Winning the Right War

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Notes

This essay is drawn from his book Winning The Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World. Reprinted by arrangement with Times Books, an Imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 2007 by Philip H. Gordon. All rights reserved.

1. Max Boot, ‘It's Not Over Yet’, Time, 9 September 2006.

2. See George W. Bush, ‘Press Conference by the President’, 25 October 2006, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary; and Dick Cheney, ‘Interview with the Vice President by Tim Russert’, NBC News, Meet the Press, Office of the Vice President, 10 September 2006. The ‘significant progress’ quote is from Cheney.

3. See Newt Gingrich, ‘Bush and Lincoln’, Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2006.

4. See Noman Podhoretz, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

5. George W. Bush, ‘Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People’, 20 September 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html.

6. See ‘President Bush Discusses Global War on Terror’, Wardman Park Marriott Hotel, Washington DC, 29 September 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060929-3.html.

7. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, ‘Views of a Changing World’, June 2003, http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=185, cited in Scott Atran, ‘Mishandling Suicide Terrorism’, Washington Quarterly, Summer 2004, p. 67.

8. See William Eubank and Leonard Weinberg, ‘Terrorism and Democracy: Perpetrators and Victims’, Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 13, no. 11, Spring 2001, pp. 155–64; and Quan Li, ‘Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorist Incidents?’, Journal of Conflict Resolution,vol. 49, no. 2, 2005, pp. 278–97, cited in F. Gregory Gause, III, ‘Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 84, no. 6, September–October 2005, p. 62.

9. See Gause, ‘Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?’.

10. In 2004, the United States government changed its methodology for tracking terrorist attacks and began to compile data on much more inclusive ‘incidents of terrorism’ rather than the narrower ‘major terrorist attacks’ counted in the State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism. The data for 2004–05 thus reflect this wider category, but the general pattern is the same. See National Counterterrorism Center, ‘A Chronology of Significant International Terrorism for 2004’, 27 April 2005; and Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, National Counterterrorism Center, http://wits.nctc.gov/Main.do for the 2005 data.

11. In 2003, for example, Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol argued that Iraq was ‘ripe for democracy’, the main piece of evidence being that democracy was being practiced in its Kurdish region at the time. See Laurence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2003), p. 99.

12. Cited in Peter Bergen, ‘Briefing Notes: What Were the Causes of 9/11’, Prospect, September 2006, p. 51. See also Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

13. See Associated Press, ‘Text of Osama bin Laden's Statement’, first broadcast 7 October 2001.

14. Michael Powell, ‘Bin Laden Recruits with Graphic Video’, Washington Post, 27 September 2001.

15. See ‘Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate: Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States’, April 2006, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/Declassified_NIE_Judgments.pdf.

16. See ‘The International Terrorist Threat to the UK’, Speech by the Director General of the Security Service, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, 9 November 2006, available at http://www.mi5.gov.uk.

17. See Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005); and ‘Suicide Terrorism and Democracy: What We've Learned Sine 9/11’, Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 582, 1 November 2006.

18. See President George W. Bush, ‘Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People’, 20 September 2001, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html.

19. See ‘President Bush Meets with Military Personnel at Fort Campbell’, Fort Campbell, Kentucky, 18 March 2004, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040318-3.html.

20. ‘President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point’, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, 1 June 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html.

21. See ‘President Bush Discusses Global War on Terror’, Wardman Park Marriott Hotel, Washington DC, 29 September 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060929-3.html.

22. See ‘President Discusses War on Terror and Hurricane Preparation’, The Pentagon, 22 September 2005, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050922.html.

23. See ‘Vice President's Remarks to Marines at Camp Lejeune’, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, 3 October 2005, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051003-4.html.

24. See Edward Alden and Roula Khalaf, ‘Dealing with Gadaffi’, Financial Times, 28 October 2003; Ray Takeyh, ‘The Rogue Who Came in from the Cold’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 80, no. 3, May–June 2001, pp. 62–72; and Martin Indyk, ‘The War did not Force Gaddaffi's Hand’, Financial Times, 9 March 2004.

