"The war on terror": how America framed an unwinnable conflict

President George W. Bush declared within 10 days of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 that the US was pursuing a "war on terror", but what did that mean?

I’m becoming increasingly interested in the subject of strategic communications, the way in which countries articulate the objectives of their foreign and defence policy to build support and alliances and conduct diplomacy ands military operations in a way which is coherent and comprehensive. I wrote an essay last June which explored the subject by framing the Royal Air Force’s Operation Chastise, the “Dambusters” raid on the dams of the Ruhr Valley in May 1943 as essentially an exercise in strategic communications: the military and economic damage inflicted by the raids was modest but its effect on British morale was considerable, and it demonstrated the imagine and reach of the RAF’s high command.

I want to look at a different aspect of the subject here, look in particular how, in those anxious and confusing days after 9/11, the West conceptualised its response to the terrorist attacks. The catastrophe of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon being struck was an epochal change for US foreign and security policy, and therefore for that of the West more generally, and transformed the presidency of George W. Bush who had only been sworn in nine months before. I explored the significance of the event in an essay last April which is worth re-reading. But one of the greatest challenges it presented was that it represented the epitome of asymmetric warfare. Against whom should the US retaliate? Where? How, and with what force?

It struck me in September 2001, as a Briton who had grown up in a country in which terrorist outrages by the Provisional IRA, other republican terror groups and (though not on the mainland) loyalist paramilitaries were part of the fabric of life, that Americans, understandably, found the reality of terrorism much more shocking. Of course it was not unknown. If you look at the 1990s, you see the unfurling of anti-government violence in particular, like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of a federal building, and of course in February 1993, the World Trade Center itself had been bombed by pro-Palestinian terrorists led by Ramzi Yousef; although the attack was less devastating than the perpetrators hoped, six people were killed and 1,042 were injured. But, although tragic and troubling, these tended to be pinpricks rather than a drumbeat of violence with which we, and even more so the people of Northern Ireland, were familiar.

Notwithstanding, 9/11 was shocking in its scale. Remember that 2,996 people were killed, including the attackers. The number of injured has never been accurately established, with calculations ranging from “just” 6,000 to as many as 25,000. The attacks were also shocking, like the blows suffered by Israel in 1973 and again in 2023, because they were relatively speaking unanticipated, though subsequently very significant failures of intelligence were identified. Congress set up the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 in February 2002 and it reported that December, some 858 pages in its published, redacted version.

Initially, Osama bin Laden, the head of al-Qa’eda and the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, denied involvement. On 16 September, he issued a statement to Al Jazeera in which he said “I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation”, and he did not formally acknowledge responsibility until 2004. There was, however, a working assumption that al-Qa’eda was immediately responsible. Interviewed for the PBS Frontline documentary Bush’s War in 2008, then-national security advisor Dr Condoleezza Rice gave no evidence of doubt.

Everybody assumed that it was al-Qa’eda because the operation looked like al-Qa’eda, quacked like al-Qa’eda, seemed like al-Qa’eda.

This was intertwined with a suspicion, or, in some ways, a hope, that Iraq was involved as a state sponsor of al-Qa’eda. Rice told the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, “one thing we need to look into is to see whether Iraq’s had anything to do with this”. Some in the American administration would have been content for Saddam Hussein to have been connected to the plot. Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, suggested that any public statements should allow for the possibility of retaliation against Iraq, while Bob Woodward asserts that, on the evening of 11 September 2001, Secretary of Defense Doanld Rumsfeld said explicitly in a meeting, “Part of our response maybe should be attacking Iraq. It’s an opportunity”.

The suspicions of Iraqi involvement were substantially inspired by wishful thinking and convenience. Michael Scheuer, a CIA officer who from 1996 to 1999 had run the agency’s “Alec Station”, the unit responsible for hunting the al-Qa’eda leader, pointed to a degree of cognitive dissonance.

