In Part Four of his series Surge and Decline, Josh Messite assesses the aftermath of 9/11 and its connection to broader trends in US foreign policy.
“One who possesses a selfless eye, a humble spirit, and a moderate appetite is a disciple of our father Abraham; one who possesses a jealous eye, an arrogant spirit, and a limitless appetite is a disciple of the wicked Balaam. The disciples of Abraham, the generous and modest, enjoy this world and inherit the world-to-come; the disciples of Balaam, the murderers and deceivers, inherit Hell and descend into the pit of destruction.” — Pirkei Avot (5:19), Galilee, Roman Palestine, c. 200 CE
In the previous installment of this series, I suggested that a collection of American intelligence and security officials, oil and defense investors, and right-wing ideologues facilitated the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This part — split in two due to length — is about that greedy and ultra-reactionary network’s successes and failures in using 9/11 as a catalyst to conquer Afghanistan and to preserve and enhance American predominance.
For American finance capitalists and corporate contractors, 9/11 was an opportunity to revitalize the sagging weapons industry and expand their penetration into the Central and West Asian energy, logistics, and infrastructure “markets.” For the CIA, 9/11 was an opportunity to establish a puppet regime in opium-rich Afghanistan and regain resources, power, and prestige by transforming themselves into an “anti-terrorist” combat organization. For the US military, 9/11 was an opportunity to permanently inflate their budget, open up new bases throughout Asia and Africa, and cement their control over the Persian/Arabian Gulf, Red Sea, and Horn of Africa. For geopolitical crusaders like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, 9/11 was an opportunity to defeat their less-hawkish domestic rivals and solidify America’s post-Soviet global hegemony.
Individual American elites, institutions, corporations, and political-economic sectors extracted tremendous value from 9/11, but history revealed that the attacks were closer to a potent shot of adrenaline than a lasting cure for the sluggish empire’s terminal decline. The “Global War on Terror” failed to produce adequate puppet governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, damaged America’s reputation throughout the world, did not prevent America’s rivals from countering US influence in Central Asia, West Asia, or Africa, and replaced the American public’s “Vietnam Syndrome” with an “Iraq Syndrome.” The (alleged) conspirators might have produced an all-time great act of propaganda, but 9/11 ultimately wasn’t powerful enough to stave off intervention fatigue, multipolarity, or even the Taliban. The new Pearl Harbor wasn’t as effective as the first one in stimulating an American Century.
Uniting and Strengthening America
The Bush White House wasted no time finding silver linings in the plumes of cancerous smoke pouring out of Ground Zero. At 9:00 pm on September 11th, as initial reports were estimating that over 10,000 people had died in the Twin Towers, President George W. Bush told his National Security Council: “This is a great opportunity. We have to think of it as an opportunity.” In a callous interview with The New Yorker a few months after the psychologically-devastating attacks, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said that she asked her team to think seriously about “how you capitalize on the opportunities” created by the deadliest terrorist attack in modern history, a mass-casualty event that helpfully “shifted the tectonic plates in international politics,” and required fast political action to “seize on that and position American interests and institutions before they harden again.” Vice President Dick Cheney saw the horrifying event as an opportunity for Americans to renew their “deep and abiding patriotism,” “speaking for all” when he told the attendees of a white-tie gala in New York a month after 9/11: “We love our country only more when she is threatened.” Cheney had a point — a higher percentage of US adults described themselves as “extremely proud to be an American” in the two years following 9/11 than they did in any poll before or after that time. A sad, angry, frightened nation under attack shifted from ambivalence and indifference to patriotism and vengeance. As Bush said 10 days after the attacks, America was “a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution.” That angry resolve was necessary to rally the frightened public around the bellicose right-wing government and its promise to protect American civilians and the newly-vulnerable American “way of life” against the Islamist enemies of “civilization, progress, pluralism, and tolerance.” When Cheney and Bush took office, American “public trust in government” hovered around 31%; in the month after the terrorist attacks the Bush-Cheney Administration had been repeatedly, specifically, and urgently warned about, public trust in government surged to 60%.
As Cheney’s motorcade was leaving the luxury hotel in Manhattan that hosted the October 2001 charity gala, he claimed in his memoir: “I looked out the window of my limo to see something completely unexpected and very moving — New Yorkers whose cars had been stopped, standing in the street cheering and applauding us.” Unexpected, indeed — not even a full year earlier, residents of New York City voted against Bush and Cheney by a margin of 77.9% to 18.3%. Bush narrowly lost the national election in November 2000 and only became president because of Republican Party control of the Florida state government and the US Supreme Court. The week before the Planes Operation succeeded beyond Al-Qaeda’s wildest dreams, unelected-President Bush had an approval rating of 51%. In the week after the Twin Towers fell, Bush’s approval rating climbed to 90%, the highest level of domestic support for an American president in the postwar era. Bush’s approval didn’t dip below 80% again for the next six months, a level of support that Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton didn’t get to enjoy for a single day of their presidencies. What price would a polarizing and illegitimate far-right political leader’s ambitious inner circle be willing to pay for an immediate 40% boost in support and a 30% boost in public trust in government?
“We Are All Americans”
The devastation and outrage caused by the 9/11 attacks also induced a feeling of pro-American goodwill and anti-terrorist unity among foreign powers that had previously bristled at President Bush’s jingoistic unilateralism. In 2001, America’s allies in Europe — especially France and Germany — weren’t happy about the Bush Administration’s rejections of multilateral environmental treaties, non-proliferation agreements, and war crimes tribunals. The Clinton Administration had signed onto the International Criminal Court Treaty, and the European Union issued a statement in June 2001 calling on Bush to maintain American support for the court’s establishment, but Bush irritated European officials by refusing to commit to the UN plan to hold war criminals accountable at The Hague.1 The European powers were also angered by Bush’s March 2001 rejection of the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, an agreement to coordinate a global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions that had been co-organized by the Clinton Administration. French President Jacques Chirac called Bush’s decision to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol “disturbing and unacceptable,” a European Union official stated that she was “extremely concerned and disappointed” by Bush’s withdrawal, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder publicly urged Bush to change his mind.
