Looking back, it's difficult to see anything positive that Bush Jr has achieved in his war on terror, writes Khalil El-Anani* It has been half a decade since the attacks of 11 September 2001 and just a little less since the US launched its war against terrorism. The tenor of American rhetoric hasn't changed one iota throughout this time. Five years ago, Bush famously proclaimed the beginning of the West's new "crusade", and speaks even more zealously of the war against "Islamic fascism" now. Americans should be asking their president to explain what he has achieved from his war against terrorism. They should demand to see the balance sheet from the red alert they have been living under for the past five years and they should insist upon answers to such questions as to whether the US is going to remain captive to this state of alarm for the rest of the century, whether their president can now guarantee that another 11 September doesn't happen, and whether the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have exhausted all the sources of terrorism or, conversely, fuelled them as never before. The first victims of the war on terror are not Afghanistan or Iraq or even the Islamic world, which has been identified as the battle theatre. Rather, they are the American people themselves, who have fallen prey to the rash ideological fantasy of the neo-conservatives. It was the Bush "principle" -- that encapsulation of the neo-conservative creed -- that set the compass for the war against terrorism and designated the battlefront, referred to variously as the "Greater", the "New", or the "Expanded" Middle East, or even the "crescent of Islamist extremism". Regardless of what headline it went under, the result remains unavoidable: patent failure. Afghanistan after the US invasion is more miserable and unstable than before. The occupation of Iraq has succeeded in nothing but administrating slow doses of death to the integrity and identity of the Iraqi state. Crude, heavy-handed intervention in Arab affairs in general has reaped increasing depths of hatred for America and American policy. Collusion with Israel against the Arabs and Lebanon in particular has fired the will to produce a new "9/ 11", albeit with a European flavour. The pre-emptive strike strategy and logic has done nothing to deter militant extremists from planning new attacks against innocent civilians. Five years of the war on terror have wrought a bitter harvest, and no amount of honeyed words, phoney tears over Americans dead in Iraq, or idle boasts that Republicans have succeeded in making America safe, can sweeten that bitterness. There are many reasons why America's war on terror has failed. The most important, however, is that ideology was mounted on the tip of the gun, turning ideas and values into political booby-traps. The result was that the US turned from being a defender of modernist enlightened values into a vengeful, megalomaniac crusader state. This transformation is what inspired Walter Russell Mead's search for a convincing explanation for America's post-11 September foreign policy. Among the questions he asked himself was whether Bush and his clique had correctly defined American interests and whether they had properly tailored the role the US should play in the new millennium. Mead holds that Bush is an anomaly in the conduct of US foreign policy. If influenced by some of the diverse schools of thought that have shaped American policy abroad over the past four centuries, he has relentlessly overthrown scores of accepted norms from that heritage. In particular, the war on terror has worked to blur the Bush administration's ability to identify American interests abroad and the means most conducive to furthering those interests. The events of 11 September and their aftermath also added a new religious dimension to American foreign policy, which under Bush has acquired a uniquely evangelical tone. The danger of this facet, according to Mead, is that it greatly diminishes the possibility of developing a consistent, harmonious strategy that would better equip the US for world leadership in times of peace. The implication of this is that America's ability to lead the world will remain contingent upon its ability to keep the world chained to a state of war against the "forces of terrorism". The worst effect of the war on terror is that an enormous gulf now separates the West from the Muslim people. In this new chapter in the history of the conflict between the two sides, an entire confrontational lore has been dredged up from the past, rendering the many political, intellectual and social problems extant between the two increasingly obdurate. Bush's determination to come out the victor in "his" war on terror threatens to perpetuate and exacerbate this problem. Nor is it surprising, in this light, that chauvinistic and fundamentalist values have gained such an ascendancy in the rhetoric of both sides as to portend the demise of the values of dialogue, enlightenment and modernism. President Bush has a right to refuse to believe that there's a civil war in Iraq. It's his right, too, to feel that American soldiers are obeying the "call of history" when they plunge into the Iraqi battlefield in defence of "the civilised world" against "Islamist extremists". But out of respect to people who think otherwise, he should at least take some pains to explain what is going on politically and militarily on the ground in Iraq. After all, do not the Iraqi people have a right to know where this American administration is taking them in its war on terror? Do they not need to know how long their country is going to remain a testing ground for neo-conservative experiments in the application of their chimerical dreams and whether the hawks in the White House have a plan for ending the bloodbath in Iraq and closing down the makeshift morgues that are chockablock full with unidentifiable corpses? Last November, Bush proclaimed a "new" strategy for victory in Iraq. The way this strategy was being trumpeted left no doubt that it was little more than an attempt to divert attention from the US's inability to halt the deterioration in Iraq. Now, less than a year after that proclamation, a recently released Pentagon report confirmed just how miserably that strategy has failed. The writers of the report refused to say that Iraq had degenerated into civil war, but they did acknowledge the existence of circumstances conducive to the eruption of civil war. One can not help but suspect that this document was a "pre-emptive" attempt to offset an attack by Democrats against Bush's handling of the war, especially now that congressional mid-term elections are only a couple of months away, and in light of the growing tide of opinion pressing for Rumsfeld's resignation for his bungling of the situation in Iraq. On the other hand, as cautious as they were, the writers of the report fell into the trap of their own circumlocution. They acknowledge that the Iraqi death toll has risen by more than 50 per cent over the past year, that attacks against coalition forces are rising by 15 per cent a month, and that the Iraqi people are living in constant fear of their lives. Certainly this indicates something of a different order than "limited" skirmishes of a non-sectarian nature. The report writers might not have been able to say the word, but developments on the ground lead to the inescapable conclusion that Iraq is in the grips of civil war. After Zarqawi was killed three months ago, Washington heralded the advent of a new era in Iraq, free of sectarian violence. The opposite has occurred and random attacks, the most fearful type of revenge, have risen to unprecedented levels. But this civil war is not one being waged across clear-cut sectarian divides; it is highly complex, with factors of history, religious and ethnic identity, and individual beliefs interacting in intricate ways. But the tragedy of Iraq is not the only consequence of Bush's war on terror, the media fanfare surrounding which is inversely proportional to its successes. Indeed, one of the broader consequences of Bush's belligerent policies is the fragmentation of Al-Qaeda and the concomitant inability to predict where one of its splinters will strike next. * The writer is a political analyst for Al-Siyasa Al-Dawliya magazine published by Al-Ahram.
