Just hours before the outgoing President George W. Bush sought in his final address to justify his disastrous two-term administration to a disillusioned and disgusted world, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband put his finger on a fatal error that has defined Bush’s gun-slinging incumbency.
As America recoiled in horror at the 9/11 attacks and the international community rallied around Washington, sharing its grief and pain, Bush’s White House team struggled for the word that would encapsulate the administration’s determination to strike back at Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda fanatics. They chose “war”. Bush was going to lead the world in a “war on terror.” It was, as Miliband has pointed out, a fatal error of judgment. By characterizing a terrible crime committed by a single terror group as an “act of war” against the United States, Bush enabled other disparate groups of bigots until then unconnected to Bin Laden, to gather under the banner of Al-Qaeda. The US-led Iraq invasion gave these groups a stage on which to play out their hatred of the United States. From then on every other terror group around the world, especially if its members were largely Muslim, have become lumped together as offshoots of Al-Qaeda and the elusive Bin Laden himself has been characterized wrongly as a mastermind directing terror on a global scale.
Miliband speaks for many when he points out that the correct response to the enormity of 9/11 was to treat it as the crime it was and reassert the values of freedom under the law, which are supposed to underpin the United States.
Instead Bush’s administrative response was as ill considered as his initial rhetoric — which also included the doltish and insensitive reference to a “crusade”. He established a Department of Homeland Security and created an atmosphere of siege in the United States, empowering wide-ranging wiretaps and intrusion into once-treasured US civil liberties. Thoroughly spooked, Americans went along with these draconian measures because they bought the falsehood that it was indeed a “war”. Few paused to consider that the death toll from 9/11 was dwarfed by US road death statistics — 41,059 in 2007.
Bush didn’t even seem to know what he meant by “war”. He denied Gitmo terror suspects any rights as prisoners of war. He also threw aside civilized behavior by torturing detainees.
In doing so and in invading Iraq on the basis of a pack of lies, he dragged America’s name into the mud. Yet because he posed as a “war-time” leader, decent Americans rallied round and even elected him a second time. But all the while Bush was actually building up the enemy he was seeking to destroy. Every time he mentioned his terror war, he rallied fresh dupes to the distorted values of terrorist bigots, who claimed to be acting in the name of Islam. This crass error may have kept him alive politically but it also reinforced the men of violence and their bloody slaughter of non-Americans.