Those transatlantic conflicts and tensions became water under the bridge after the Islamist terror attacks killed 2,996 people in America, including 372 foreign victims from 102 different countries. On September 13th, 2001, progressive French newspaper Le Monde — long critical of US foreign policy — declared that “We Are All Americans.” Parisians laid flowers in front of the US Embassy and sang the Star Spangled Banner at a memorial service in the Notre Dame cathedral. A week after the attacks, President Chirac flew to DC, became the first foreign leader to meet with Bush post-9/11, and toured the Ground Zero rescue site, a scene that made Chirac “feel like crying.” As of August 2001, Bush was “highly unpopular with the publics of the major nations of Western Europe,” with a foreign policy approval rating of just 16% in France and 23% in Germany, but by April 2002, 64% of French respondents and 61% of German respondents supported the Bush-led war in Afghanistan. Like Gaullist Chirac, social-democratic Schröder put his disagreements with Bush aside and pledged “unlimited solidarity” with the United States in a speech before the German parliament — 565 out of 611 voting members of the Bundestag approved Schröder’s pledge and agreed to collaborate with Bush’s War on Terror. French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin — the ex-Trotskyist leader of the French Socialist Party — told the French National Assembly in November 2001 that “if France participates in this conflict, it is not against Afghanistan, but instead because the United States has suffered attacks of a rare violence and, as an ally, France has to side with the Americans.” President Bush had made that clear — in his address to Congress on September 21st, 2001, W. declared that “every nation in every region now has a decision to make: either you are with us or you are with the terrorists… This is not just America’s fight, and what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight.”
The day after 9/11, the UN unanimously passed a resolution expressing “its deepest sympathy and condolences to the victims and their families and to the people and Government of the United States,” “calling on all States to work together urgently to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these terrorist attacks.” The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) held an emergency meeting that same day, where President Bush invoked the organization’s Article 5 collective defense clause for the first and only time in NATO’s history, calling on America’s allies to help fight the War on Terror in Afghanistan. The call was heeded. In the 20 years following 9/11, Germany and the United Kingdom each sent approximately 150,000 soldiers to Afghanistan, France sent 70,000 soldiers, Italy sent 50,000, Canada and Australia each sent 40,000, Romania sent 30,000, Georgia and Denmark each sent 20,000, Norway sent 10,000, New Zealand sent 3,500, and the Netherlands, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia, Finland, Albania, North Macedonia, and Luxembourg deployed smaller contingents to Afghanistan as well. Although NATO had previously intervened in the post-Yugoslavia Balkan wars, the coalition’s enormous and protracted occupation of Afghanistan was unprecedented. The Bush Administration obviously never would have been able to rope America’s allies into their Afghan debacle in the absence of Al-Qaeda’s attacks against New York and DC.
Some of America’s enemies and rivals also expressed sympathy and an increased willingness to collaborate with the Great Satan after 9/11. Ten days after the attacks, the New York Times reported that “last week, for the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, there were no chants of ‘death to America’ at weekly Friday prayers around” Iran. Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei were both quick to condemn Al-Qaeda’s attack on American civilians, and “both the reformist camp around President Mohammad Khatami and the more conservative clerics behind the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have softened their tone toward the United States.” Thousands of Iranians attended a candlelight vigil in Tehran for the 9/11 victims, and 60,000 Iranian spectators observed a minute of silence for the American victims during a post-9/11 soccer game in Azadi Stadium. Tehran Mayor Morteza Alviri sent a condolence message to New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — “the first public official contact between Iran and the US” since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Ahmad Borghani, a reformist member of the Iranian parliament, brought a wreath of white flowers to the US diplomatic section at the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, signed the memorial book for the relatives of the 9/11 victims, and stated that “this tragedy has brought the two countries closer.” In February 2002, the New York Times also reported that Cuban President Fidel Castro had “muted his hostile remarks about Washington,” “offered to cooperate with the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism,” supplied “intelligence on the movements of terrorists,” and “did not criticize the United States decision to detain Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners at the American military base at Guantánamo Bay.” Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque indicated interest in a post-9/11 détente between the US and Cuba, expressing “hope that one day the relations on all official matters can be handled with the respect and collaboration that is happening at Guantánamo.” Pérez Roque insisted that “we do not have a policy against the United States. There is no anti-North American sentiment in Cuba. There is no hatred against the United States or against the people of the United States. On the contrary, there is a feeling of respect.”
The Bush Administration rejected the post-9/11 conciliatory gestures from Iran and Cuba — Bush added Iran to his “Axis of Evil” and his State Department did not remove Cuba from its “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list — but they were more open to rapprochement with their Great Power rivals. On September 11th, Vladimir Putin became the first foreign leader to speak with Bush and offer his condolences. In the hours after the attacks, Putin issued a statement of solidarity with the United States, announcing that “we entirely and fully share and experience your pain. We support you.” Putin described the 9/11 attacks as “a brazen challenge to the whole of humanity, at least to civilized humanity,” by “barbarians, terrorists, and bandits.” In October 2001, Putin claimed that 9/11 “bore the same signature” as the 1999 Moscow apartment building bombings, which killed more than 300 Russian civilians, justified Russia’s brutal attacks on Chechnya, facilitated Putin’s rise to power, and linked Russian anti-separatism to the post-9/11 War on Terror. The 1999 bombings were attributed to Chechen terrorists, but the attacks that “bore the same signature” as 9/11 were probably perpetrated by the FSB, Russia’s national security agency, in order to provide a pretext for the Second Chechen War and increase former FSB Director Putin’s popularity. Bush called on the Chechen separatists to accept peace talks with Putin and cut their ties with “international terrorist groups.” Bush also announced his support for Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization and granted Russia “market economy” status, leading BBC to report that “Putin has been handsomely rewarded for his vocal support of the US military response to the 11 September attacks.” Bush had liked Putin since a very enjoyable Slovenian meeting between the world leaders in June 2001, where W. “looked the man in the eye,” “found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” “got a sense of his soul,” and declared that Putin’s Russia “can be a strong partner and friend.” When asked about geopolitical competition between the US and Russia for influence in Central Asia, Putin replied: “if there is more confidence and cooperation, both the United States and Russia will gain from this.”
