President Bush is losing the War on Terror
President Bush wants to make the election about the War or
Terror. But what is the President’s record in fighting against
real card carrying terrorists? The Bush administration has had
three major opportunities to demonstrate their competence
against dangerous terrorists and has failed each time.
The first failure happened at Tora Bora. The battle of Tora
Bora may well prove to be one of the most costly “victories”
in US military history.
Despite having thousands of US Marines relatively close at
hand, the Bush administration chose to use a handful of
special forces and Afghan militias to attack the terrorist
stronghold. Incredibly, the leadership in the Pentagon failed
to realize that the Afghan militias would conduct their part
of the battle in their traditional manner which is based on
the ancient teachings of the Chinese military strategist, Sun
Tsu. One of Sun Tsu’s most basic principles is to “win the
battle without fighting,” that is, to maneuver the enemy out
of your territory with few if any losses. This was important
because in ancient China, just as in present day Afghanistan,
every tribe and province is surrounded by deadly enemies.
Winning a costly victory over your enemy today means defeat at
the hands of another enemy tomorrow.
In each stage of the war, our Afghan militia allies were
content to merely maneuver the Taliban and foreign fighters
out of their respective tribal territories. The same scenario
played out at the battle of Tora Bora. Osama and the majority
of his fighters were not confronted but allowed to slip into
Pakistan. Al Qaida was inconvenienced and disrupted but was
not destroyed. The enemy merely traded one rocky mountainside
in Afghanistan for another rocky mountainside in Pakistan less
than one hundred miles away.
The civilian leadership in the Pentagon violated one of the
most basic principles of war in Afghanistan. The politicians
in the Pentagon were obsessed with capturing territory, i.e.,
the capital of Kabul, the fortress of Tora Bora, rather than
the critically important goal of concentrating our forces to
kill or capture the enemy.
The United States had a golden opportunity to destroy al Qaida
in one stroke, but failed due to ignorance, incompetence, and
neglect.
According to Bob Woodward’s book, Point of Attack, after 9/11
Donald Rumsfeld was “driven to the brink” by the delay in
getting boots on the ground in Afghanistan. But by insisting
on a rapid response, President Bush and Rumsfeld sowed the
seeds for eventual failure. Then, while the officers at
General Tommy Franks Central Command were still busy directing
the Afghan war, Donald Rumsfeld ordered them to begin
planning for the invasion of Iraq. Both President Bush and
Rumsfeld were obsessed with Iraq, and this obsession diverted
resources and attention away from the battle in Afghanistan
before the war was won. Consequently, the war in Afghanistan
is still not won, and may well never be won.
While the war in Iraq is now the main front in the War on
Terror according to President Bush, before the war, Iraq was
not a safe haven for terrorists with one exception, Sargat.
President Bush’s second major failure in the War on Terror was
at the Iraqi village of Sargat which is located close to the
Iranian border. Sargat was occupied by Ansar al-Islam, a
mostly Kurdish terrorist group led by a Jordanian with ties to
al-Qaida. The Bush administration rarely mentioned Sargat when
discussing the War on Terror because Ansar al-Islam existed
for all practical purposes under U.S. protection. Sargat was
located north of the northern Green Line, which Saddam was
prohibited to cross, and thus Ansar al-Islam was safe from
attack by Saddam’s army. But while the U.S. had plenty of
bombs to drop on Saddam in the years between Gulf War 1 and
the Iraq War, seemingly there were no bombs available to drop
on the base of a known terror group who had killed Kurdish
secularists and which was allegedly running poison
laboratories.
The Bush administration finally did decide to deal with Sargat
as part of the invasion of Iraq. But, while there were
plenty of U.S. troops available to protect the Iraqi Oil
Ministry, no regular US troops were available to attack
Sargat. According to Point of Attack, a handful of Special
Forces in the Kurdish region who had been running the
“Rockstars” spy network were assigned the job. Tragically, the
mistakes made at Tora Bora were repeated at Sargat. The boots
on the ground were provided by the local Kurdish militias, and
as could have been predicted, they repeated the performance of
their cousins in Afghanistan. The Kurds were content to
maneuver the terrorists out of their territory and across the
border into Iran. As the last of the terrorists were loading
their SUVs to leave, the American Special Forces called for an
airstrike, but sadly, no planes were available to attack these
deadly terrorists. The vast majority of the terrorists lived
to fight another day.
The commander of Ansar al-Islam was named Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, and he would soon return to Iraq and kill hundreds
of Americans and thousands of Iraqis.
The third major failure of the Bush administration in the War
on Terror is on-going and unfolding before our eyes. While
President Bush claims to be the tough guy against the
terrorists, according to CNN correspondent Michael Ware,
“al-Qaida at its very heart has been found, identified, yet is
not being struck…”
According to a report released by Ware on September 12, 2006,
Al-Qaida uses the town of Ramadi in Al Anbar province as its
headquarters. “This is were the leaders hide, move plan.”
Also, “Al Qaida (in Iraq) is almost untouched in its area of
operations, and in the city of Ramadi itself, al Qaida
fighters are constantly attacking U.S. troops.”
Ware also says, “So, here’s the heart of al-Qaida in Iraq, and
there’s simply not enough troops and no strategy to combat
it.”
Also, according to Ware, “there’s an area north of the
Euphrates River that is used by al Qaida’s top leadership that
Osama bin Laden himself points to. It’s the size of New
Hampshire. You have only a few hundred troops there. They can
do nothing to hamper al Qaida’s leadership in that area.”
Ware also says, “…Ramadi, it’s actually the al Qaida front
line,” and “this is where American Marines and soldiers go
face to face every day with the very organization that
attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and yet it
seems that they’re being forced to do so under-resourced and
with one arm tied behind their back.”
Ware concludes that, “In Ramadi, in western al Anbar province,
we see what can only be described as a black hole in President
Bush’s global war on Terror.”
The Bush administration failed to confront and defeat the
terrorists at Tora Bora and Sargat, at the subsequent cost of
thousands of lives. Now President Bush is making speeches
claiming that only he and his administration can lead the War
on Terror.
But the Bush administration is not even fighting the al Qaida
terrorists in Iraq effectively, his own chosen battlefield.
The Bush administration has a proven record of failure. For
the sake of the American people, the United States desperately
needs new, effective leadership in the War on Terror.
Jim McMeans
Jmcmeans@negia.net
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