Mr Wolfowitz, Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Cheney all cut their teeth in the Cold War, in the contest between nation-states. They’re not comfortable with thinking that the world’s greatest power can be threatened by a couple of Arabs with long beards, squatting around a desert campfire in Afghanistan. It doesn’t register.

The CIA already accepted that al-Qa’eda represented a significant threat to United States interests. They had bombed the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 and attacked the USS Cole in Aden in 2000, killing hundreds. The director of central intelligence, George Tenet, who would head the CIA for longer than anyone except Allen Dulles, had begun to create a “grand plan” to tackle al-Qa’eda, and part of that was his appointment in June 1999 of Cofer Black as director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC). By that point, Black had been with the agency for almost 25 years, a Connecticut native who had been educated at the University of Southern California. His early career was spent in clandestine operations in Africa, and from 1993 to 1995 he was CIA station chief in Khartoum; Osama bin Laden had relocated from Afghanistan to Sudan the year before and was under close observation by the US intelligence agencies.

Black’s conception of fighting al-Qa’eda relied on a substantial, co-ordinated, ambitious and proactive mission. It went far beyond intelligence-gathering to the establishment of covert CIA facilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere and locally based paramilitary strike teams. Once colleague later observed that Black and his subordinates “described their plan as military officers might”. The CIA, in contrast with its British counterpart, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), had always embraced a muscular, pseudo-military approach to its work, and Black’s CTC was the logical conclusion of that tendency. When 9/11 took place, it was, in a sense, the day for which his grand plan had been designed. As he noted to PBS:

We had been working on this for years. Where everybody else is looking for their maps on Afghanistan, we’re ready to rock, ready to roll. And it really took momentum. And George Tenet said, “OK, update the plan and have it ready by tomorrow.”

Author Ron Suskind described Black saying “We are going to spread this over 80 countries. We are going to go at it with this eight-pronged attack.” Tenet and the CIA were not unchallenged, however. The vice-president, Dick Cheney, distrusted the agency, and while he was willing to be just as aggressive in his approach to counter-terrorism, he wanted the Pentagon to be the lead organisation. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, was a very old friend and ally of Cheney, who had been his deputy as White House chief of staff 1974-75 under President Gerald Ford and had succeeded him in that post.

One difference in approach was that the leadership of the Department of Defense wanted to encompass Iraq in the response to 9/11. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, had written his University of Chicago PhD thesis on nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and had been under secretary of defense for policy during Cheney’s own Pentagon tenure in 1989-93. According to Colin Powell, Bush’s secretary of state, Wolfowitz “put a case forward that, ultimately, Iraq would have to be dealt with”.

This, then, was the policy atmosphere immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Al-Qa’eda was responsible, yes, and that asymmetry—how does a nation state respond to an attack against a pan-national terrorist organisation?—created a challenge. But an answer had already emerged in placing al-Qa’eda in a broader context, a network of threats to the United States which included Afghanistan and Iraq.

President Bush addressed the American people at 8.30 pm Eastern Time on 11 September. He only spoke for five minutes: it was not quite 12 hours since American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 heading from Boston to Los Angeles, had struck the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Rightly the president spoke of the priority of treating those who had been injured, but he spoke in clear terms, contrasting the depravity of the terrorists’ actions with the heroism of the emergency services which responded.

Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature. And we responded with the best of America—with the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way they could.

He stated that “the search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts” and pledged that they would be “brought to justice”, which was in some ways the language of crime and punishment rather than armed conflict, but he also implied that the perpetrators were, indeed, part of a wider picture and that the impending response would take a broad view of who was on which side. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Closing his remarks, the president said that America and its friends and allies “stand together to win the war against terrorism”.

This first use of the phrase “the war of terrorism” to refer to the post-9/11 world was important and would become critical. It was not a fresh coinage. In 1982, Neil Livingstone, founder of a risk management consultancy called GlobalOptions Inc., had published a book entitled The War against Terrorism.