25. In his 15 December 2006 farewell speech after resigning as defense secretary, Rumsfeld stated that ‘it should be clear not only that weakness is provocative, but the perception of weakness on our part can be provocative as well’. See Jim Rutenberg, ‘In Farewell, Rumsfeld Warns Weakness is “Provocative”’, New York Times, 16 December 2006. It was the same message Rumsfeld had been conveying since 2001, when he argued that ‘weakness is provocative … it kind of invites people to do things that they otherwise wouldn't think about doing’, quoted in Bill Gertz, ‘Rumsfeld Says U.S. Presence in Asia is Vital’, Washington Times, 25 July 2001.

26. According to an April 2006 official US National Intelligence Estimate, the Iraq conflict has become ‘the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement’. See ‘Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate: Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States’, April 2006, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/Declassified_NIE_Key_Judgments.pdf; as well as Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, ‘Of Course Iraq Made It Worse’, Washington Post, 29 September 2006.

27. Cited in Mark Danner, ‘Taking Stock of the Forever War’, New York Times Magazine, 1 September 2005.

28. From bin Laden's 29 October 2004 tape ‘The Towers of Lebanon’, cited in Bruce Riedel, ‘Al-Qaeda Five Years after the Fall of Kandahar’, The Brookings Institution, 18 January 2007. See also Danner, ‘Taking Stock’.

29. See Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin 2006).

30. See Lewis L. Lehrman and William Kristol, ‘Crush the Insurgents in Iraq’, Washington Post, 23 May 2004.

31. See US Army, Counterinsurgency, Field Manual No. 3-24, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5, Headquarters: Department of the Army, Washington DC, 15 December 2006, para. 1-45.

32. For the State Department recommendation, see Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, ‘Memorandum re Draft Decision Memorandum for President on the Applicability of the Geneva Convention to the Conflict in Afghanistan’, 26 January 2002, http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/etn/gonzales/memos_dir/memo_20020126_Powell_WH%20.pdf.

33. This was the view of Lord Johan Steyn, a member of Britain's highest court, who added that ‘as a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would have to say that I regard this as a monstrous failure of justice’. See Lord Johan Steyn, remarks to the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, Twenty-seventh F.A. Mann Lecture, 25 November 2003, available at http://www.barhumanrights.org.uk/pdfs/FA_Mann_lecture1Dec03.pdf.

34. See Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, ‘Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, re Standards of Conduct for Interrogation Under 18 U.S.C. &&2340-2340A’, 1 August 2002, http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/doj/bybee80102mem.pdf; reprinted in Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 172–217.

35. See the Bybee memo as well as the discussion in Joseph Margulies, Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 90.

36. In Rasul v. Bush,a case that involved an Australian and two British citizens captured in Afghanistan, the court rejected the Bush administration's argument that US law had no jurisdiction in Guantanamo, ruling that even non-US prisoners there should have access to the court system. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a case that involved a US citizen captured in Afghanistan, the court ruled that the administration had the right to declare US citizens ‘enemy combatants’ but that such prisoners had to be able to appeal that designation before an impartial judge.

37. See Supreme Court of the United States, Hamdi et al. v Rumsfeld. et al., October Term, Argued 28 April 2004, Decided 28 June 2004.

38. The story was broken by the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes II, which aired its report on 28 April 2004, and by Seymour Hersh, whose article ‘Torture at Abu Ghraib’ was posted on-line on 30 April and appeared in the 10 May 2004 issue of the New Yorker. See also Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); ‘The Taguba Report on Treatment of Abu GhraibPrisoners in Iraq’, Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade, http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/iraq/tagubarpt.html.

39. See Taguba Report and Kate Zernike, ‘Detainees Depict Abuses by Guard in Prison in Iraq’, New York Times, 12 January 2005.

