By George Friedman
There are moments in history when everything comes together. Today is the sixth
anniversary of the al Qaeda attack against the United States. This is the week Gen.
David Petraeus is reporting to Congress on the status of the war in Iraq. It
also is the week Osama bin Laden made one of his rare video appearances. The
world will not change this week, but the convergence of these strands makes it
necessary to pause and take stock.
To do this, we must begin at the beginning. We do not mean Sept. 11, 2001, but
the moment when bin Laden decided to stage the attack -- and the reasoning
behind it. By understanding his motives, we can begin to measure his success.
His motive was not, we believe, simply to kill Americans. That was a means to
an end. Rather, as we and others have said before, it was to seize what he saw
as a rare opportunity to begin the process of recreating a vast Islamic empire.
The rare opportunity was the fall of the Soviet Union. Until then, the Islamic
world had been divided between Soviet and American spheres of influence.
Indeed, the border of the Soviet Union ran through the Islamic world. The Cold
War between the United States and Soviet Union created a tense paralysis in
that world, with movement and change being measured in decades and inches.
Suddenly, everything that was once certain became uncertain. One half of the
power equation was gone, and the other half, the United States, was at a loss
as to what it meant. Bin Laden looked at the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan
and saw a historical opening.
His problem was that contrary to what has been discussed about terrorist
organizations, they cannot create an empire. What they can do is seize a
nation-state and utilize its power to begin shaping an empire. Bin Laden had
Afghanistan, but he understood that its location and intrinsic power were
insufficient for his needs. He could not hope to recreate the Islamic empire
from Kabul or Kandahar. For bin Laden's strategy to work, he had to topple an
important Muslim state and replace it with a true Islamist regime. There were
several that would have done, but we suspect his eye was on Egypt. When Egypt
moves, the Islamic world trembles. But that is a guess. A number of other
regimes would have served the purpose.
In bin Laden's analysis, the strength of these regimes also was their weakness.
They were all dependent on the United States for their survival. This fit in
with bin Laden's broader analysis. The reason for Muslim weakness was that the
Christian world -- the Crusaders, as he referred to them -- had imposed a
series of regimes on Muslims and thereby divided and controlled them. Until
these puppet regimes were overthrown, Muslims would be helpless in the face of
Christians, in particular the current leading Christian power, the United
States.
The root problem, as bin Laden saw it, was psychological. Muslims suffered from
a psychology of defeat. They expected to be weaker than Christians and so they
were. In spite of the defeat of the atheist Soviets in Afghanistan and the
collapse of their regime, Muslims still did not understand two things -- that
the Christians were inherently weak and corrupt, and that the United States was
simply another Crusader nation and their enemy.
The 9/11 attack, as well as earlier attacks, was designed to do two things.
First, by striking targets that were well-known among the Muslim masses, the
attack was meant to demonstrate that the United States could be attacked and
badly hurt. Second, it was designed to get a U.S. reaction -- and this is what
bin Laden saw as the beauty of his plan: If Washington reacted by doing nothing
effective, then he could argue that the United States was profoundly weak and
indecisive. This would increase contempt for the United States. If, on the
other hand, the United States staged a series of campaigns in the Islamic
world, he would be able to say that this demonstrated that the United States
was the true Crusader state and the enemy of Muslims everywhere. Bin Laden was
looking for an intemperate move -- either the continued impotent responses to
al Qaeda attacks in the 1990s or a drastic assault against Islam. Either one
would have done.
For the American side, 9/11 did exactly what it was intended to do: generate
terror. In our view, this was a wholly rational feeling. Anyone who was not
frightened of what was coming next was out of touch with reality. Indeed, we
are always amused when encountering friends who feel the United States vastly
exaggerated the implications of four simultaneous plane hijacks that resulted
in the world's worst terrorist attack and cost thousands of lives and billions
in damage. Yet, six years on, the overwhelming and reasonable fear on the night
of Sept. 11 has been erased and replaced by a strange sense that it was all an
overreaction.
Al Qaeda was a global -- but sparse -- network. That meant that it could be
anywhere and everywhere, and that searching for it was like looking for a
needle in a haystack. But there was something else that disoriented the United
States even more. Whether due to disruption by U.S. efforts or a lack of
follow-on plans, al Qaeda never attacked the United States again after 9/11.
Had it periodically attacked the United States, the ongoing sense of crisis
would not have dissipated. But no attack has occurred, and over the years,
actions and policies that appeared reasonable and proportionate in 2001 began
to appear paranoid and excessive. A sense began to develop that the United States
had overreacted to 9/11, or even that the Bush administration used 9/11 as an
excuse for oppressive behavior.
Regardless of whether he was a one-trick pony or he did intend, but failed, to
stage follow-on attacks, the lack of strikes since 9/11 has turned out to be
less damaging to bin Laden than to the Bush administration.
