By Dr Sharifullah Dorani*
Introduction
This essay considers how the belief systems and images (beliefs and past experiences) of President George W Bush and his close advisors on how to deal with terrorism/states sponsoring terrorism shaped the Global War on Terror (GWOT) strategy.
The belief systems of Bush and his close advisors
‘…there is an image of America out there that we are so materialistic, that we’re almost hedonistic, that we don’t have values, and that when struck, we wouldn’t fight back.’ President Bush expresses his perception of the terrorists’ view of America under previous administrations, particularly the Clinton one.[1]
In a discussion between President-elect George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on the possibility of the latter becoming Secretary of Defense for the incoming Bush Administration, Rumsfeld shared the experiences, thoughts and beliefs he had formed over the years. Rumsfeld was unhappy with, and disappointed in, US reactions to terrorism in the past decades. For Rumsfeld, terrorism constituted a major threat to the world as it had, especially when supported by a rogue nation, the capability of altering the behaviour of great nations.[2] The US decisions to withdraw from Beirut and Somalia under fire, and its failure to act vigorously in response to Al Qaeda’s lethal attack on USS Cole in Yemen, invited the enemies to act more aggressively.
In the early 1980s in Beirut, for example, instead of being on the offensive and going after the terrorists, the Americans chose a defensive approach by installing cement barriers to protect themselves from terrorist attacks. When it did not work, the US had to withdraw. For Rumsfeld, ‘[t]he way to successfully deal with terrorists is not only to try to defend against them, but also to take the battle to them; to go after them where they live, where they hide; to go after their finances and their networks; and even to go after the nations that harbor and assist them. The best defense would be a good offense [emphasis added].’[3]
In 1984, Rumsfeld and Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz had warned that the US could not afford to be a ‘global Hamlet’ (Shakespeare’s character is known for his reluctance to take action) while terrorism was on the rise. Rumsfeld and Shultz had recommended that America should be able to pre-empt a terrorist attack by responding in a variety of forms and could start ‘at times and places of our choosing’ −[4] the same words that would be pronounced by Bush 17 years later following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.[5]
Rumsfeld told Bush in the meeting that the former particularly was disappointed by the Bill Clinton Administration’s ‘reflexive pullback’ approach:[6] when America had been challenged or attacked, President Clinton often played softly by embracing a cautious, even squeamish response. In extreme cases, such as the bombing of the American embassies in East Africa that killed more than 200 and wounded more than 5,000, Clinton had used cruise missiles. The enemy, especially Osama Bin Laden, took the inactions/retreats/squeamish responses by the US as a sign that the US was not willing to defend its interests because American soldiers were not willing to engage in long wars at battlefields and would flee once they were under attack.[7]
These inactions/retreats/squeamish responses, caused partly by the Vietnam syndrome[8] and partly by the bureaucracy in Washington, continued to show a lack of resolve on the US side and showcased America as vulnerable, irresolute and weak. ‘Weakness is provocative… so is the perception of weakness’, but strength would have deterred the terrorists’ adventures, Rumsfeld told the President-elect, and the latter nodded in agreement.[9] In Rumsfeld’s view, Osama Bin Laden had declared war on the US and by 9/11 he had been winning. However, Rumsfeld, if appointed Secretary of Defense, and if America found itself under attack by terrorists, would come to the President not for use of missiles but for ‘a forward-leaning action plan’.[10] The plan would be to unleash US military against the perpetrators.
Rumsfeld then told Bush that if Bush was uncomfortable with Rumsfeld’s view, Rumsfeld was the wrong man for the job. Bush replied that Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense he had been looking for.[11]
President Bush equally believed that Clinton’s approach to Al Qaeda’s persistent attacks on US assets was weak to the extent that the administration invited Al Qaeda to attack again and again. In President Bush’s opinion, a technically and military advanced America’s response with missile attacks was frail, pathetic, and ‘really a joke’.[12] It made America come across as impotent. It created a worldwide image that the American people had no values, and, when struck, were not willing to fight back. Bush agreed that US weak responses clearly emboldened Osama Bin Laden and his followers.[13]
CIA Director George Tenet, too, observed in his memoir that US withdrawal from Somalia gave Osama Bin Laden a perception that the US was a soft target, a paper tiger, and was easier to defeat than the Soviet Union.[14]
But that perception was not going to hold under the Bush Administration. When President Bush, proud of US abilities and not in Washington to play ‘small ball’,[15] and his advisors, mainly Rumsfeld, Tenet, and Vice President Dick Cheney,[16] suddenly found America under attack on 9/11 by Al Qaeda, headed by Osama Bin Laden, they were to prove Osama Bin Laden wrong: America was not a ‘paper tiger [that] ran in less than twenty-four hours’.[17] Al Qaeda interpreted the US’s lack of serious response as a sign of weakness, but Bush and his principals were determined to change that impression, and on Sunday, September 16 made a formal decision: America was to fight the ‘war on terror on the offensive, and the first battlefield would be Afghanistan’.[18] The War on Terror would begin, declared a resolute Bush, with Al Qaeda, but it would not end there. It would not stop until every terrorist group of global reach was found, stopped, and defeated.’[19]
Conclusion
What this article tries to establish is that the (consistent) belief systems and images (beliefs and past experiences) of Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney of how terrorism/states sponsoring terrorism could be a major threat to the world and how to deal – offensively as opposed to defensively – with terrorism enormously helped construct the Bush Doctrines (which by 2002 were inserted into the 2002 National Security Strategy).[20] To put in practice these doctrines, Bush declared the GWOT, resulting in an American foreign policy that aimed at destroying and eliminating terrorism worldwide, which began in Afghanistan. Thus it was a question of when rather than if before the administration put its beliefs (formed in most cases by past experiences) of how to deal with terrorists into practice.