40. See ‘Homicide Unpunished’, Washington Post, 28 February 2006.

41. Bush administration lawyers tried to argue that such an approach would be legal, since the Senate, when it ratified the UN Convention Against Torture in 1994, had linked the definition of mistreatment to the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution, which applies only to US citizens. However, Abraham Sofaer, who had served as the legal adviser to the State Department when the convention was signed, insisted that the obvious purpose of the reservation was to give ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’ the same meaning as ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ in the Eighth Amendment – not to constrain the geographic reach of the Convention. See Letter of Abraham D. Sofaer to Hon. Patrick J. Leahy, 21 January 2005, cited in Margulies, Guantanamo, p. 179. See also David Luban, ‘Torture, American-Style’, Washington Post, 27 November 2005. On Cheney's efforts to exempt the CIA, see David Espo and Liz Sidoti, ‘Cheney Appeals to GOP Senators for CIA Exemption to Torture Ban’, Associated Press, 4 November 2005. The Washington Post noted that Bush's veto threat meant that he was ‘proposing to use the first veto of his presidency on a defense bill needed to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan so that he can preserve the prerogative to subject detainees to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’. See ‘End the Abuse’, Washington Post, 7 October 2005.

42. See ‘President's Signing Statement, HR2863’, Department of the US White House, CQ Federal Department and Agency Documents, 30 December 2005.

43. See ‘President Discusses Creation of Military Commissions to Try Suspected Terrorists’, 6 September 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060906-3.html. Also see ABC news reports that the practices included ‘water boarding’, extreme sleep deprivation, and forced standing up to 40 hours, all of which have long been condemned as torture by the US government. Brian Ross and Richard Esposito, ‘CIA's Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described’, ABC News, 18 November 2005.

44. For Gonzales, see Jackson Diehl, ‘Inhuman: Yes or No?’ Washington Post, 12 September 2005. For Rice, see ‘Minced Words; Torture’, Economist, 10 December 2005.

45. See Olivier Roy, ‘We're Winning, Despite the “War”’, International Herald Tribune, 7 September 2006.

46. For the Wolfowtiz quote, see DOD News Briefing – Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, Pentagon, 13 September 2001, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1622. On Woolsey's trip, see Karen DeYoung and Rick Weiss, ‘U.S. Seems to Ease Rhetoric On Iraq; Officials Urge Wait and See on Anthrax’, Washington Post, 24 October 2001. The article quotes Woolsey as saying that ‘there are too many things, too many examples of stolen identities, of cleverly crafted documentation, of coordination across continents and between states … to stray very far from the conclusion that a state, and a very well-run intelligence service, is involved here’.

47. That thesis is expounded in Laurie Mylroie, The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Regan Books, 2000), whose jacket includes glowing blurbs from Wolfowitz, Perle and Woolsey. The lack of solid evidence for Mylroie's thesis is discussed in Peter Bergen, ‘Armchair Provocateur: Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons’ Favorite Conspiracy Theorist’, Washington Monthly, 1 December 2003.

48. See Ken Adelman, ‘Cakewalk in Iraq’, Washington Post, 13 February 2006.

49. Quoted in Nicholas Lemann, ‘After Iraq’, New Yorker, 17 February 2003, p. 72. Several years later, Feith was still arguing that the Iraq war was ‘an operation to prevent the next, as it were, 9/11’. See Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘A Little Learning: What Douglas Feith Knew and When He Knew It’, New Yorker, 9 May 2005.

50. In September 2005, 43% of those surveyed believed Saddam Hussein was ‘personally involved’ with the 11 September attacks, and 46% said there was a ‘connection’ between Iraq and the attacks. See ‘Poll: Iraq War Could Wound GOP at Polls’, 25 September 2006, http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/09/06/iraq.poll/index.html for the first figure and Zogby Poll, ‘9/11+5 Reveals Dramatic Partisan Split’, 5 September 2006, http://www.zogby.com/News/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1169.

51. See speech by Paul Wolfowitz, ‘Iraq, What Does Disarmament Look Like?’, Council on Foreign Relations, 23 January 2003.

52. Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC's Meet the Press, 10 September 2006, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14720480/.

53. See ‘President Discusses Foreign Policy During Visit to State Department’, 14 August 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/2006/08/20060814-3.html.

54. See Newt Gingrich, ‘The Third World War Has Begun’, Guardian, 20 July 2006; Interview with NBC's Meet the Press, 16 July, http://www.msnbc.com; and ‘The Only Option is to Win’, Washington Post, 11 August 2006; and Rick Santorum, ‘The Great Test of This Generation’, Speech Delivered at the National Press Club, 20 July 2006, available at http://www.nationalreview.com.

