Standing atop the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center three days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush pledged, to resounding cheers from the first responders gathered around him, “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” Although the US homeland has remained relatively protected over the last quarter-century, analyses in Middle East Policy’s new special issue show that Bush’s war on terrorism misread the threat from nonstate actors, misunderstood the lessons of history, and locked the American people into wars that continue to shape the regional and global orders.
This special issue, 9/11 at 25: The World It Created, presents Middle East Policy’s coverage of the attacks on New York and Washington and their aftermath, from analyses by practitioners and scholars envisioning a path forward, to the roots and development of Islamist violence against the West, to the misjudgments and traps of the war on terrorism. Readers can also access an early view of our forthcoming fall issue through this link. If you find this article useful, please forward it to others you believe will benefit. You can register to receive our weekly updates here. And please follow us on the social media platforms X and LinkedIn.
After the attacks on Washington and New York, Bush promptly zeroed in on al-Qaeda’s home base of Afghanistan, driving the Taliban from power in the fall of 2001 and attacking the sanctuary from which 9/11 had been planned. Stephen Van Evera calls this part of the strategy “clearly the right move.” However, he argues, the administration soon lost sight of its most dangerous enemy, shifting resources from Afghanistan toward regime change in Iraq even before Osama bin Laden, his co-conspirators, and their capacities for violence had been defeated and destroyed. The war on terrorism was becoming something much broader than a campaign against the organization that had attacked and posed a major threat to the United States. Just as important, Van Evera contends, the Bush administration subsequently “made little effort to win others’ support for its Mideast policies,” which limited potential help from key regional and external actors.
Bush’s failure to cultivate allies may have been driven by what Ian S. Lustick observes was the president’s “immense amount” of domestic political capital. But Lustick accuses the administration of being far more interested in toppling Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, as this had been a “long-cherished goal” of many top American officials. The 9/11 attacks, Lustick argues in the special issue, created an opportunity structure to pursue a regime-change agenda in Iraq that had been obstructed by key institutions in the federal government, from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA. The war on terror was thus effectively delinked from al-Qaeda’s responsibility for September 11, creating a self-perpetuating trap.
However, the chaos of the American military interventions squandered both the domestic and the regional support for Washington’s reaction to the attacks. Indeed, retired American General William E. Odom, the former head of the National Security Agency, declared the Iraq invasion “the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” James A. Russell contends that this was due to three outcomes of the Iraq War that damaged American interests:
- It overturned the regional balance of power.
- It weakened the standing and capacity of the United States as a security guarantor in the Middle East.
- It produced a more insecure regional order.
“If Iraq proves to be a precursor to a prolonged period of strategic instability as new actors vie for political power throughout the region,” Russell writes, “the [military] infrastructure established by the British and passed on to the United States may prove to be a casualty of war.” The author thus sees naval power as likely to grow in importance as forward-based ground forces become less viable. This is fascinating context through which to assess the current US war on Iran.
Although many critics saw Bush as motivated by Israel’s interests, Ari Barbalat’s piece in the special issue provides a counterpoint by closely examining whether the war on terrorism and US actions in the region actually made the American ally safer. The key example is his assertion that the Iraq War diverted attention from an al-Qaeda threat that endangered Israel and Jews more generally. In addition, “the Bush administration had the opportunity to come to terms with Iran over both its nuclear program and its hostility to Israel, but dropped the ball.” A 2003 Iranian proposal had offered full cooperation against al-Qaeda, tighter IAEA controls and extensive inspections, help with stabilizing Iraq, a political reorientation of Hezbollah, acceptance of a two-state solution, and an end to support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Barbalat says Bush officials neglected the offer and subsequently rebuffed talks.
This US tendency to go it alone and impose its will across the region runs counter to what Anthony H. Cordesman terms “the real war on terrorism,” which “can only be won within Islam and at a religious and ideological level.” The veteran strategist therefore lays out a model that he contends will be far more effective in stemming the global threat. There are three central elements:
- Define the threat more precisely. Cordesman argues that most terrorism is local or national; the genuinely transnational threat was specifically violent neo-Salafi Sunni Islamist extremism represented by al-Qaeda.