References
Barnett, Marc, ‘American Exceptionalism and the Construction of the War on Terror: An Analysis of Counterterrorism Policies under Clinton, Bush, and Obama’, INSCT, November 2016, <https://securitypolicylaw.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Barnett_American-Exceptionalism_and_the_Construction_of_the_War_on-Terror-mwedit111716.pdf>
Bush, George W, National Day of Prayer and Remembrance Service, 14 September, 2001,
<http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/bushrecord/documents/Selected_Speeches_George_W_Bush.pdf>
Bush, George W, ‘Address to the Joint Session of the 107th Congress, White House, 20 September, 2001, <https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html>
Bush, George W. 2010. Decision points. New York: Crown publishers.
Kalb, Marvin, ‘It’s Called the Vietnam Syndrome, and It’s Back’, The Brookings Institution, 22 January 2013.
Leffler, Melvyn P., ‘September 11 in Retrospect; George W. Bush’s Grand Strategy, Reconsidered’, Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2011, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/68201/melvyn-pleffler/september-11-in-retrospect>
Loyn, David. 2008. Butcher and bolt. London: Hutchinson.
Nye, Jr, Joseph S., ‘Transformational Leadership and U.S. Grand Strategy’, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61740/joseph-s-nye-jr/transformational-leadership-and-us-grand-strategy>
Rumsfeld, Donald. 2011. Known and unknown: a memoir. New York: sentinel.
Tenet, George, and Bill Harlow. 2007. At the centre of the storm: my years at the CIA. New York: HarperCollins Publisher.
Woodward, Bob. 2002. Bush at war. New York: Simon & Schuster.
*Dr Sharifullah has a PhD from Durham University in the UK on America’s Afghanistan War. He has authored several articles and two acclaimed books: The Lone Leopard, a novel set in Afghanistan, and America in Afghanistan, published by Bloomsbury Publishing. Sharifullah is the founder of CEPSAF and the South Asia and Middle Eastern Editor at CESRAN International.
[1] Woodward, Bob. 2002. Bush at war. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 38.
[2] Rumsfeld, Donald. 2011. Known and unknown: a memoir. New York: sentinel, p. 33.
[3] Rumsfeld, Donald. 2011. Known and unknown: a memoir. New York: sentinel, p. 32.
[4] Rumsfeld, Donald. 2011. Known and unknown: a memoir. New York: sentinel, p. 34.
[5] Bush, George W, National Day of Prayer and Remembrance Service, September 14, 2001,
<http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/bushrecord/documents/Selected_Speeches_George_W_Bush.pdf>
[6] Woodward, Bob. 2002. Bush at war. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 38.
[7] Rumsfeld, Donald. 2011. Known and unknown: a memoir. New York: sentinel, pp. 32-34.
[8] The term refers to public aversion to US overseas military involvement following the domestic controversies over the Vietnam War. For more discussion of the term, see Kalb, Marvin, ‘It’s Called the Vietnam Syndrome, and It’s Back’, The Brookings Institution, 22 January 2013.
[9] Rumsfeld, Donald. 2011. Known and unknown: a memoir. New York: sentinel, pp. 203, 282.
[10] Woodward, Bob. 2002. Bush at war. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 20.
[11] Woodward, Bob. 2002. Bush at war. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 20; Rumsfeld, Donald. 2011. Known and unknown: a memoir. New York: sentinel, p. 283.
[12] Woodward, Bob. 2002. Bush at war. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 38.
[13] Woodward, Bob. 2002. Bush at war. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 38.
[14] Tenet, George, and Bill Harlow. 2007. At the centre of the storm: my years at the CIA. New York: HarperCollins Publisher, p. 155.
[15] Loyn, David. 2008. Butcher and bolt. London: Hutchinson, p. 293; Leffler, Melvyn P., ‘September 11 in Retrospect; George W. Bush’s Grand Strategy, Reconsidered’, Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2011, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/68201/melvyn-pleffler/september-11-in-retrospect>; Bush, George W. 2010. Decision points. New York: Crown publishers, p. 227; Nye, Jr, Joseph S., ‘Transformational Leadership and U.S. Grand Strategy’, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61740/joseph-s-nye-jr/transformational-leadership-and-us-grand-strategy>
[16] Goldstein, Joel K,‘The Contemporary Presidency: Cheney, Vice Presidential Power and the War on Terror’, 201o, Presidential Studies Quarterly 40, No 1, <https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1522&context=faculty>; Dorani, Sharifullah, ‘The Foreign Policy Decision Making Approaches and Their Applications: Case Study: Bush, Obama and Trump’s Decision Making towards Afghanistan and the Region, The Rest: Journal of Politics and development, summer 2019, <https://www.academia.edu/39978817/The_Foreign_Policy_Decision_Making_Approaches_and_Their_Applications_Case_Study_Bush_Obama_and_Trump_s_Decision_Making_towards_Afghanistan_and_the_Region>
[17] Bush, George W. 2010. Decision points. New York: Crown publishers, p. 191.
[18] Bush, George W. 2010. Decision points. New York: Crown publishers, p. 191.
[19] Barnett, Marc, ‘American Exceptionalism and the Construction of the War on Terror: An Analysis of Counterterrorism Policies under Clinton, Bush, and Obama’, INSCT, November 2016, <https://securitypolicylaw.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Barnett_American-Exceptionalism_and_the_Construction_of_the_War_on-Terror-mwedit111716.pdf>; Bush, George W, ‘Address to the Joint Session of the 107th Congress, White House, 20 September, 2001, <https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html>
[20] Leffler, Melvyn P., ‘September 11 in Retrospect; George W. Bush’s Grand Strategy, Reconsidered’, Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2011, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/68201/melvyn-pleffler/september-11-in-retrospec>
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