This post-9/11 cooperation included the entity currently engaged in a proxy war with Russia: NATO. On September 13th, 2001, NATO and Russia released an unprecedented joint statement calling for the defeat of Islamist terrorism, “this greatest evil.” In October 2001, Putin signaled openness to NATO’s expansion, even in the case of former Soviet republics. This was a shocking pivot. Russian President Boris Yeltsin had warned Bill Clinton only a few years earlier that he saw “nothing but humiliation for Russia” if NATO expanded into Central and Eastern Europe. In May 2002, the two powers “launched a new era in NATO-Russia cooperation,” establishing a body called the NATO-Russia Council to coordinate their efforts against terrorism and other areas of mutual interest. The Putin Administration compared NATO-Russia cooperation on the War on Terror in the aftermath of 9/11 to the anti-Axis alliance between the West and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks. Russia agreed to supply counterterrorist intelligence to NATO, to open up Russian air space to planes carrying humanitarian cargo to Afghanistan, and to accept the opening of US military bases in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia for anti-terrorist operations. Washington Post managing editor Robert G. Kaiser argued that, by shifting Russian policy closer to the US and NATO, “Putin has helped make Sept. 11 potentially the most important moment in world history since the collapse of communism.” Anatoly Chubais, Yeltsin’s Deputy Prime Minister/privatization chief, said that Putin’s collaboration with the US and NATO “has turned Russian foreign policy around 180 degrees… there has never been a change on a similar scale in all of the history of Russian statehood.” US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul described Putin’s post-9/11 geopolitical shift as a “risky westward turn” that was “the boldest decision of his short tenure,” stating that Putin’s acceptance of American troops in Central Asia was as if “Russian troops came into Mexico… the center of gravity in the world has changed.”
The terrorist attacks also warmed US relations with China. Much as Russia used 9/11 as an opportunity to further collaborate with the West and internationally legitimize their crackdown on Chechen separatism, China used 9/11 to deepen ties with the US and internationally legitimize their crackdown on Uyghur separatism. In an October 2001 joint press conference in Shanghai, Bush commended Chinese President Jiang Zemin for his commitment to cooperate in the War on Terror and for “standing side by side with the American people as we fight this evil force.” Jiang was “pleased to note that, recently, there has been improvement in our bilateral ties,” as he and Bush “reached a series of consensus with respect to such major issues as Sino-US relations, counterterrorism, and maintenance of world peace and stability.” In December 2001, General Francis X. Taylor — the State Department’s Counterterrorism Coordinator — praised the Chinese government for following through on their promises to help the US wage war against Al-Qaeda, announcing: “We’re pleased with the cooperation we have received from China since Sept. 11.” Gen. Taylor described the relationship between the US and China as a “robust, multi-faceted, and evolving partnership designed to confront a common threat that we face, that is global terrorism.” To thank China for its support, the US State Department agreed to officially designate anti-Chinese Uyghur militant Hasan Mahsum’s small “Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement” as an illegal terrorist organization, bolstering the Chinese government’s broader conflation of Uyghur separatism with Al-Qaeda. The US military also detained 22 Uyghurs without trial in Guantánamo Bay, allowing Chinese interrogators access to the detainees in September 2002.
Much like the alien squid in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, the horrific destruction in New York on 9/11 aligned the world’s geopolitical rivals against an ambiguous, fearsome, and convenient common enemy. In September 2002, the Bush Administration’s National Security Council released an optimistic strategy document, announcing that “the events of September 11, 2001 fundamentally changed the context for relations between the United States and other main centers of global power and opened vast new opportunities,” claiming hopefully that:
Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the 17th century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually preparing for war. Today, the world’s great powers find ourselves on the same side — united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos. The United States will build on these common interests to promote global security. We are also increasingly united by common values. Russia is in the midst of a hopeful transition, reaching for its democratic future and a partner in the War on Terror. Chinese leaders are discovering that economic freedom is the only source of national wealth. In time, they will find that social and political freedom is the only source of national greatness. America will encourage the advancement of democracy and economic openness in both nations, because these are the best foundations for domestic stability and international order.
In that same document, the Bush Administration declared that “it is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength” and gave itself the right to wage preemptive wars against enemies “seeking weapons of mass destruction” and “dangerous technologies,” stating that “as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.”
Benevolent Global Hegemony
The Bush Administration’s commitment to use military force unilaterally and preemptively was an extension of its neoconservative view of America’s place in the world, described by Robert Kagan and William Kristol — co-founders of the neoconservative “Project for the New American Century” think tank — as “benevolent global hegemony.” In an influential 1996 essay for Foreign Affairs titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Kagan and Kristol argued: “peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it… American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible.” Kagan and Kristol called for right-wingers to make it their primary foreign policy objective to “preserve and enhance American predominance” by increasing the military budget by about $60-$80 billion and by consciously acting as the unchallenged hegemon America already was. They believed the responsible exercise of US hegemony should include large-scale regime change operations in countries that threaten US interests and/or values. Their embrace of “benevolent hegemony” was motivated by their imperialist desire to extract value from Central and West Asia unimpeded, by the defense contractors’ yearning to return to the Reagan Era glory days of military spending, and by a neocolonial “civilizing” savior-complex akin to Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden.” The neoconservatives wanted American corporations to have the military-enforced freedom to plunder any country in the world, but they also saw American regime change operations as a way to “remoralize” America and “restore a sense of the heroic” through an “elevated patriotism” derived from the successful spread of American freedom and democracy throughout the world.
Kagan and Kristol lamented, however, that “the lack of a visible threat to US vital interests or to world peace has tempted Americans to absentmindedly dismantle the material and spiritual foundations on which their national well-being has been based.” After the fall of the Soviet Union, “the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness.” In their view, the end of the Cold War made the American public and the DC Establishment complacent and self-destructive, as cuts to the military budget and an inward pivot toward domestic crises distracted the empire from its righteous “responsibility to lead the world.” Although George Bush Sr.’s Gulf War was supposed to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all,” ridding the American public of the pesky “belief that any large-scale American military intervention abroad was doomed to practical failure — and perhaps also to moral iniquity,” public aversion to large-scale military intervention and a general lack of faith in the federal government remained after the US defeated Iraq in 1991. This unpatriotic cynicism, intervention fatigue, and support for the reallocation of resources toward problems at home posed serious obstacles to the bold objectives of the neoconservatives. Reagan had carried out a low-casualty invasion of Grenada in 1983 and an air raid against Libya in 1986, and Bush Sr. launched a low-casualty invasion of Panama in 1989, but Reagan could not muster political support for a retaliatory attack against Hezbollah and Iran after the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings, and he complained that the Vietnam Syndrome prevented him from considering a large-scale military intervention in El Salvador or Nicaragua. H. W.’s Gulf War was only feasible because of a massive public relations campaign and a restrained military strategy devised by General Colin Powell to avoid repeating the same mistakes the US made in Vietnam. General Powell believed that US military intervention should take the form of limited-objective, time-constrained, broadly-supported, straightforward, “winnable” military operations rather than sinking American lives and resources into open-ended, long-term, unpopular, complex, overly-ambitious military occupations and counterinsurgencies.