In April 1983, a suicide bomber had driven a van containing 2,000 pounds of explosives into the US embassy compound in Beirut and, reaching the portico at the front of the main building, had detonated the bomb. It was at that time the deadliest attack every carried out on an American diplomatic mission, killing 17 Americans (embassy staff, CIA officers, soldiers and a United States Marine Corps security guard), 32 Lebanese citizens and 14 visitors and passers-by. Responsibility was claimed by a Lebanese Shia militant group called the Islamic Jihad Organisation. The following April, President Ronald Reagan had sent a message to the US Congress to promote a group of four bills addressing international terrorism. In the letter, Reagan described the legislation as “an important step in our war against terrorism”.

In a lecture billed Terrorism and the Modern World, delivered in New York on 25 October 1984, the secretary of state, George Shultz, had signalled a significant shift in emphasis by the United States government, recalibrating terrorism as “not just criminal activity but an unbridled form of warfare”. He emphasised the international and interconnected nature of the threat and picked up the president’s formulation, describing it as “our war against terrorism”. Neither usage was not greeted with especial fanfare but seeped quickly into the argot: within 18 months, an internal paper by the US Air University used the phrase “war on terrorism” 11 times without suggesting it was remarkable or innovative.

President Bush used the phrase again on 16 September in remarks made as he arrived at the White House from Camp David. Responding to a question from Terry Moran of ABC News about potential security measures, Bush used very bold, indeed provocative, language.

This is a new kind of—a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient.

The religiosity which suffused Bush’s language should not be surprising. Although he had been raised in the Episcopalian faith of his father, President George H.W. Bush, he had embraced evangelical Christianity later in life, joining the United Methodist Church to which his wife Laura belonged. In The Jesus Factor, a 2004 PBS Frontline documentary, he was described as “the most openly religious president in generations”. The language of religion, of faith communities and of a clear distinction between good and evil came naturally to him, and would be an important factor in how he presented US policy in the aftermath of 9/11.

On 20 September, Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. It was nine days since the terrorist attacks, but this was the president’s first opportunity to address what had happened, and how the United States would respond, in a coherent, co-ordinated and considered way. Almost unimaginable levels of preparation had gone into the text he would deliver. The George W. Bush Presidential Library holds 18 folders of documents relating to drafts of the speech, including supporting evidence, which run to 1,126 pages. The bulk of the work fell to Michael Gerson, director of speechwriting, Matthew Scully, special assistant and senior speechwriter, and John McConnell, deputy assistant.

The address maintained the moral tone of the president’s more spontaneous statements. The United States was “a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom”, and the administration would be fiercely resolute: “whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done”. He said explicitly that “enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country”, and formally identified al-Qa’eda as the overwhelmingly likely perpetrators. He went on to explain the terrorists’ relationship with the Taliban régime which held sway in Afghanistan, and set out in uncompromising terms what the United States expected the Taliban to do to end that relationship and help bring al-Qa’eda to account. Whether these criteria were genuine demands or a rhetorical advice which the administration would not be accommodated, Bush pulled no punches. He said of the Taliban, “they will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.”

Bush then made a decisive expansion in scope and rhetoric. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qa’eda, but it does not end there.  It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” That was an extraordinarily expansive definition: not only did Bush set his sights well beyond al-Qa’eda and ell beyond Afghanistan, he pushed his frame of reference beyond Islamic extremists and beyond the Middle East and central Asia. The United States now saw as clear and immediate enemies “every terrorist group of global reach”. That could be interpreted to mean almost anything and anyone, and indeed it did not even require groups to pose a threat to the United States itself. It defined America’s enemies not so much by ideology or strategic interests but by approach and by moral virtue, or the lack of it.

Bush’s rhetoric also developed a simple taxonomy of friend and foe. The first group was drawn very widely, and the president argued that al-Qa’eda and the enmity it represented had many targets, targets who, by definition, then cohered as allies against a shared threat.

They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.

Standing with America, Bush was effectively saying, was accepting a place in a rainbow coalition, one which represented many faiths, many regions and many geopolitical stances.