- Make Muslim societies, not Western armies, the primary actors. American military power can destroy sanctuaries, protect targets, and buy time, but it cannot change societies and ideologies. “As Afghanistan and Iraq have shown,” Cordesman writes, “military and counterterrorist battles need to be won by local and Islamic forces, not ‘occupiers,’ ‘crusaders’ and ‘neo-imperialists.’” Prolonged Western deployments can actually produce more recruits for extremists.
- Abandon externally imposed political transformation in favor of evolutionary local reform. Calls for regime change and attempts to impose Western political models can generate instability and resistance. Instead, the United States should work with imperfect existing governments and prioritize security, effective governance, economic opportunity, and locally sustainable reform.
One of the keys is patience. “The West needs to accept the fact that an evolutionary approach to change means working with many local leaders who are not democratic, fall short of Western ideals or are ‘traditional’ in character,” Cordesman asserts. “Calls for regime change and other efforts that introduce political instability and produce more resistance to reform will do far more harm than good.”
But instability was the order of the day, and global jihad was not destroyed. Despite the enormous US investment in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency after 9/11, Brynjar Lia contends, jihadism expanded as an ideology and an international threat. He calls the overall counterterrorism campaign largely counterproductive and argues that its predominantly kinetic approach helped create a “jihadi recruitment bonanza.” Lia shows that the state breakdowns and upheavals of the Arab Spring provided jihadists with opportunities for expansion, while military interventions continued across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, and elsewhere.
Regional governments adopted the US rhetoric and methods of the war on terrorism, with largely counterproductive effects. “Military action has sapped public support for counterterrorism efforts and undone soft power campaigns to stem recruitment and support for jihadi groups,” Lia argues. “Only when jihadism is conceptualized anew based on a willingness to accept that it represents a political insurgency brought forth by real-world grievances can a sound strategy for stemming its continued expansion be constructed.”
9/11 at 25: The World It Created
A Middle East Policy Special Issue
ANALYZING THE SHOCK ATTACKS
Bin Laden and the New Age of Global Terrorism
John O. Voll
At War With Utopian Fanatics
Alan Richards
America and the War on Terror
William B. Quandt
New Friends, New Enemies and Oil Politics: Causes and Consequences of the September 11 Terrorist Attacks
Julia Nanay
The Political Requirements of Victory
Ian S. Lustick
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ISLAMIST VIOLENCE
The Four Waves of Global Jihad, 1979–2017
Glenn E. Robinson
The Life and Death of Abdullah Azzam
Jed Lea-Henry
Osama bin Laden: Embedded in the Middle East Crises
Ann M. Lesch
Mullah Omar’s Missiles: A Field Report on Suicide Bombers in Afghanistan
Brian Glyn Williams
Hawala: The Terrorist’s Informal Financial Mechanism
Robert Looney
Terrorist Recruitment and Radicalization in Saudi Arabia
Thomas Hegghammer
Killing in the Name of Islam: Al-Qaeda’s Justification for September 11
Quintan Wiktorowicz and John Kaltner
THE WAR ON TERROR AND ITS TRAPS
Winning the “War on Terrorism”: A Fundamentally Different Strategy
Anthony H. Cordesman
The War on Terror: Forgotten Lessons From World War II
Stephen Van Evera
Whither Regional Security in a World Turned Upside Down?
James A. Russell
A Friend Like This: Re-evaluating Bush and Israel
Ari Barbalat
Jihadism in the Arab World after 2011: Explaining Its Expansion
Brynjar Lia
Are We Trapped in the War on Terror?
Ian S. Lustick | Ivan Eland | Charlotte Beers | Edward N. Luttwak
BOOK REVIEWS
Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy
Reviewed by Jeffrey Record
McGovern and Polk, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now
Reviewed by Marc Lynch
Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat
Reviewed by Mia Bloom
Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad
Reviewed by Sara Roy
Doumani, Academic Freedom after September 11
Reviewed by Eve M. Troutt Powell
Freeman, America’s Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East
Reviewed by Richard J. Schmierer
Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq
Reviewed by Ian S. Lustick
Gorka, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War
Reviewed by Augustus Richard Norton
Malkasian, Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State
Reviewed by Ronald E. Neumann
Biden’s Gaza Failure, the Syrian Revolution, and the Folly of US Middle East Policy
A.R. Joyce