William Kristol and fellow neoconservative intellectual Charles Krauthammer fumed at Bush Sr. and Gen. Powell for that self-imposed restraint, their refusal to “finish off Saddam at the end of the war” even though the US had the military capacity to continue on to the president’s palaces after expelling the Iraqi military from Kuwait. Although the neoconservatives disdained Bill Clinton’s “Wilsonian multilateralism” and shift away from muscular militarism toward “insular” issues like education, infrastructure, and healthcare, they also scorned conservative “realists” like Bush Sr., Brent Scowcroft, James A. Baker III, and Henry Kissinger as amoral pessimists incapable of maximizing American greatness. The neoconservative Lost Causers strongly believed that the failure of the Vietnam War was caused by domestic backstabbers and Fifth Columns — anti-war radicals, hippie pacifists, and irresponsible journalists — not by anything intrinsic to the American Empire or its strategy of conquest. Against the narrow visions of weak-willed cowards like Colin Powell, the neoconservatives saw the lesson of Vietnam as a need to inspire a deep feeling of patriotism and an unshakable “willingness to win” in the American public. Their biggest competitors for the support of right-wing patriots were the Christian-nationalist “paleoconservatives” led by Pat Buchanan and Thomas Fleming, who became acutely threatening to the neoconservative agenda after Buchanan’s unexpectedly-strong 1996 Republican primary campaign. Buchanan argued that “when the Cold War is over, America should come home,” opposed Bush Sr.’s Gulf War, called for a return to the “America First” anti-interventionist nativism of the interwar period, and favored patriotic protectionism over global free trade: policies anathema to US global hegemony. If the neoconservatives were going to strengthen their country and its place in the world, they believed they would need to defeat the multilateral, domestic-oriented Democrats, the unprincipled conservative realists, and the neo-isolationist paleocons.
The most sophisticated defense of the neocons’ ultra-belligerent worldview against their less-hawkish rivals was written in 1995 by Zalmay Khalilzad — a Reagan Administration State Department official and another member of the Project for the New American Century — in a study called “From Containment to Global Leadership: America and the World After the Cold War.” In that RAND Corporation report, Khalilzad noted that “despite a decline in its relative economic power and significant domestic problems, the US remains the world’s largest economy” and “the world’s preeminent military and political power,” but “three years after the end of the Cold War, no grand new design has yet jelled” and “the country is still trying to get its strategic bearings.” Khalilzad’s concern was that “once you’re at the top, the great danger is that you get lazy. You think you’re fat and happy, you’re running the world. Others, who want to rise up, are motivated.” Khalilzad warned that a failure to “obtain and maintain domestic support” for US global leadership would lead to a more chaotic and violent world, in which “the relative position of the US would decline, the world would most likely settle into a balance-of-power multipolar system,” and “Russian re-imperialization and Chinese expansionism” would go unchecked. Khalilzad worried that a self-inflicted end to American hegemony would impede the spread of free-market capitalism, enable a regression to nationalistic protectionism, negatively impact the wealth and security of Americans, increase the occurrence of regional wars and failed states, spark the rise of new arms races, and raise the risk of nuclear conflict. Khalilzad concluded that “even if the development of a multipolar world is inevitable, the later it happens, the better… precluding the rise of a hostile global rival is a good guide for defining what interests the US should regard as vital.” In a RAND Corporation research brief co-written with neoconservative intellectual Abram Shulsky in 2000, Khalilzad proposed that the US “develop an integrated political, military, and economic strategy aimed at thwarting the growth of rivalries that may engender instability or conflict in the region” based on “the need to prevent the rise of a dominant power that might seek to undermine the US role in Asia or use force to assert its claims.”
In addition to encouraging vigilance against the return of multipolarity, the Afghan-American Khalilzad (born in Balkh, raised in Kabul and California) also co-wrote a policy paper in 2000 encouraging regime change in Afghanistan. Citing the presence of Al-Qaeda, the plight of Afghan women under the repressive Taliban, and the cancerous growth of the opium industry in his home country, Khalilzad argued that the protection of US interests “requires confronting the Taliban and preventing it from consolidating power,” as “engagement would do little to subdue the Taliban.” Khalilzad predicted that “there is little reason to expect the Taliban to renounce radicalism in exchange for ties to Washington,” and that “as long as the Taliban’s radical leadership remains in power, a true crackdown on Osama bin Laden’s network is not likely.” In a section titled “Why Should We Care?”, Khalilzad lists several reasons why Afghanistan is of geopolitical significance to the American Empire: its “position near such critical but unstable regions as the Persian Gulf and the Indo-Pakistani border,” “Central Asia’s oil and gas reserves, which are estimated to rival those of the North Sea,” Afghanistan’s prospective role as “a valuable corridor for Central Asian energy” and “access to markets in Central Asia,” its potential role as “a trade link between Central and South Asia,” and its present role in “obstructing the development of Central and South Asia” by scaring potential foreign investors away from the region.
Khalilzad neglected to include another, more personal factor influencing his agitation for regime change: his work as a paid consultant for the Los Angeles-based Union Oil Company of California (Unocal), which was the leader of a consortium seeking to build a pipeline across Afghanistan connecting the enormous gas fields in southeastern Turkmenistan to refineries and ports in Pakistan and potentially India. Unocal also owned a significant stake in the BP-led post-Soviet pipeline connecting Azerbaijan’s offshore Caspian Sea oil fields to terminals and ports on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. The US State Department and CIA saw inland Turkmenistan’s natural gas and the landlocked Caspian Sea’s oil as geopolitically-appealing alternatives to the Persian/Arabian Gulf’s oil. Turkmenistan had the third-largest proven reserves of natural gas in the world (behind Russia and Iran) and American imperialists were eager to use corporate pipeline projects to pry Central Asia’s energy resources away from post-Soviet Russia. Khalilzad — a Pashto speaker and a member of the same Pashtun tribe as the current leader of the Taliban — participated in pipeline negotiations between Unocal and Taliban officials in 1997, but Osama bin Laden’s 1998 attacks on US embassies in East Africa made it impossible for Unocal to do business with the government harboring bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda camps.
Major Retaliation
As White House Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clarke predicted in a desperate memo to Condoleezza Rice one week before 9/11, the negligent [obstructionist] actions of the White House and CIA meant that national security officials had been “left waiting for the big attack, with lots of casualties, after which some major US retaliation will be in order.” In the aftermath of the catastrophic attack with thousands of casualties, major US retaliation was in order — against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but also against enemies who were not involved in it. President Bush informed Bob Woodward that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld didn’t even wait a week after 9/11 before saying, “this is an opportunity to take out Saddam Hussein.” It’s not hard to see why Rumsfeld thought that. Domestic support for an American invasion of Iraq spiked from an already-high 52% in February 2001 to a strong, bipartisan 74% in November 2001. In October 2002, 66% of Americans and 57% of Democrats believed the Bush Administration’s false insinuations that Saddam facilitated 9/11. That month, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, 27 other Democratic Party senators, and 81 Democratic Party representatives voted to authorize an invasion of Iraq, “creating a broad mandate” for the deployment of US ground forces to overthrow the Iraqi government. That broad mandate would have been impossible for the Iraq-hawks to create if the Bush Administration had prevented 9/11.
Donald Rumsfeld envisioned the conquest of Baghdad as only the beginning. In October 2001, the Pentagon chief mused to the New York Times that “maybe out of this tragedy comes opportunity… the kind of opportunities that World War II offered: to refashion much of the world.” Condoleezza Rice also compared the post-9/11 situation to the decisive period brought on by World War II, a time when American imperialism and the capitalist world-system were transformed and strengthened. According to Woodward, President Bush wrote in his diary on the night of 9/11 that “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” On the first post-9/11 Fourth of July, Bush stole Cheney’s line about “loving our country more when she’s threatened.” Did W. also steal his Pearl Harbor comparison from Cheney and Rumsfeld’s think tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)? One year before 9/11, PNAC argued that a “new Pearl Harbor” would be necessary to serve as a “catastrophic and catalyzing event” if the empire was going to get back on the right track after post-Cold-War American “timidity” and reductions in defense spending had “threatened America’s ability to exercise its dominant military power,” making it “impossible to maintain” “global American preeminence” and “the world order secured by that preeminence.” In a December 2001 interview, Donald Rumsfeld told Larry King that he had successfully predicted on the morning of September 11th that there would soon be “an event that would occur in the world that would be sufficiently shocking that it would remind people, again, how important it is to have a strong, healthy Defense Department.” Nostradamus over here…
Restoring a weakened Pentagon to its former glory was not going to be cheap. There was a great deal of post-Cold-War damage to undo. In 1991, President Bush Sr. released a 6-year-plan to cut national defense spending by 20%, savings H. W. presented as a “peace dividend.” In 1992, President Bush Sr. proposed a budget that made billion-dollar cuts to weapons programs, slashing $3 billion in 1993 and up to $50 billion in military spending by 1997. When Bill Clinton took office, he cut military spending by an additional $14 billion in 1994 and an additional $60 billion by 1997. Military expenditures as a percentage of US GDP fell from 5.9% in 1989 to 4.6% in 1993 and 3.1% in 2001. The military procurement budget declined by more than 60% between 1989 and 1997. This decrease in spending had a profound impact on defense contractors, which relied on federal weapons contracts for revenue. Clinton’s Deputy Defense Secretary William Perry told the CEOs of the major military contractors that “we expect defense companies to go out of business, and we will stand by and let that happen.” The military contractors reacted by laying off hundreds of thousands of employees, expanding into commercial/civilian markets, and engaging in a merger & acquisition feeding frenzy. By the time the dust had settled in 1997, the 51 large defense contractors that existed at the end of the Cold War had consolidated into the “Big Five”: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman.
Shortly after 9/11, the Vice President of Boeing told the Wall Street Journal that “the purse is now open… any member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November.” In October 2001, the Pentagon and the British military gave Lockheed Martin a multi-decade contract worth $200 billion to build 3,002 F-35 fighter jets. Ten years of delays, defects, and budget overruns ended up inflating the Lockheed Martin F-35’s total production costs above $400 billion, making the contract larger than the GDP of Denmark, but members of Congress loved the 300,000 domestic advanced manufacturing jobs created by the F-35 program.2 In February 2002, Bush and Rumsfeld announced the largest single-year budget increase for the US military since the Reagan Era, an immediate boost of more than $46 billion (roughly the size of the Bolivian GDP, for scale). Much of that increase was allocated directly to “counterterrorism,” which Bush and Rumsfeld projected would cost more than $27 billion in 2003. The Bush Administration proposal entailed a $120 billion increase in the Pentagon’s budget by 2007. For defense contractors, the most exciting aspect of skyrocketing post-9/11 military spending was the $38 billion increase in procurement. The 2002 plan called for spending $5.2 billion — a $1.3 billion increase — on the Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets. Bush and Rumsfeld gave Boeing a $9.7 billion contract to build 60 more C-17 transport planes and proposed a near doubling of spending on a Lockheed Martin/Northrop Grumman surveillance satellite system. General Dynamics made billions off expanded contracts for M1 Abrams tanks and Stryker armored fighting vehicles. Raytheon received a $1.2 billion contract to build new training jets for the Air Force and $117 million annually to build missiles for the Navy. Another $1 billion was allocated to the production of drones by General Atomics and Northrop Grumman. In 2010, the Pentagon’s yearly spending reached over $800 billion in 2021 dollars — “substantially more than the US spent on its military at the height of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or the Reagan buildup of the 1980s.” Total Pentagon spending between 2001 and 2021 exceeded $14.1 trillion, and nearly half of that inconceivably-large amount was paid to defense contractors.
Those numbers might seem high, but you gotta spend (public sector) money to make (corporations) money. The vast federal resources invested in regime change in Iraq were expected to produce an impressive financial return in the form of Iraq’s nationalized energy industry. In 1998, the CEO of Chevron said: “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas — reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.” In Spring 2001, Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force — which included representatives from Chevron and other petroleum, gas, and pipeline corporations — reviewed maps of Iraqi oil fields, pipelines, refineries, and terminals, produced a list of “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,” and issued a recommendation to “support initiatives by [West Asian] suppliers to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.” A February 2001 National Security Council memo directed National Security staffers to collaborate with Cheney’s Energy Task Force in “melding” “the review of operational policies towards rogue states” such as Iraq with “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.” Iraq’s energy resources had been closed off to Western capital since BP, Exxon, and Shell were kicked out of Iraq by Ba’athist President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr in 1972. The Ba’athists used their control over Iraq’s resources to restrict global oil supply and boost prices, giving them economic leverage over the Western imperialists. In the months leading up to the Bush-Cheney invasion, the US State Department’s “Future of Iraq Project” recommended that Iraq “be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war.” In January 2003, Cheney’s office met with representatives from Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and other energy companies to “discuss plans for Iraq’s postwar industry.” After Saddam’s Ba’athist government was successfully overthrown, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum, and Shell won previously-inaccessible Iraqi oilfield contracts. Energy servicers like Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Weatherford International, and Schlumberger won lucrative oil drilling and well refurbishment subcontracts in Iraq that didn’t exist before the demise of Saddam. Between June 2014 and March 2023, the largest importer of oil from Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish-governed region was the State of Israel; the Iraqi government had prohibited trade with Israel since 1948, Iraq fired 42 Scud missiles at Israel in 1991, and Saddam financially supported the Palestinian resistance. Chevron and Exxon’s oil deals in post-Saddam Iraqi Kurdistan may have been smoothed over by the presence of a familiar face: neoconservative intellectual/businessman Zalmay Khalilzad, who became a member of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s investment board after serving as Bush Jr.’s Special Presidential Envoy to Afghanistan (2001-2003), Ambassador to Afghanistan (2004-2005), Ambassador to Iraq (2005-2007), and Ambassador to the UN (2007-2009). Halliburton — Dick Cheney’s company — also made a fortune off “sweetheart” Iraqi infrastructure deals, raking in $12 billion in postwar reconstruction funds. The 150+ logistics and construction firms brought in by the American occupiers to rebuild Iraq after the US military destroyed it collectively received contracts worth more than $50 billion.
But the push to invade Iraq wasn’t only about oil and imperial-corporate looting. The neoconservatives ultimately saw Iraqi regime change as “a war to remake the world.” Condoleezza Rice defended the invasion of Iraq against conservative-realist skeptics by arguing that “the world is a messy place, and someone has to clean it up.” As Charles Krauthammer put it in his February 2001 articulation of the “Bush Doctrine,” the US had become “the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome,” and its military-backed global preeminence granted it “the power to reshape, indeed remake, reality on its own.” In 2002, a “senior adviser to Bush” (who may or may not have been his dirty tricks mastermind Karl Rove) told a reporter that “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” By destroying Saddam’s government in a Krauthammerian “unapologetic and implacable demonstration of will,” the imperial maximalists around George W. Bush sought to reshape and remake West Asian and North-East African reality to better suit American interests. This was an opportunity to put into place the strategy Paul Wolfowitz had devised when he was Cheney’s Defense Undersecretary for Policy: the use of military aggression to “establish and protect a new order,” “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” Destroying a stubborn opponent of the US-led world order and remaking his state as a pro-American “democracy” “floating on a sea of oil” (extracted by Western corporations) would send a powerful message to Iran, Libya, and Syria. Neocon Rumsfeld advisor Richard Perle said that overthrowing Saddam allowed the US to “deliver a short message, a two-word message: ‘You’re next.’” When Bush was planning the overthrow of the Taliban, he said: “Let’s hit them hard. We want to signal this is a change from the past. We want to cause countries like Syria and Iran to change their view.” William Kristol wrote that “the mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there. We stand at the cusp of a new historical era.” Just as Cold War regime change operations in Indonesia and Chile were intended to serve as both models and warnings, post-Saddam Iraq was envisioned as a neoliberal utopia created through the military destruction of a disobedient nationalist state. Reaganite Bush speechwriter David Frum argued that “an American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein — and a replacement of the radical Ba’athist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States — would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe the Romans.”
In addition to deterring and overthrowing hostile governments, America also planned to project its power throughout the world by installing small military bases referred to as “lily pads” and medium-sized “forward operating bases” in strategically-located nations like Pakistan, Qatar, Kenya, and Djibouti. As David Vine and Chalmers Johnson have reported, the Pentagon built dozens of flexible and secretive bases in Central Asia, West Asia, and East Africa after 9/11. US control over the commercially-significant waters in those regions was backed up by America’s post-9/11 “Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa,” “Task Force 150,” and “Combined Maritime Forces,” initiatives the Pentagon used to “uphold the Rules-Based International Order” in the Red Sea, Persian/Arabian Gulf, Gulf of Aden, Gulf of Oman, Indian Ocean, and Horn of Africa. The US also planned to install between 14 and 58 “enduring” military bases in post-Saddam Iraq and to retain access to nine military bases in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Bush and Rumsfeld put neoconservative Douglas J. Feith — considered by General Tommy Franks, the Commander in Chief of the US Central Command, to be “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the Earth” — in charge of the Pentagon’s “plan to ‘realign’ our bases so as to ‘forward deploy’ US forces into the ‘arc of instability’.” Paul Wolfowitz told the New York Times that the bases’ “function may be more political than actually military.” Feith and Wolfowitz’s compatriots at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute heralded the Pentagon’s creation of a “worldwide network of frontier forts” as a welcome embrace of its role as “the cavalry of a global, liberal international order. Like the cavalry of the Old West, their job is one part warrior and one part policeman — both of which are entirely within the tradition of the American military.” The post-9/11 repositioning of American soldiers away from their “anachronistic” Cold War bases in Germany, Japan, and South Korea toward new and expanded bases in and near the Global War on Terror’s conflict zones was described by geopolitical analysts as a “military Big Bang” and “the most extensive realignment of US power in the past half century.” By the peak of the War on Terror, America had approximately 800 overseas military bases in 80 foreign countries and territories, by far the most overseas bases of any country.3
Eager to implement all of those grandiose plans, Rumsfeld and Cheney rapidly got to work turning post-9/11 shock into action. Three days after the attacks, as rescue personnel continued pulling civilians’ bodies out of the Ground Zero rubble, the US Senate voted 98-0 and the US House of Representatives voted 420-1 to authorize the Bush Administration to use military force against any foreign government* or organization that “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the September 11 attacks (*with the exception of their Saudi and Pakistani accomplices). That same week, Rumsfeld and Cheney began assembling a secretive group in the Pentagon called the “Office of Special Plans.” They put neocon psychos Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas J. Feith, and Abram Shulsky in charge of the ominously-named unit, filled it with right-wing hacks from the American Enterprise Institute, and ordered it to find/fabricate evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 and/or possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to legitimize an American invasion of Iraq. Even before the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz attempted to divert American counterterrorism efforts away from Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan toward Saddam Hussein and Iraq, falsely claiming that Al-Qaeda’s pre-9/11 operations had been sponsored by Saddam. The pressure Wolfowitz applied within the White House to immediately attack Iraq after 9/11 was so aggressive and annoying that a Republican politician compared him to “a parrot bringing Iraq up all the time. It was getting on the President’s nerves.”
Arizona Senator John McCain took post-9/11 belligerence even further — in addition to advocating for an invasion of Iraq, the Operation Rolling Thunder “hero” also called on Bush to bomb Iran, Syria, Sudan, and “perhaps” Libya and North Korea as well. In his January 2002 State of the Union speech, W. described Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the “Axis of Evil,” a phrase David Frum coined after reading FDR’s Pearl Harbor speech. In May 2002, Undersecretary of State John Bolton added Syria, Libya, and Cuba to the administration’s post-9/11 list of “rogue states.” Rumsfeld also expressed interest in attacking Somalia, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called for US attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. But Bush decided that military-enforced political transformation throughout Asia and Africa should wait until after the easy elimination of the Taliban and the quick occupation of Afghanistan. W. was playing the long game; on September 16, 2001, he told reporters: “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while, and the American people must be patient.” Bush privately explained to British Prime Minister Tony Blair: “We must deal with [the Taliban] first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.” The Iraq-obsessed neocons, the extremist wing of an already-extreme conservative-imperialist coalition, reluctantly refrained from beating the drums of war until September 2002 and didn’t get their invasion until March 2003.
The Good War
CIA officials were less gung ho than the neocon ideologues about using the 9/11 attacks to overthrow the government of Iraq through military force. The day after 9/11, Tony Blair’s foreign policy advisor told CIA Director George Tenet that “we should concentrate on Afghanistan and not be tempted to launch any attacks on Iraq,” and Tenet replied: “Absolutely, we all agree on that. Some might want to link the issues, but none of us wants to go that route.” According to Blair’s Cabinet Secretary, the British Prime Minister’s immediate reaction to the 9/11 attacks was “How do we influence Bush so he doesn’t do anything stupid?” Blair’s Britain became “America’s most active ally in the struggle against terrorism,” but before Blair made the “agonizing decision” to ignore his advisors, change his mind, and support Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the Blair Administration tried to pressure Bush to focus on securing, stabilizing, and reconstructing Afghanistan rather than launching a “daft” attack on Iraq. The CIA agreed. In January 2003, Tenet’s Deputy Director for Intelligence Jami Miscik threatened to resign from the CIA if she was forced to give in to pressure from Dick Cheney and his henchmen (I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Stephen Hadley) to produce false evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda terrorism. Miscik had been complaining to Tenet about neoconservative agitation for a CIA-provided link between the Iraqi government and the 9/11 attacks since June 2002. Tenet was a wily yes-man who suppressed his concerns and generally told President Bush whatever he wanted to hear about Iraq, but when forced to choose between his Iraq-skeptical officers and the Iraq-hawks in the White House, Tenet supported Miscik and told Cheney’s goons to back off.4
George Bush Sr. and his semi-retired conservative realist clique took the CIA bureaucracy’s side in their dispute with the neoconservative Rumsfeld-Cheney faction. In August 2002, three prominent members of H. W.’s inner circle publicly criticized W.’s brewing plans for Iraq. James Baker wrote an op-ed for the New York Times encouraging Bush Jr. to “reject the advice of those who counsel” unilateral military action in Iraq. Brent Scowcroft wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal warning his friend’s son to focus on the occupation of Afghanistan instead of allowing the evangelical and neocon extremists in their coalition to bog his administration (and the American Empire) down in a disastrous war in Iraq. Bush Sr.’s Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger told CNN that the time was not right for regime change in Iraq. Behind the scenes, H. W.’s predatory friend David Boren urged his protégé Tenet to “throw a fit and threaten to resign” from the CIA rather than surrender to the neoconservatives’ reckless crusade to overthrow Saddam. Tenet didn’t listen. Bush Sr. believed that his son’s attempts to topple the Iraqi government could stretch the empire too thin and create a geopolitically-inconvenient power vacuum in post-Saddam Iraq, serving Iranian interests. But when Woodward asked Bush Jr. if he had sought Bush Sr.’s advice on Iraq, Born Again W. piously replied: “There is a higher Father that I appeal to.”
Although they shared his goal of preserving and enhancing American predominance, George Tenet and his CIA counterterrorism team were more grounded in secular reality than W. and more interested in Kabul than Baghdad. It’s crucial to remember that America’s “good war” in Afghanistan would not have been launched if the CIA had prevented 9/11, and also that the CIA had long been eager for the US to intervene in Afghanistan, the “Heart of Asia.” British imperialist Halford Mackinder’s “heartland theory” had argued that whoever rules Central Asia — which borders and supplies Russia, China, Pakistan, and Iran — rules Eurasia and therefore the world, a theory American imperialists like Zbigniew Brzezinski took very seriously. Thanks in no small part to Brzezinski, Central Asia had also become a central hub for drug trafficking, connecting Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran) and Golden Triangle (Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand) opiates to drug markets throughout Europe and Asia.