The forces of terrorism, of whom al-Qa’eda was a proxy or an example, were definitionally wicked. “ They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century”, Bush declared, and therefore were not to be understood in terms of competing political priorities or strategic interests. This was good against evil, right against wrong, and, critically, it was a binary choice: this was not a struggle from which, in Bush’s view, countries could simply stand aside or stay aloof.

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

These were the highest stakes the president could possibly have proposed. But he stressed that this was much broader than a defence of US interests. America has been attacked, but in a sense she had been the target as a representation of good.

This is not, however, 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. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.

It was essential, if Bush was to present such a maximal portrait of the threat, that it was not something simply targeted at US interests. This idea of an almost universal defence of virtue across the board, of all of the qualities which seemed impregnably benevolent, was an essential part of the framework of US policy.

The civilized world is rallying to America’s side. They understand that if this terror goes unpunished, their own cities, their own citizens may be next. Terror, unanswered, can not only bring down buildings, it can threaten the stability of legitimate governments. And you know what—we're not going to allow it.

This was a key part of Bush’s play. Al-Qa’eda was not a simple terrorist organisation but merely the most immediately relevant manifestation of a concept of sheer evil. Equally, while America had been the direct target, it stood for all of the ideals and freedoms which the global community embraced. He concluded by summing up the cause in which America was engaged and underlining the eventual inevitability of success.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them. Fellow citizens, we’ll meet violence with patient justice—assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may He watch over the United States of America.

That was the context in which Bush placed what had happened in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Irrespective of the butcher’s bill of 9/11, the president was taking the attacks far from the context of criminality or even political violence. In moral and geographical terms, the battle lines were drawn as widely as they could be. This was how President Bush conceptualised the “war on terror”.

It takes only a few brush strokes to depict the “war on terror” as simplistic, evangelical, divisive and lacking in nuance. It can be made into a caricature of the supposed faults of the American stereotype, and this becomes more potent still when paired with Bush’s (carefully constructed) public image as a slow-talking, plain-speaking, no-frills cowboy from the Texas oilfields. By 2001, he had lived and worked in Texas for 25 years, founding an oil exploration company, Arbusto Energy, in 1977, investing in the Texas Rangers, a Major League Baseball squad, in 1989 and then serving as governor of Texas from 1995. In 1999, a year before his election as president, he bought the Prairie House Ranch near Crawford, a tiny town in central Texas, and cultivated the image of an outdoorsman. It was suggested that he kept a cowboy hat on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office throughout his presidency and he owned a large collection of handmade cowboy boots from RJ’s Boot Company in Houston, including one bearing the presidential seal of office.

This obscures some equally true observations about the 43rd President of the United States. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, famously the son of a father who would precede him as president by only eight years, the grandson of a United States senator for Connecticut and great-grandson of an industrialist who was for 20 years president of Buckeye Steel Castings, a major Ohio steel manufacturer, possessing significant sway in inter-war Washington DC. Bush attended Phillips Academy, one of the most prestigious prep schools in the country, studied at Yale where he was a member of the exclusive Skull and Bones society, and he was awarded an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1975, the only president to hold such a degree. One should not, therefore, take the uncomplicated cowpoke image at face value.

It is also tempting to see the tone and simplicity of the president’s approach as calculated to attract reflexive, patriotic support from the electorate. But it has to be seen from the opposite end of the telescope too, shaped by as much as designed to shape the sentiment of the American people. The nature and scale of the terrorist attacks were profoundly shocking to a population which considered the continental United States as a safe haven. There was still real force behind what Abraham Lincoln had told his audience in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838 as he warned that they must cherish the republic.

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

This was, too, still the time of the “peace dividend” of the post-Cold War era. It had not quite yet been 10 years since the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union; the United States had dealt quickly effectively and consensually to lead a huge military coalition against Iraq in 1990-91; it had flexed its military might to achieve some kind of settlement in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995 by the Dayton Accords and seen NATO insert a peacekeeping force, KFOR, into Kosovo in 1999; and it had dislodged the military dictatorship of Lieutenant-General Raoul Cédras in Haiti in 1994. American involvement in the United Nations peackeeping mission in Somalia had been more challenging, but in general US influence was strong.

