After 10 years, what have we GWOT?

Today's post is my attempt to digest Abe Greenwald's article in Commentary this month. He has a very different view of Bush II than the subject of my last post, but that doesn't mean that I agree with everything he has to say either. I encourage you to read it, lengthy as it is, and form your own opinions, but as a primer, here are a few things I liked/took issue with:

1. Over the course of the 10 years, American authorities foiled more than two dozen al-Qaeda plots. Those averted tragedies were not foremost on the minds of revelers who gathered to celebrate Bin Laden’s demise on May 1 at Ground Zero, Times Square, and in front of the White House. But if a mere few of the plots had materialized, those spaces might not even have been open to public assembly. 9/11 was the result of systematic intelligence failures in the US, and intelligence agencies are more reliably evaluated on how much they can prevent or influence. On that basis the lack of post-9/11 al Qaeda attacks in the USA can be taken as a "win".



2. It was the Freedom Agenda of the George W. Bush administration—delineated and formulated as a conscious alternative to jihadism—that showed the way. Indeed, the costly American nation-building in Iraq has now led to the creation of the world’s first and only functioning democratic Arab state. One popular indictment of Bush maintains that he settled on the Freedom Agenda as justification for war after U.S. forces and inspectors found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The record shows otherwise. “A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East,” he said before the invasion, in February 2003. “Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both.” I'm a bit ambivalent about the end result, but I have maintained for years that Bush invaded Iraq because he believed that Democracy conquers all, and most emphatically NOT for oil. The (democratically elected) Iraqi government freezing American oil companies out in favour of Chinese ones seems to vindicate much of my view of cause and effect in "Iraqi/Enduring Freedom".



3. Incensed civil libertarians on the right, for their part, also fail to acknowledge some extraordinary facts. The TSA pat-downs, no-fly lists, travel restrictions, and legislation aimed at stopping would-be terrorist attacks have in fact worked. Ok, I take this a bit out of context, but I don't agree 100%. Even if it has worked as well as claimed, what sort of price should we pay for our freedom? I suspect it could be dialed back a bit and be just as effective while being more efficient, but the ways to make that happen will make the left froth at the mouth (e.g. Profiling).

It's long, but worth your time. I've seen things before which suggest that G.W. Bush will be looked back on more kindly by Posterity for "The Bush Doctrine", and this piece is a brick on that path. Obama has inherited any successes he's had in foreign policy from the system (mostly intact) built back then, because a lot of it works. I still hold that Iraq could have been done a lot better if it needed to be done at all, and that too will be laid at the Bush Administration's door by Posterity, rather like the dead animals your cat barfs up on your step.

As Winston Churchill said, “War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.” Indeed, and things are rarely as simple as people would like them to be. I retain the right to change my mind to fit the facts, but I'll fight any inversion of that. Go read this and tell me what YOU think of it.