Self-Inflicted By An Ill-Judged US Policy

Illustration: John Shakespeare.


By Peter Hartcher
September 13, 2011
Courtesy Of "The Sydney Morning Herald"

Terrorism is a calculated, rational tactic to create an emotional response. The best answer to terrorism is calm rationality, to refuse to co-operate with the enemy.

A great power cannot be provoked unless it allows itself to be.

The central flaw in the US response to the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of 10 years ago was that it gave America's enemies exactly what they sought.

The US allowed emotion to overwhelm calm analysis.

''We should not take ourselves psychological hostage,'' said Adam Garfinkle, editor of the American Interest magazine and a former speechwriter for Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

''Alas, that's precisely what the administration did allow.''

George Bush's deputy secretary of state at the time of the attacks, Richard Armitage, said the US abandoned its traditional hope and optimism: ''After 9/11 we found ourselves exporting something foreign from America: fear and anger.''

The greatest harm to America came not from the direct strike by the terrorists; it was self-inflicted by ill-judged US policy. The costs were moral, strategic and economic.

As president, Bush made a speech declaring that ''torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere''. He deplored ''rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit . . . The US is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example.''

A CIA interrogator who'd been questioning a suspected al-Qaeda member wrote of the Bush statement: ''I found this speech infuriating. I knew what we were doing; our actions soiled what it meant to be American, perverted our oath, and betrayed our flag.''

The interrogator, Glenn Carle, had been required by his CIA superiors to send his prisoner to a friendly country to be tortured. Carle, after 23 years with the agency, has recorded his experience in a memoir, The Interrogator: A CIA Agent's true story.

But what of the claim by the US vice-president of the time, Dick Cheney, that ''enhanced interrogation techniques'' had extracted valuable intelligence from terrorists and saved lives? He is ''flat wrong'', according to Carle.

''In almost every case, the 'intelligence' obtained was faulty and subsequently discredited or suspect, or of secondary importance. The after-action assessments have mostly, albeit very quietly, found that we obtained little of critical benefit.''

Bush declared the US to be on a ''global war on terror'' to save civilisation from the evils of fundamentalist barbarism. But the CIA set up a secret international network of illegal kidnappings, ''black'' prisons and sanctioned torture that put the US and its allies into a moral abyss.

This is not saving civilisation but betraying it. Fortunately, al-Qaeda has not been able to capitalise on this hypocrisy.

Joseph Nye, a former US assistant secretary of defence in the Clinton administration and an eminent Harvard scholar in international relations, has written that ''in the information age, success is not merely the result of whose army wins, but also whose story wins . . .
''In this regard, presidential rhetoric about promoting democracy was less convincing than pictures of Abu Ghraib.''

Strategically, the greatest self-harm inflicted by the US was the invasion of Iraq. Quite apart from the human cost - 1½ times as many US soldiers died in Iraq as US citizens in the twin towers, plus a conservatively estimated 125,000 Iraqi civilians - the invasion has been a tremendous strategic boost to Iraq's traditional enemy, Iran.

And the total economic cost of the US ''war on terror'' has been calculated in a study by Brown University researchers in the US at $US3.7 trillion to $US4.4 trillion.

This includes US homeland security measures, as well as the cost of the two invasions, the cost of interest on money borrowed to pay for the invasions plus veterans' benefits. For a country suffering an intolerable debt burden, the Iraq portion, at least, about one-quarter of the total, was an irresponsible indulgence.

It's a measure of the scale of US might and accumulated goodwill that it has been able to squander so much moral advantage, so much credibility, so much blood and so much treasure and still somehow remain a functioning  superpower. It's America's luck to have so large a margin for error. But the margin is now smaller.

Peter Hartcher is The Sydney Morning Herald's international editor.