The 9/11 attacks not only undermined that sense of confidence but came from an enemy of a different kind: nebulous, sectarian and divorced from any mutual understanding of political reality. Al-Qa’eda did not seek real-world, achievable political goals but a worldwide Islamic caliphate.

All of this sparked in many Americans a confusing mixture of grief, fear, anger and solidarity. One young man, interviewed by The New York Times in Union Square, expressed the incoherence.

I don’t know why I’ve been coming here, except that I’m confused. Also a sense of unity. We all feel differently about what to do in response, but everybody seems to agree that we’ve got to be together no matter what happens. So you get a little bit of hope in togetherness.

The president as both head of state and commander-in-chief had a duty to respond to that emotional cocktail. Certainly, his calculations resonated with the American people: after his address to Congress, Gallup measured Bush’s approval rating at 90 per cent, a level so high as to be almost incredible. The degree of public support was all the more astonishing given that it came less than a year after a deeply divisive presidential election in which the Democratic candidate, Vice-President Al Gore, had actually won the popular vote by a narrow margin of around 500,000. The election had only been decided finally in December when the United States Supreme Court had ruled that a recount in Florida be stopped, leading Bush to carry the state by 537 votes and thereby a majority in the Electoral College.

It is also the case that, while the implication that Iraq had been involved in 9/11 was absolutely false (as I will deal with shortly), it was a reasonable, in fact sensible, decision to cast the actions of al-Qa’eda in a broad multinational context. Bin Laden, after all, was hardly constrained by national borders or any Westphalian sense of sovereignty in assembling his own world vision: he saw the struggle of Islam against the West in Palestine, Kashmir and throughout central Asia, as well as Sudan, where he had spent the middle years of the 1990s, and he had even been issued with a Bosnian passport by officials in Vienna in 1993 as the former Yugoslavia opened up safe havens for Islamist terrorists. He had been born in Saudi Arabia, and by 2001 regarded Taliban-controlled Afghanistan as “the only Islamic country”. Less than two months after Bush’s address to Congress, bin Laden broadcast a statement on Al Jazeera in which he connected conflicts in “Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan to the Arab world and Nigeria and Mauritania” in opposition to “the huge criminality practiced by Israel and the United States in Palestine and other Muslim countries”.

There was no ambivalence in bin Laden’s message or the ideological underpinnings of al-Qa’eda strategy.

This clearly indicates the nature of this war. This war is fundamentally religious. The people of the East are Muslims. They sympathized with Muslims against the people of the West, who are the crusaders.

While President Bush’s readiness to adopt the idea of a crusade and of Manichaean idea of good and evil was stark, he had not plucked it from the ether. It is simply not credible to suggest that bin Laden was acting in response to Bush’s conceptual framework. He thought in explicitly religious and sectarian terms, every bit as Manichaean as Bush, and there was logic behind the US decision to move on to al-Qa’eda’s territory when seeking to challenge and defeat its violent Islamism.

It should also be noted that at this early stage in the “war on terror”, America had the sympathy and often the support of a very broad coalition of nations. Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Chile all expressed firm solidarity with Washington, Russia ands Belarus condemned the attacks, Thailand, Laos and the Philippines pledged support to counter terrorism (as later would Burma), China expressed its condolences and even the North Korean state broadcaster brought itself to condemn “all forms of terrorism and whatever support to it”. The United Nations Security Council had unanimously agreed Resolution 1368 on 12 September, condemning the attacks and affirming its stance against terrorism, and on 4 October NATO invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which declares an attack on one member state to be an attack on all, for the first and (so far) only time in the alliance’s history; this would pave the way for military action in Afghanistan the same month.

