/11, and then expended tremendous energy trying to minimise the political fallout as the quagmire there deepened. Also coming in for Bergen’s opprobrium: the first administration of Donald Trump. Ironically, Trump’s original 2017 team of foreign and defence policy advisers included some of the military officers who’d proved most successful in fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Trump preferred to follow his “instinct” over anything that smacked of strategy, consistency or logic. 

Trump often seemed most interested in optics. In one darkly hilarious anecdote, Bergen recounts how Melania Trump inexplicably wandered into the Situation Room on October 27, 2019, while her husband and his advisers were watching a live feed of an operation to kill or capture Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS. 

After an American K9 dog chased Baghdadi into a tunnel where he blew himself up with a suicide vest, the high-level discussion turned to how the president might best convey the news to the public. “You should talk about the dog,” Melania advised. “Everybody loves dogs.” Proof that Trump does sometimes listen to advice, he told the press about the K9, which had been slightly injured — “a beautiful dog, a talented dog.” 

Far less amusing, in Bergen’s view, was Trump’s betrayal of the American-allied Afghan government. Anxious to be able to announce a withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan before the 2020 election, Trump had his representatives negotiate a peace settlement with the Taliban while excluding the democratically elected government, enabling him to announce before the election that the last American soldiers would leave the country as early as May 2021. 

As Bergen archly points out, when one side in peace talks offers up a withdrawal date, the talks are no longer a negotiation but a surrender. While holding Trump chiefly responsible for this shameful episode, Bergen also blames Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, for failing to countermand the deal. That decision turned an embarrassing retreat into a truly disgraceful and tragic one. The image of a quavering America, Bergen argues, may also have helped embolden Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine the following year. 

One might wish that All the Presidents’ Wars was coming out a few months from now, in time for the full magnitude of the stupidity attending Trump’s war of choice against Iran to be realised. As has been the case so many times over the past 25 years, this folly, too, was peddled as part of the war on terror, but undertaken with even less forethought than its predecessors. Incredibly, Trump seemed to take no notice of how the weaponised drone has enabled Ukraine to keep the vastly larger Russian Army at bay for over four years. Nor did he seem to consider how this innovation might factor into a conflict with Iran, one of the world’s pioneers in the manufacturing of cheap and sophisticated drones. 

A major theme of Bergen’s book is the repeated failure of American leaders to plan for “the day after” a military action is taken, but in Iran, he makes clear, Trump didn’t even plan for “the day of.” As a result, it is now all but certain that the US is headed for another major defeat in its war on terror. For the gory details on that, though, one will have to wait for Bergen’s next book.

 

The reviewer is the author, most recently, of King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation