Why Al-Qaeda Won

[Better Believe It]

Why Al-Qaeda Won
By Walden Bello
Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines and a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.
September 21, 2011


Disregarding the lessons of Vietnam and the British and Soviet debacles in Afghanistan, the Bush administration drove the United States into two unwinnable wars against highly motivated insurgents in the Middle East as bin Laden watched with satisfaction, living unperturbed under the protection of an American ally, the Pakistani military, in the peaceable garrison town of Abbottabad. It was not the scenario he had envisaged, but he was not about to quibble if the Bush administration, owing to its drive for unipolar hegemony, placed the United States on the road to overextension, which was, after all, his strategic aim.

By the end of the Bush administration, the United States had spent nearly $1.5 trillion on the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the estimates of Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz. This was staggering. But as the wars were being pursued, the American public did not realize their true cost becausethe Bush administration chose to pay for the war via yearly emergency supplemental appropriations, which amounted, as analyst Doug Bandow put it, to a “pay-as-you-go” system.

Bush, in the midst of a recession in the early 2000s, avoided raising taxes to fund his wars since that was a sure fire way of eliciting public opposition to these adventures. Indeed, he cut taxes on the rich. The preferred course of action was massive borrowing, a course that eventually added some $1 trillion to the national debt.Afghanistan and Iraq were, in turn, part of a massive defense buildup, funded by debt, to achieve the unchallengeable hegemonic position the neoconservatives sought. The defense budget rose 70 percent: from $412 billion, when Bush entered office, to $700 billion when he left. Paying for the defense buildup by borrowing was a major factor that contributed to the rise in the ratio of the national debt to gross domestic product from 56 percent in 2001 when Bush took office to 84 percent when he left in 2008. By then, the government owed its domestic and foreign creditors a whopping $10.4 trillion.

But 9/11 triggered a chain reaction that not only resulted, as in Vietnam, in military and political overextension. It also did irreparable and perhaps permanent damage to the economic capability of the United States to wage imperial wars. As former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it to West Point cadets last February, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”

Read the full article at:

http://www.fpif.org/articles/why_al-qaeda_won

[Tesha]

1. "The Princess Bride" got it right:

"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders --
The most famous of which is 'never get involved
in a land war in Asia' ..."



Tesha