Years of vigilance without an indisputable attack have led to a slow but
systematic meltdown in the American consensus that was forged white hot on
Sept. 11. On that day, it was generally conceded that defeating al Qaeda took
precedence over all other considerations. It was agreed that this would be an
extended covert war in which the use of any number of aggressive and unpleasant
means would be necessary. It was believed that the next attack could come at
any moment, and that preventing it was paramount.
Time reshapes our memory and displaces our fears from ourselves to others. For
many, the fevered response to 9/11 is no longer "our" response, but
"their" response, the response of the administration -- or more
precisely, the overreaction of the administration that used 9/11 as an excuse
to wage an unnecessary global war. The fears of that day are viewed as
irrational and the responsibility of others. Regardless of whether it was intentional,
the failure of al Qaeda to mount another successful attack against the United
States in six years has made it appear that the reaction to 9/11 was overblown.
The Bush administration, however, felt it could not decline combat. It surged
into the Islamic world, adopting one of the strategies bin Laden hoped it
would. There were many reasons for this, but part of it was psychological. Bin
Laden wanted to show that the United States was weak. Bush wanted to
demonstrate that the United States was strong. The secretary of defense at the
time, Donald Rumsfeld, used the term "shock and awe." That was
precisely the sense the United States wanted to deliver to the Islamic world.
It wanted to call bin Laden's bet -- and raise it.
That was more than four years ago. The sense of shock and awe, if it was ever
there, is long gone. Rather than showing the Islamic world the overwhelming
power of the United States, the United States is now engaged in a debate over
whether there is some hope for its strategy. No one is arguing that the war has
been a slam dunk. Whatever the complex reasons for invading Iraq, and we have
addressed those in detail, time has completely undermined the psychological
dimension of the strategy. Four years into the war, no one is shocked and no
one is awed. The same, it should be added, is true about Afghanistan.
Time has hammered the Bush administration in two ways. In the first instance --
and this might actually be the result of the administration's success in
stopping al Qaeda -- there has been no further attack against the United
States. The justification for the administration's measures to combat al Qaeda,
therefore, is wearing thin. For many, a state of emergency without any action
simply does not work after six years. It is not because al Qaeda and others
aren't out there. It is because time wears down the imagination, until the
threat becomes a phantom.
Time also has worn down the Bush administration's war in Iraq. The Islamic
world is not impressed. The American public doesn't see the point or the end.
What was supposed to be a stunning demonstration of American power has been a
demonstration of the limits of that power.
The paradox is this: There has been no follow-on attack against the United
States. The United States did dislodge Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, and
while the war goes badly, the casualties are a small fraction of those lost in
Vietnam. Most important, bin Laden's dream is gone. No Muslim state has been
overthrown and replaced with a regime that bin Laden would find worthy. He has
been marginalized by both the United States and by his rival Shiite radicals,
who have picked up the mantle that he dropped. His own jihadist movement is no
longer under his effective control.
Bin Laden has been as badly battered by time as Bush. Unable to achieve any of
his political goals, unable to mount another attack, he reminds us of Che
Guevara after his death in Bolivia. He is a symbol of rebellion for a
generation that does not intend to rebel and that carefully ignores his massive
failures.
Yet, in the end, Guevara and bin Laden could have become important only if
their revolutions had succeeded. There is much talk and much enthusiasm. There
is no revolution. Therefore, what time has done to bin Laden's hopes is
interesting, but in the end, as a geopolitical force, he has not counted beyond
his image since Sept. 11, 2001.
The effect on the United States is much more profound. The war, both in Iraq
and against al Qaeda, has worn the United States down over time. The psychology
of fear has been replaced by a psychology of cynicism. The psychology of
confidence in war has been replaced by a psychology of helplessness. Exhaustion
pervades all.
That is the single most important outcome of the war. What happens to bin Laden
is, in the end, about as important as what happened to Guevara. Legends will be
made of it -- not history. But when the world's leading power falls into the
psychological abyss brought about by time and war, the entire world is changed
by it. Every country rethinks its position and its actions. Everything changes.
That is what is important about the Petraeus report. He will ask for more time.
Congress will give it to him. The president will take it. Time, however, has
its price not only in war but also psychologically. And if the request for time
leads to more failure and the American psychology is further battered, then
that is simply more time that other powers, great and small, will have to take
advantage of the situation. The United States has psychologically begun tearing
itself apart over both the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. Whatever your
view of that, it is a fact -- a serious geopolitical fact.
The Petraeus report will not address that. It is out of the general's area of
responsibility. But the pressing issue is this: If the United States continues
the war and if it maintains its vigilance against attacks, how does the
evolution of the American psyche play out?