War on Terrorism

On September 11, 2001, members affiliated with the terrorist network known as al-Qaeda hijacked four U.S. passenger planes. Two planes were flown into the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, and the United States and world community reacted both with shock and outrage. The incident brought to the forefront issues of U.S. foreign policy and, more immediately, the question of a military response. Nine days after the attacks, on September 20, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush spoke to a joint session of Congress. After expressing gratitude for domestic bipartisanship and international support; rebuking the actions of al-Qaeda, whose “goal is remaking the world and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere”; and arguing that Afghanistan was the chief incubator of al-Qaeda militants, Bush broadened his statement, unveiling a foreign policy that would define U.S. government interventions for years to come: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” This initial reference to a “war on terror” has never been defined successfully by Bush, his administration, other policymakers, or political commentators. For this reason, more than any other, the war on terrorism has been a failure. Extrajudicial proceedings, torture, and ill-advised military adventurism all were symptoms of Bush’s broad and dangerously undefined initial claim. The concept of a war on terror set in motion a U.S. foreign policy that reframed the idea of war on terror based on nationalistic and short-term needs, rather than coherent, long-term radical strategy.

I. Who to Fight

The immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks represented one of the narrowest understandings—but not definitions—of the enemy in the war on terror: Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Domestic and international support was highest for campaigns that specifically targeted bin Laden and his followers. These campaigns were conducted under the banner of the war on terror, but the war on terror was never restricted to Bin Laden. Even as Bush stood before Congress on September 20th, the scope had already broadened to include the Afghan government, which was protecting bin Laden. Indictment of Afghan support and the subsequent military invasion to overthrow the ruling Taliban did not initially weaken international support for the war on terror, but it revealed the rapidity with which the doctrine allowed international conflicts to escalate and encompass nations related tangentially to direct threats to U.S. security, upon which the Bush administration premised the war on terror.

This ideological “mission creep,” which most famously led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, was fomented by the words “war on terror.” As Andrew Bacevich notes, “A war against terror in which terrorism is synonymous with evil is a war in which politics seemingly have no place. There is nothing to discuss, nothing to negotiate. Dialogue becomes tantamount to appeasement” (Bacevich 59). The concept of a war on terror allowed its hawkish advocates to place themselves on the side of moral righteousness prior to or during any debate about U.S. action, either diplomatic or military. The rhetorical framework assumed an appropriate action—war—and the moral position of the war’s targets—terrorists.

While the case for moral righteousness may have been easily justified in retributions against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the grand scope of Bush’s assertions inevitably led to more challenging assessments of which anti-American or violently rebellious groups might constitute proper targets for the war on terror. Ninan Koshy exposes the precarious nature of these assumptions: “The paradigm of the war on terror has erroneously and deliberately subsumed all forms of local, national and violent movements under the category of global terrorism” (Koshy 44). The fractured opposition to the U.S. presence in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban exemplified Koshy’s concern about the failure of U.S. policymakers to grasp the idea that, while they may view all violent opposition to U.S. policy as a monolithic threat, in reality, the threat has many faces that require an equally diverse number of policy responses. Placing all opposition forces under an umbrella offers only rhetorical benefits while complicating policy implementation. Koshy continues, noting that “more often than not, national or regional terrorism is considered as nothing more than a local manifestation of global terrorism” (45). Beyond the potential misstep of failing to identify local interests that might cause violent revolt against a U.S. policy or military presence, Koshy highlights the potential mistake of creating unity out of disunity. Myriad, diverse nationalistic groups around the world could unite under a banner offered by U.S. policymakers that labeled them enemies in a global war on terror.

II. How to Fight Them

Koshy’s argument leads effectively into the next unanswered question that derives from “war on terror”: how to fight the war. The greatest conceit of U.S. policy in the war on terror was the preeminence of U.S. military force. The Bush administration believed that military superiority could conquer ideological opposition. Yet even a cursory survey of history reveals otherwise: “Based on past experience, the defeat of terrorist groups without territorial ambitions has always come about through police methods. The armed forces are, by definition, unable to defeat an enemy that does not involve the control and domination of military space” (Abraham 4102). In both the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the two most profound examples of implementation of the war on terror, failures were less the result of military blunders or inferiority and more a product of the inability to manage the conflict after the removal of core political authority in the area. The war on terror was a policy failure in part because it assumed that military action, while arguably proportional and appropriate in some settings, was the main point of conflict around which to form policy.

The shortcoming in long-term solutions evidenced the lack of a central narrative for the conflict between the United States and violent extremism. This concept of a central narrative is explained by Kathe Callahan, et. al: “In past U.S. wars, a central narrative was a critical element in developing support and directing the war effort. This has not been the case with the present ‘war on terror’” (Callahan 554). Callahan’s argument explains to a degree why the war on terror was a failure: it established a hardened ideological framework of military aggression against unquestioned evil before the nuances and complications of that ideological framework had been tested in real-world confrontation. Callahan and her colleagues go on to challenge the parallels drawn between the September 11, 2001, attacks and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that frequently was evoked in the days following the al-Qaeda hijackings. They note that “until the morning of September 11, 2001, however, there was no substantial storyline in the popular press or from the government about a war on terror” (554). This lack of a central narrative meant that the war on terror would be defined as it progressed, but it had no guiding principles. Even as the military mission managed to quickly organize a successful effort to unseat the Afghan Taliban and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the missing narrative providing no instruction for the after-the-fall era, especially as it became evident that the removal from power of unfriendly dictators did little to affect the core ideology that drove some individuals to religious extremism and terrorism.

