“If we were about
to be attacked or had been attacked or something happened that threatened a
vital U.S. national interest, I would be the first in line to say, ‘Let’s
go,’ I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just
much more cautious on wars of choice.”
Robert Gates
This is what George
W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense said on being asked if he had any words of
wisdom during his final interview before retirement. This lifelong Republican
said that the human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he has
witnessed first-hand are far too great to start wars that were not necessary.
He said he had learned clearly over the past four and a half years that wars
“have taken longer and been more costly in lives and treasure” than
anticipated.”
The man George Bush handpicked to fix the mess his
predecessor Donald Rumsfeld made in Iraq, effectively told America that the
Iraq war was not something he would have embarked on; a war that was clearly
one of America’s choosing. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/us/politics/19gates.html)
Ten years after the
September 11th attacks, Americans are still avoiding having an open,
honest and meaningful discussion about the far reaching implications and
long-term costs of the decisions their government made in the name of national
security.
I truly believe that until America has this conversation and in doing
so faces the real ghosts of 9/11, they will struggle to move forward as a unified
nation again. Instead, the country will continue down the post 9/11 path of a
nation deeply divided and one that has never stopped living in and reacting out
of fear.
Nobody denies the fact that the country’s security should be a major
concern when attacked in this way. Nor would anyone have a problem with the
United States going after those responsible with any and all means possible; we
can also expect and discount a certain amount of knee-jerk reactionism in the
short-term.
However, after a short period of time the elected leaders should
have been the first people to step up and ensure that cooler heads prevailed. They
should have been the ones to ensure that both the short-term costs and the
long-term implications of every major decision was weighed and counter-weighed;
that every plan was carefully examined before there was a rush to judgement.
Now,
ten years later, the best way to have this important conversation is to do it by
looking at the facts and figures, and by studying the realities and outcomes
that resulted from those decisions made by the Bush government in those fear
filled months and fear-mongering years after 9/11.
Let’s start by examining the financial burden of both
the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This figure now stands at a staggering $1.7
trillion and counting; and that is just for military operations, base security,
reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care. It is
worth mentioning that 1% - 2% of this total amount has been misplaced. The government now acknowledges
that they have no accounting for this loss of taxpayer money.
The Iraq war
accounts for $872 billion (or 63%) of the total. Of that amount, $803 billion
has been spent on military operations, $28 billion on local security and $41
billion that includes funds for reconstruction and foreign aid (source: “The
Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since
9/11” prepared by the
Congressional Research Service).
Keep in mind this does not include the future
cost of both these wars; which along with the estimated veteran care are
projected to cost US taxpayers another $867 billion. Of course critics say
these projections are too high but think back to when Cheney was lobbying for the Iraq
war, he also repeatedly re-assured us that the price tag for this war - to
oust Saddam, restore order and install a new government would not exceed $50-$60 billion.
As we
compile the total costs of post 9/11 government actions we are still not
accounting for the increased expenditure from huge new additions to the
government bureaucracy with the inception of the Transportation Security Administration
(TSA), the Department of Homeland Security and increased domestic intelligence
budgets that were all non-war related expenses. In fact, if you tally all of
this government expenditure, then George W. Bush has the distinction of
“presiding over the largest increase in the size of government since the Great
Society,” and those are John McCain’s words.
Next, we need to examine the current state of the regions
within which these conflicts reside to fully understand the very real outcomes
from both a regional stability and geopolitical stand-point. In the Middle
East, the US’s closest ally Israel finds itself increasingly isolated and alone
in the region. Meanwhile, Iran’s influence and power has grown substantially,
directly as a result of America removing enemies on her borders, Iraq and
Afghanistan. What’s more, today Iraq is
one of Iran’s largest trading partners, and Iran is rapidly strengthening trade
ties with Afghanistan, giving it unparalleled clout and influence in both
countries. Ironically, Bush’s War on
Terror has resulted in unimaginable gains and geopolitical power for this “axis
of evil” country. The US has inadvertently helped change Iran’s status from an
isolated pariah state, in 2003, to a major regional power broker by 2009. One
wonders if America had not taken its eye off the ball when it had the Taliban and
Al’ Qaeda on the run, and finished the job, if the situation would be different
today with Iran. By taking the entire focus away from the Afghan conflict and
relying instead on writing blank cheques to Pakistan and a corrupt Afghan
government, it seems America was hoping they could have their cake and eat it. The
US expected to wrap up a quick and cheap Iraq war – we all know how that turned
out. This decision is even more amazing given that the US was fully aware of
the murky history between the ISI and Taliban and acutely aware of Pakistan’s
paranoia about India’s growing influence in a new Afghanistan. By 2008 the
Taliban had the opportunity to fully re-group, and had turned Pakistan’s tribal
regions into a new safe harbor for themselves and a host of other affiliated
