Messianic failure: pursuing the GWOT Jabberwock

Anniversaries can provide occasions for reflection and deep consideration. Past errors and misjudgements can be considered soberly; historical distance provides perspective. Mature reflections may be permitted. But they can also serve the opposite purpose: to cake, cloak and mask the record.

The gooey name GWOT, otherwise known as the Global War on Terrorism, is some two decades old, and it has revealed little by way of benefit for anybody other than military industrialists, hate preachers and jingoists. For its progenitors in the administration of President George W. Bush, motivated by the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, few of its aims were achieved.

The central feature to the war, which deserves its place of failure alongside such disastrously misguided concepts as the war on drugs, was its school boy incoherence. It remained, and to an extent remains, a war against tactics, a misguided search reminiscent of the huntfor Lewis Carroll's nonsense beast, the Jabberwock. As with any such wars, it demands mendacity, flimsy evidence if, in fact, it needs any evidence at all.

This perception was critical in placing the US, and its allies, upon a military footing that demanded false connections (a fictitious link of cooperation between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda), false capabilities (Iraq's weapons of mass destruction) and an exaggeration of the threat to US security (all of the above).

With such evaluations of terroristic potential, a secular, domestic murderer such as Saddam could be transformed into a global threat armed with weapons of mass destruction, neither proposition being true as the attacks on 9/11 were executed. In this hot house fantasy, the Iraqi leader was merely another pilot willing to steer a plane into an American target.

This narrative was sold, and consumed, by a vast number of press houses and media outlets, who proved indispensable in promoting the GWOT-Jabberwock crusade. Calculated amnesia and hand washing has taken place since then, pinning blame on the standard crew of neoconservatives, various Republicans and New York Times reporter Judith Miller. "It's been forgotten this was actually a business-wide consensus," Matt Taibbi points out, "which included the enthusiastic participation of a blue-state intelligentsia."

War sceptics such as Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura were removed from MSNBC while war cheerleaders thickened the airwaves with ghoulish delight. The New York Times ran sympathetic columns and reviews for the war case, praising such absurd works as Kenneth M. Pollack's The Threatening Storm. "The only prudent and realistic course of action left to the United States," wrote the grave Pollack, "is to mount a full-scale invasion of Iraq to smash the Iraqi armed forces, depose Saddam's regime and rid the country of weapons of mass destruction."

The New Yorker also joined in the pro-war festivities. David Remnick made his case in "Making a Case" by praising Pollack and dismissing containment as "a hollow pursuit" that would be "the most dangerous option of all." Jeffrey Goldberg, now at The Atlantic, was even more unequivocal in a staggeringly inexpert contribution headlined, "The Great Terror." On his own hunt for the Jabberwock, Goldberg interviewed alleged terrorist detainees in a prison operated by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an anti-Saddam Kurdish group in Iraq's northern Kurdish area. Having been permitted to interview the prisoners by the Union's intelligence service (no conflict of interest there), Goldberg was informed that Saddam Hussein's own spooks had "joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam [a local jihadist group]"; that the Iraqi leader "hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992"; that members of Al Qaeda escaping Afghanistan had "been secretly brought into the territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam" and that Iraq's intelligence service had "smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan." And so rests the case for the prosecution.

In March 2003, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting examined 393 on-camera sources who featured in nightly news stories on Iraq across a range of programs – ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Of those 267 were from the United States; of the US official sources, only Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts, registered his doubts. Even then, he could hardly be said to be a firebrand contrarian, telling NBC Nightly News that he worried about exit plans, the extent of US troop losses and "how long we're going to be stationed there".

Many of these outlets would be the same who obsessed about President Donald Trump's attacks upon them as peddlers of "fake news" during his time in office. Trump, drip-fed on conspiracy theories and fictions, knew who he was talking to.

The security propagandists have not done much better. With pious conviction, the vast security apparatus put in place to monitor threats, the warrantless surveillance regime exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, and the persistent interventions in the Middle East, have all been seen as beneficial. "Terrorism of many sots continues domestically and internationally," claims Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, "but the data is unmistakable that in most cases – and especially in the United States – it is both manageable and not nearly of the scale feared in 2001."

A. Trevor Thrall and Erik Goepner advance a rather different proposition. "Even if one believes American efforts have made the nation marginally safer, the United States could have achieved far greater improvements in safety and security at far less cost through other means."

The issue of what is marginal is a point of contention. Former chiefs of the Department of Homeland Security, a monster created in direct response to the 9/11 attacks, are guarded in their assessments. Bush's Secretary Michael Chertoff admits to being "hesitant" in saying "we are safer, or less". He prefers focusing on scale. "We haven't had an attack of that scale since 9/11, and we've also been very good about keeping dangerous people out of the country." Alas, domestic threats had emerged, notably on the Right, while jihadi sympathisers lurk.

Janet Napolitano, who occupied the office under the Obama administration, waffles in her reading. "Are there some things that we're safer on now than we were on 9/11? Absolutely. Are there new risks that have evolved or multiplied or grown since 9/11? Absolutely. To put it shortly, on some things, we're definitely safer." Napolitano is up with a jargon that says nothing at all: "risks are not static"; the environment is "constantly changing". "DHS needs to continue to be agile and to adapt."

The smorgasbord of modern terrorism, a good deal of it nourished by cataclysmic US-led interventions, is richer than ever. "We have more terrorists today than we did on 9/11," Elizabeth Neumann, DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism during the Trump administration, told a Senate panel last month. "That's very sobering, as a counterterrorism person." Preparing the grounds for the imminent exit from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden reasoned that keeping US troops in the country as a permanent counter-terrorist force was no longer a tenable proposition. Terrorism as a threat had "become more dispersed, metastasising around the globe". The folly of pursuing the GWOT jabberwock shows no sign of abating.