III. What It Means to Win

Many argue that one of the greatest losers in the war on terror was the strength of international institutions and the rule of law. As Itty Abraham notes, “the Bush administration recognized early that existing laws of war came in the way of their preferred conduct in the global ‘war’ on terror. Calling suspects ‘enemy combatants’ denied them the ability to be identified as legitimate participants in a war, with corresponding rights under international law” (Abraham 4102). A war on terror had been declared before it was deemed possible to fight it under existing international law. When existing international laws did not provide the tools believed necessary, government lawyers sought to rewrite them to enable the United States to fight an unconventional war in which national boundaries were subsumed beneath ideological linkages. At their extreme, Abraham continued, “government lawyers even tried to redefine torture to exclude all actions that did not cause ‘massive organ failure’” (4102). Both successful and unsuccessful attempts to rewrite international laws—or adherence to them—were the genesis behind extraordinary rendition, which allowed U.S. Central Intelligence Agency interrogators to utilize methods, such as waterboarding, now widely recognized as torture. They also facilitated the creation of U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a legal purgatory that remained unresolved through 2013.

Further, the U.S. invasion of Iraq represented a clear undermining of United Nations (UN) authority. Julian Reid writes that the U.S. decision was “a direct challenge to the agency, practice and normative framework underlying UN involvement. The humanitarian elements of UN policy [. . .] were swept away, it was said, by the flagrant pursuit of US security and economic interests” (Reid 245). While the short-term policy goals of the Bush administration may have been expedited by flouting UN authority, the resultant weakening of the United Nations as an international agency to put forth binding resolutions is a long-term liability both for the United States and all nations. The importance of a tradition of authority in the United Nations is necessary for the international agency to survive in an era that still places preeminent authority in the nation-state. It is not difficult to envision a future in which the U.S. invasion of Iraq was seen as a precedent for any power to take action for a national interest even in the face of staunch international opposition.

And yet, even those sympathetic to many of the aforementioned arguments fail to grasp the inherent difficulties engendered by the phrasing “war on terror.” In Philip Gordon’s “Can the War on Terror Be Won? How to Fight the Right War” in Foreign Affairs, Gordon accepts the limitations of military achievement, but he still is unable to accept the rhetorical barriers of the “war on terror.” Gordon argues that victory in the war on terror will come “when political changes erode and ultimately undermine support for the ideology and strategy of those determined to destroy the United States.” (Gordon 54). If this is the definition of victory, then the United States and Europe still battle Hitler with the lingering proponents of Neo-Nazism, not to mention the threat posed by Communist societies and political groups that still exist—and in some cases hold office—worldwide. Curiously, Gordon cites the collapse of the Soviet Union as an example of how the to win the war on terror: “Just as the Cold War ended only when one side essentially gave up on a bankrupt ideology, the battle against Islamist terrorism will be won when the ideology that underpins it loses its appeal” (55). This is clearly not the case. Were it so, the war on terrorism would have been won with the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and, for those that saw Iraq as a supporter of al-Qaeda, the demise of Saddam Hussein. But the United States does not battle nation-states in which the tipping point for victory is a governmental collapse or repeal of formal support. No nation outwardly espouses support for terrorist action against the United States; the lingering threat remains small pockets of committed ideologues that can and have survived democratic and undemocratic changes of power, military invasions, and international law. Perhaps most telling, Gordon’s only solution, admittedly presented without an endorsement, is the reallocation of “hundreds of billions of dollars per year in domestic spending to homeland security measures, significantly curtailed civil liberties to ensure that no potential terrorists were on the streets, and invaded and occupied countries that might one day support or sponsor terrorism” (59). Absurd not only in its premise but in its feasibility, Gordon’s far-fetched example of what it would take to win the war on terror is the surest proof of its impossibility.

Bush’s declaration of a war on terror was a rhetorical strategy that, given the urgency and governing U.S. political ideology of the moment, became an unfortunate policy tool. In its translation from speech to action, the war on terror’s ambiguities quickly became evident, escalating after an initial military victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan. The subsequent insurgent war there, coupled with the ill-fated invasion of Iraq grew the ignominy of the term, furthered still by later revelations of extraordinary rendition and torture. After Bush left office, his successor, Barack Obama, opted not to continue the use of the phrasing. Yet even as the war on terror ceased to appear in newspaper headlines and on television, it remained influential in policy decisions to slight Pakistani sovereignty in a raid at an Abbottabad compound hiding bin Laden, and the continuation and expansion of a drone program highly unpopular publically, though tacitly accepted politically, in several unstable nations throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The war on terror remained a viable way in which the U.S. public and its officials interpreted a range of potential security threats around the world. Yet just as military action did not represent a solution to the complex security issues facing the Bush administration, neither did the removal of the phrase erase the ideological thrust behind the now-famous words, whose policy influence, it seems, still lingers.

Works Cited

Abraham, Itty. “Torture and ‘War on Terror.’” Economic and Political Weekly 41.39 (2006): 4102. JSTOR. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.

Bacevich, Andrew J. “The War on Terror Properly Understood.” World Policy Journal 24.1 (2007): 59-60. JSTOR. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.

Bush, George W. “Text: Bush Addresses the Nation,” Washington Post. 20 Sept. 2001. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.

Callahan, Kathe, Melvin J. Dubnick, and Dorothy Olshfski. “War Narratives: Framing Our Understanding of the War on Terror.” Public Administration Review 66.4 (2006): 554- 568. JSTOR. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.

Gordon, Philip H. “Can the War on Terror Be Won? How to Fight the Right War.” Foreign Affairs 86.6 (2007): 53-66. JSTOR. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.

Koshy, Ninan. “Revisiting the Terrorism Discourse.” Economic and Political Weekly 44.26/27 (2009): 44-46. JSTOR. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.

Reid, Julian. “The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: A Critique of the ‘Return of Imperialism’ Thesis in International Relations.” Third World Quarterly 26.2 (2005): 237-552. JSTOR. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.