This is not, however, to say that the framing of United States policy as a “war on terror” was without problems. One was the fact that not all of the linkages being made by Washington were accurate. It was certainly reasonable to argue that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a threat to regional stability, despite being subject to economic sanctions and undergoing United Nations weapons inspections to investigate potential weapons of mass destruction. Tony Blair would later protest, perfectly accurately, that while the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not specifically and explicitly authorised in terms by a resolution of the UN Security Council, that same body had issued 16 resolutions from 1991 onwards requiring the complete destruction of WMD programmes, and Iraq had repeatedly refused to comply or co-operate. Moreover, the United States was unequivocally committed to régime change in Iraq well before 9/11, Congress having passed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 during the Clinton administration.

Nevertheless, while Washington was not making radically new policy towards Iraq in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was displaying a cynical approach to the facts when it prayed in aid the al-Qa’eda threat. The administration created the notion of a long-standing and secret relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa’eda dating as far back as 1992, but the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence could only point to one meeting between representatives of the Iraqi Intelligence Service and al-Qa’eda, in Sudan in 1995, and the Iraqi interlocutor, later taken into US custody, attested that he “received word from his IIS chain-of-command that he should not see bin Laden again”. There had not, the general agreement went, been any kind of operational relationship between the two. Saddam had rejected two other advances from al-Qa’eda.

In any event, an alliance between the pan-Islamist al-Qa’eda and Saddam’s Ba’ath Party was profoundly unlikely: while they might share an enemy in the United States, Ba’athism was a creed of pan-Arabism and Arab socialism and had for much of its history been fundamentally secular in outlook. It was only after 1993 that the Baghdad régime embarked on the so-called Faith Campaign which allowed a degree of Islamic influence into various parts of national life and extended freedoms for religious Islamic groups. The campaign had sporadic support in Iraq, and while Saddam gave it his support, few if any of his senior leadership cadre were similarly committed, fearing it would antagonise potential regional allies. Indeed, one of the most public critics of the Faith Campaign was Saddam’s sadistic and probably psychopathic elder son Uday (he had fallen out of favour with his father in 1988 after becoming drunk at a party in honour of the wife of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, and stabbing Saddam’s valet to death with an electric carving knife).

Undoubtedly this false linkage between al-Qa’eda, 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, created purely for presentational and tactical purposes, undermined the whole framework of the war on terror. It also contributed to a conflation of the military operations against Afghanistan, from 2001, and Iraq, from 2003. At least in the initial stages, action against the Taliban in Afghanistan had been legitimate, supported by the international community and formally agreed by NATO, and there was a clear causal relationship, as al-Qa’eda was using Afghanistan as a safe haven and location for training. The United States, however, seemed to prosecute the war against Iraq with much greater vigour and enthusiasm, and Iraq was always the larger commitment in terms of personnel and resources. It was easy for the international community to suspect that hostility towards Saddam Hussein and Iraq was a more important driver behind US foreign and security policy than a campaign against international terrorism triggered 9/11.

There was also a broader conceptual flaw in definition. Put simply, by framing its policy as a war on “terror” or “terrorism”, the United States created an opponent which was essentially impossible to defeat. In contrast to President Bush’s hubristic declaration of “Mission Accomplished” against Iraq in May 2003, there would and could never be such a definitive proclamation against terror. This was a fatal defect, creating an unwinnable conflict which would always be vulnerable to mission creep. While that was problematic in tactical and strategic terms, it was nothing short of disastrous in terms of presentation and public opinion.

This brings me back to the issue from which I started, that of strategic communications. The declaration resulting from NATO’s Strasbourg/Kehl Summit in April 2009 included the following section:

It is increasingly important that the Alliance communicates in an appropriate, timely, accurate and responsive manner on its evolving roles, objectives and missions. Strategic communications are an integral part of our efforts to achieve the Alliance’s political and military objectives.