In the days after the 9/11 attacks, Tenet quickly persuaded President Bush to support the plan that the CIA had spent two years pushing for without any luck: topple the Taliban and install a reconfigured Northern Alliance as the new Afghan government. Tenet, Counterterrorist Center director Cofer Black, and Bin Laden Unit chief Richard Blee — all of whom personally made decisions that ensured Al-Qaeda’s Planes Operation would succeed — went around DC fruitlessly singing the praises of Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud at the turn of the millennium. Massoud was a wealthy, Western-educated ethnic Tajik who got his start in Afghan politics as an anti-Marxist activist in the violent Muslim Youth Organization. He spent the ‘70s fighting the secular-Pashtun Daoud dictatorship, the ‘80s fighting the Marxist-Leninists, the early ‘90s fighting rival mujahid Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the late ‘90s-early ‘00s fighting the Taliban. Massoud’s forces murdered countless Afghan civilians, particularly members of the oppressed Hazara minority group, and Massoud funded his military campaigns by smuggling Afghan opium into America, Western Europe, and Russia. In 2000-2001, the majority-Tajik Badakhshan Province under Massoud’s control accounted for 79% of Afghanistan’s total opium production (because of the Taliban’s successful July 2000 opium ban in its territory). Massoud’s protégé, field marshal, and successor as the Northern Alliance’s Defense Minister was Mohammad Qasim Fahim, a corrupt Tajik-Afghan warlord and a prolific heroin trafficker. Nevertheless, Black and Blee portrayed Massoud as a Romantic hero, “a Che Guevara figure, a great actor on history’s stage… a poet, a military genius, a religious man, and a leader of enormous courage.” I guess he was multifaceted.
Black and Blee became Massoud boosters after negotiating a secret deal in Tashkent with Northern Alliance sponsor/brutal Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov in October 1999, an agreement that allowed the CIA to use the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) Air Base in oil-rich southern Uzbekistan.5 The Northern Alliance was primarily composed of ethnic Tajik and Uzbek Afghans, although the predominantly-Hazara Shia Islamic Unity Party [Hezb-e Wahdat], the Iran-aligned Shia Islamic Movement [Harakat-e Islami], the pro-American Pashtun-aristocratic Karzai family, Pashtun-aristocratic eastern mujahideen leaders Abdul Haq and Abdul Qadeer, and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf’s mostly-Pashtun Saudi-aligned Islamic Union [Ittehad-e Islami] militia were also members of Massoud’s United Front against the Taliban. Blee personally handed the “Lion of Panjshir” briefcases full of cash. The CIA started paying the warlord-poet hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, positioning Massoud as “by far their most valuable potential ally against Al-Qaeda.” The anti-Communist local ally became the counter-terrorist local ally. The Company didn’t mind that Commander Massoud and Marshal Fahim were involved in the Golden Crescent opium network. Dating back to their Cold War misadventures in the Golden Triangle, the CIA has valued opium produced and distributed by their political allies in Asia as a bountiful and non-accountable source of funds.
Massoud successfully lobbied Russian, Iranian, Indian, and French officials for political and logistical support in his struggle against the Taliban, but American public officials were stingier. A CIA officer in Uzbekistan told Massoud’s American lobbyist that he hoped she would succeed in securing support for Massoud from the White House and Congress — that spy had been unsuccessfully urging American politicians to give more substantial help to the Northern Alliance in his CIA reports for years.6 The Clinton Administration had been unwilling to go beyond limited CIA assistance to Massoud’s forces for a few reasons: Clinton State Department staffers were worried about jeopardizing their deals with the Taliban-backing Pakistani government, Clinton White House and State Department advisors saw Massoud as a heroin-trafficking war criminal, and Clinton’s Pentagon advisors told him that Massoud’s coalition had no chance of beating the Taliban. Massoud’s September 2000 defeat in the strategically-significant northeastern city of Taloqan was a severe setback that called into question the Northern Alliance’s ability to even maintain their strongholds, let alone extend their control into the rest of the country. On a trip to Tajikistan (ruled by corrupt CIA-backed dictator Emomali Rahmon), Cofer Black made it clear to Massoud and his camp that the CIA wanted to do more to help the Northern Alliance supplant the Taliban at some point “in the future,” but “the system in the United States… takes dramatic events for things to move.”7 Massoud didn’t live to see that analysis get confirmed — the Afghan Napoleon was assassinated by Al-Qaeda operatives two days before 9/11, a killing that remains shrouded in mystery and rumors of betrayal.
Blee and his officers believed the Northern Alliance would “soon collapse” without Massoud’s strong leadership,8 but Tenet, Black, and Blee were able to use 9/11 to convince President Bush to rescue the late Massoud’s anti-Taliban forces from disarray and turn the hostile Afghan government into an American puppet regime. Massoud’s replacement as the leader of the Afghan anti-Taliban coalition was his CIA-favored ally Hamid Karzai. While Massoud had been an ethnic minority from the north who stubbornly maintained his autonomy from his US sponsors and fiercely opposed a US military invasion of Afghanistan, Karzai was a Pashtun tribal leader from Kandahar who (initially) welcomed the Western soldiers as liberators. Enthusiastic about the CIA’s new opportunity to control Afghanistan, Black told Bush that a dispersed Al-Qaeda and a disempowered Taliban could be defeated in “a matter of weeks.” Black dismissed concerns that America risked repeating the Soviets’ Vietnam-esque mistakes in Afghanistan by hyperbolically promising that the CIA would put their enemies’ “heads on pikes” and deliver Osama bin Laden’s severed “head in a box filled with dry ice” to Bush. The CIA’s transformation from a de-militarized intelligence-gathering agency into a re-militarized counterterrorist organization was about to begin.
- Bush formally “unsigned” the International Criminal Court Treaty in May 2002, and in August 2002 the US Senate passed the “Invade the Hague Act” (by a vote of 75-19), prohibiting US government employees from collaborating with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and authorizing the president to send in the US military to extract American officials or soldiers from ICC custody if necessary.
- When Democratic politicians later tried to decrease the F-35 procurement budget, the International Association of Machinists — the “largest aerospace and defense [labor] union in the United States” — launched “a full-court lobbying campaign to shore up wavering congressional support for the long-troubled program,” demanding maximal funding for the F-35 program in order to protect high-paying skilled American union jobs, “support our veterans,” “sustain our defense industrial base,” “bolster our national security,” and “deter foes” such as China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran.
- The United Kingdom is next with 145 overseas military bases, Saudi Arabia has 20 military bases in Yemen’s southeastern Al-Mahrah province and another overseas base in Djibouti, Russia has around a dozen overseas bases, France has five (all in Africa), Turkey, India, and the UAE each have three, and China has just one (in Djibouti), although American analysts believe the Chinese government has plans in the works to build a few more.
- Jami Miscik later succeeded Tenet’s mentor David Boren as the co-chair of President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
- Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin Press, 2004), p. 459-461.
- Ibid, p. 563.
- Ibid, p. 508.
- Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, (Penguin Press, 2018), p. 28.