The squandering of that moment of national unity

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Repealing The Bush Doctrine

Robert L. Borosage
September 11, 2006


September 11, 2001, remains etched in memory—the crystalline beauty of that day, the gothic horror of the violation, the heroism of those who came to rescue. Americans rallied as one. The world, appalled at the crime, stood at our side. “We are all Americans,” read the headline of Le Monde.

The squandering of that moment of national unity and international solidarity by the Bush administration in the past five years rivals the enormity of the original attack. Yet the administration proceeds even to this day as if its ruinous policies are the only real choice if we are to protect ourselves from future acts of terror. They are not. It is time for a new vision that accomplishes what the administration has manifestly failed to do: neutralize terrorist networks, starve extremists of the money and motivation that fuel their activities,and build international alliances that actually leave the world safer and more secure.

The administration’s failures are apparent. Americans are divided as the White House continues to wield the war on terror as a partisan club. Allies are alienated. Fury in the Muslim world is on the rise. Osama bin Laden is free and has set up camp in Pakistan. Terrorist acts are up dramatically across the world. Our nation’s credibility is shredded by the lies leading up to the invasion of Iraq; our nation’s honor besmirched by the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the gulag of secret prisons and use of torture still coming to light. American forces are mired in a bloody and endless civil war in Iraq. The Taliban is back on the rise in Afghanistan, with the NATO commander pleading for more forces. The nonpartisan 9/11 Commission gives the administration a failing grade on homeland security. The conservative Supreme Court rebukes the president for his imperial disdain for America’s laws and constitution. Career military officials censure the administration for misleading and weakening the military. Five years later, America is more isolated, more hated and less safe.

It is worth understanding the roots of these failures. The neoconservatives who dominated administration policymaking got the threat wrong, the strategy wrong, the priorities wrong and the facts wrong. They scorned the threat posed by bin Laden and stateless terrorists both before 9/11 and after. They disdained international alliances and the United Nations, believing that the United States could act alone and others would follow. They believed that the “shock and awe” of U.S. military power would suffice to cow the terrorists. They claimed—falsely—that there were weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein was an ally of bin Laden and other Islamist terrorists. While pursuing the Iraq fiasco, which had nothing to do with 9/11 or Islamist terror, the administration turned from the attack on bin Laden in Afghanistan and shut down the unit tasked with tracking him down.

Bin Laden, as he has said repeatedly, wars on us because of our policies, not because of our freedoms. He gains adherents because Muslims see us as waging war on Islam, supporting repressive dictatorships to gain access to oil, stationing troops throughout the region, supporting brutal repression of Muslims in Chechnya and elsewhere, and arming and emboldening Israel against the Palestinians. The problem is not that the United States has intervened too little in the Middle East. Bin Laden’s appeal comes from the reality that the United States is permanently engaged in the region, supporting unpopular regimes against their own people.


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Stirring Up The Dust At Ground Zero (9-11-2006)