55. See Hassan M. Fattah, ‘Militia Rebuked by Some Arab Countries’, New York Times, 17 July 2006.

56. See Michel Bôle-Richard, ‘Le Fatah de Mahmoud Abbas défie le Hamas’, Le Monde, 8 January 2007.

57. See ‘President Bush Delivers State of the Union Address’, 23 January 2007, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070123-2.html.

58. See Glenn Kessler, ‘President's Portrayal of “The Enemy’ Flawed”, Washington Post, 24 January 2007.

59. See George W. Bush, ‘President Holds Primetime News Conference’, Washington DC, 11 October 2001, cited in Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), p. 194. Two years later, in a television interview, Bush spoke of his intention to remind French President Jacques Chirac that ‘America is a good nation, genuinely good’, in the hope that Chirac would come to understand the decisions he had made on Iraq. See the interview with Fox News's Brit Hume, ‘Text of Bush Interview’, 22 September 2003, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,98006,00.html.

60. For the argument that ‘to be effective, multilateralism must be preceded by unilateralism’, see Robert Kagan, ‘The Benevolent Empire’, Foreign Policy, Summer 1998, p. 33. For other, similar arguments and a discussion of Bush's assertive leadership style, see Philip H. Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, Allies at War: America, Europe and the Crisis Over Iraq (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), pp. 49–55.

61. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 81.

62. Bush, cited in Dan Balz, ‘President Puts Onus Back on Iraqi Leader’, Washington Post, 7 March 2003. In his State of the Union Address in January of the following year, Bush's formulation was that ‘America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country’. See ‘State of the Union Address’, The White House, 20 January 2004.

63. See ‘America's Image Slips, but Allies Share U.S. Concerns Over Iran, Hamas’, 15 Nation Pew Global Attitudes Survey, 13 June 2006, available at http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/252.pdf. See similar results in German Marshall Fund of the United States, Transatlantic Trends: Key Findings 2006 (Washington DC: German Marshall Fund, 2006).

64. See Pew Global Attitudes Project, ‘U.S. Image Up Slightly, But Still Negative’, 23 July 2005, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=247.

65. The average percentages of those with a ‘mainly negative’ view were 52% in 2007, 47% in 2006 and 46% in 2005. Poll conducted between November 2006 and January 2007 among 18,000 adults in 18 countries by GlobeScan together with the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. See http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/306.php?nid=&id=&pnt=306&lb=hmpg1.

66. See University of Maryland and Zogby International 2006 Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey, data available at http://www.brookings.edu/views/speeches/telhami20070208.pdf; and Shibley Tehami, Reflections of Hearts and Minds: Media, Opinion, and Identity in the Arab World (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007).

67. See Max Boot, ‘Power: Resentment Comes with the Territory’, Washington Post, 3 March 2003.

68. Kristol cited in Maureen Dowd, ‘Hypocrisy and Apple Pie’, New York Times, 30 April 2003. Also Bill Kristol, ‘Fox News Sunday’, Fox News Network, 27 April 2003.

69. See George W. Bush, ‘Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People’, 20 September 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html.

70. For Bush's reference to ‘war with Islamic Fascists’, see ‘President Bush Discusses Terror Plot Upon Arrival in Wisconsin’, 10 August 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060810-3.html. For Rumsfeld's evocations of Churchill, fascism, Nazism and appeasement, see Donald H. Rumsfeld, ‘Address at the 88th Annual American Legion National Convention’, Salt Lake City Utah, 29 August 2006, http://www.defenselink.mil/Speeches/Speech.aspx?SpeechID=1033. Cheney makes a parallel to Franklin Roosevelt and the ‘dirty business’ of fighting wars in ‘Vice President's Remarks at Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention’, Reno, Nevada, 28 August 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060828-4.html.

71. See Rumsfeld, ‘Address at the 88th Annual American Legion National Convention’.

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Philip H. Gordon

Philip H. Gordon is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.