NATO now defines strategic communications as:

a holistic approach to communication, based on values and interests, that encompasses everything an actor does to achieve objectives, in a contested environment. It means that strategic communications is understood more as a holistic mind-set in projecting one’s policies. We cannot focus on short-term, single-dimension, local issues. We have to think long-term, complex solutions, and effective ways of influencing big, important discourses in a very competitive environment. That is a permanent state of agility, whilst remaining true to own values.

By any reasonable definition, the decision to frame policy towards al-Qa’eda and the threat of Islamist terrorism after 9/11 as a “war in terror” would hold up poorly to that definition. It is possible to see the motivational traces of the idea in the initial expansive concept pioneered by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, an attempt to place Osama bin Laden and his organisation in a much wider context of a series of global and interlinked challenges. But the execution was inadequate, and fatally undermined by the glaringly misleading inclusion of Iraq as part of an overall narrative. It made a coherent US policy seem false and contrived, created division between potential allies and made a mockery of the sense of “values” which the current theorising now requires.

There is a final irony that it was, to an extent, unnecessary. There was already the foundation of a credible but separate narrative in terms of policy towards Iraq: one can trace a continuous thread from Saddam’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990, through the defiance of so many UN Security Council Resolutions in the 1990s and decreasing co-operation with weapons inspectors. By 2003, Iraq was still a threat to regional stability, it was a rogue state in breach of all kinds of international agreements and Saddam had proven his willingness not only to war with his neighbours but also to use WMDs in pursuit of genocidal policies towards his own people, such as the persecution of the Feyli Kurds which saw up to half a million people deported and perhaps 15,000 murdered, and the displacement of 200,000 Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq. President Bush inherited a settled policy of régime change from his predecessor, and this could have provided a basis to sustain a separate approach, distinct from the “war on terror” but still encompassing the measures he would in the end take anyway.

History is unlikely to judge the execution of US and allied Middle East policy between 1990 and the present day kindly, punctuated as it is by deception, miscalculation, inconsistency, incoherence and the casual acceptance of terrifying levels of death, destruction and displacement. Setting aside moral, ethical and legal judgements on what was done, there must at least be an ongoing learning of lessons and their application to the future. We see this in sharp relief at the moment, as the United States attracts widespread condemnation for its support for Israel and its ongoing conflict in Gaza, a tense and hostile relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the failure of the West to prevent carnage in Syria and, now, the military action against Houthi militants in Yemen as they use their strategic location to threaten the global economy and carry our strikes against shipping in the Red Sea.

“Only connect,” as E.M. Forster concluded in Howard’s End. “Live in fragments no longer.” Foreign policy has to follow that dictum if it is to be effective, and the different connections can be far-reaching and ferociously complicated. At the moment, one can connect the situation in the Red Sea not only with what is happening in Israel and Gaza and the actions of Iran in carrying out air strikes against Iraq, Pakistan and Israel but also with longer-term developments in the Horn of Africa. The desire of Somaliland for international recognition as a sovereign state, independent of and distinct from the failing state of Somalia, is tied into the recent agreement between Ethiopia and Somaliland for the former to have access to the Red Sea through Berbera, and the desire on Ethiopia’s part not to be reliant on Djibouti, where port fees are high. It has exacerbated tensions between Somalia and Somaliland, and has caused Eritrea to view the Ethiopia/Somaliland alliance as a security threat. That has knock-on effects as far as the European Union, which maintains a maritime security commitment, EUNAVFOR ATALANTA, to tackle piracy off the coast of the Horn of Africa. There is now a danger that this will conflict in some ways with the United States-led Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea and the overall security situation could decline with serious economic and geopolitical consequences.

Stitching all of these factors together in a way which makes sense and is supported by a public weary of seemingly endless, costly and inconclusive military commitments is almost unimaginably difficult. If, however, the “war on terror” shows the perils of failing to do so, it must also provide some lessons for getting it right this time. Mark Twain may never actually have said that “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”, but there is truth in the idea. The task facing the international community now is to ensure that the rhymes are effective and strike a chord with the people.