terrorist networks, including Al Qaeda. Pakistan is still the launching point
for all attacks on US troops in Afghanistan, and arguably closer to being a
failed state, with nuclear weapons, than ever before in its history. I believe there
is a strong argument that things would be very different in this region, today,
had the US not diverted all its military resources, assets, support and political
focus and diverted it to a war of choice in Iraq.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, between warrantless
wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation, water boarding, the
patriot act and illegal domestic surveillance programs, we are only now
starting to scratch the surface of secret government decisions made in the name
of our security. It is also apparent that many of these decisions did not
uphold America’s high ideals, beliefs and strong democratic values. Rather than
get into a discussion about civil rights violations, let us examine the net
result of the actions of creating a huge new domestic security apparatus with the
TSA, Homeland Security and a mega-billion dollar domestic intelligence
gathering network. One that starts with a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) that
local police officers are encouraged to fill out on their beats, which gets
stored in a massive database without any further scrutiny or investigation of
the person named in the report. All this information is then analysed using sophisticated
software that is meant to stitch disparate pieces of information together, distributing
it to federal “authorities” in real-time. In the context of this enhanced security
apparatus, let’s review the last three major terrorist plots against the US,
starting with the Christmas Day bomber. Umar
Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to board a flight to Detroit with an explosive
device hidden in his underwear. Luckily this device failed to detonate, after
which he was wrestled to the ground by a fellow passenger. What boggles the
mind is the fact that this new and improved multi-billion dollar security
apparatus completely missed him - this after his father, a respected Nigerian
banker, called US authorities and warned them that his son was becoming
radicalized. Despite being on a no fly list Abdulmutallab was not stopped at
two different airports, and even though he bought a one-way ticket (like all the
9/11 hijackers) it was not picked up as a red flag by all our new and highly sophisticated
security algorithms and apparatus. We are told that his name was misspelled on
the no-fly list; clearly our government’s multi-billion dollar taxpayer funded state-of-the-art
software does not contain a basic spell check or even the level of sophistication
that Google’s search box provides with its query suggestions. Next we had the Times Square bomber who was caught, not by our enhanced security, but only because some alert citizens noticed a man acting strangely after parking his SUV near Times Square. A couple of street vendors called police after seeing what looked like smoke and some strange apparatus inside the abandoned vehicle, Finally, we had another close call with two packages located on separate cargo planes bound for the US from Yemen. Both had home printers with plastique explosives and a sophisticated detonating mechanism timed to blow up in mid-air over US cities. The only reason we discovered and disarmed them was thanks to a call from a reformed Al
Qaeda terrorist to the head of Saudi intelligence. It begs the
question of what all this increased prying, searching, and snooping has resulted
in. Clearly it has not served as a deterrent, because the number of terrorist attacks
has actually increased dramatically worldwide* (see footnote for sources), and in
the US, in the past decade and at a much greater rate than before the Iraq war.
The point is that securing the country is important but finding the right
balance between technology, paranoia and human intelligence is equally
important. Think about the fact that every new action by terrorists has led to
a knee-jerk and piece-meal reaction to our growing security paranoia. First, we
were asked to remove our shoes, then our belts, then gels were prohibited, next
liquids had to be less than 3.4 ounces, and put in clear plastic baggies. Now
since they cannot ask us to take off our undergarments we are instead virtually
strip searched. Arguably, all this money is not being well spent because it is
being done in a completely reactionary fashion rather than as part of a well
thought out plan. We know that the terrorists will stop at nothing to kill us,
so the only question is where will we draw the line?
Read Part 2: September 11 - Ten Years Later (part 2)
*NOTE: Sources: The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
from September, 2006. The NIE is issued
by the President’s Director of National Intelligence and their conclusions are based on analysis
of raw intelligence collected by all the US spy agencies. It is an assessment on national
security. The 2006 NIE said that the
number of terrorist attacks (defined as “as an act of violence or the threat of
violence, calculated to create an atmosphere of fear and alarm”) had risen
dramatically worldwide since the Invasion of Iraq in 2003. The same NIE also cited the Iraq war as a
major factor in this startling rise in global jihadist terrorist attacks. We also have the US State Department’s
Country Reports on Terrorism, 2006 which stated that there had been a 29%
increase in terrorism worldwide in 2006, over the previous year; terrorist
attacks on non-military targets rose to 14,338 with an increase of deaths to
20,498. If you need any more data then I
can point to another independent global study on terrorism conducted by Peter
Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at the Center on Law and Security
at the NYU School of Law. They found
that there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks
since the Iraq invasion. It is true that Iraq and Afghanistan do cause a huge
blip and together account of 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of
fatalities; however, if you exclude these two countries you still see a solid
35 percent per year increase in the number of terrorist attacks in the rest of
the world.
