20 years of 9/11, the waning of Neocons and an emerging of a new American doctrine
“It seems bin Laden has finally achieved his strategic objective to push the US out of the Middle East, not because of the 9/11 and the street protest like in Vietnam war as of his expectation, but because the US policy makers have realized what has been depicted in Paul Kenedy’s “Imperial overstretch” not to repeat what the Soviet Union had done during the cold war.”
There is no other essays written in the “Tour de France” style to review jihardism like Nelly Lahoud’s one in the latest printing of Foreign Affairs, part because of her background in research focusing on the evolution and ideology of al-Qa’ida (AQ) and the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS/ISIL), her fluent in Arabic, and especially because of the recent open access to thousands of al Qaeda documents seized in the 2011 raid. The CIA has declassified 470,000 digital files, including audio, images, videos, and text; with helps of two research assistants, they proceeded 96,000 of those files, “including nearly 6,000 pages of Arabic text that form a record of al Qaeda’s internal communications between 2000 and 2011,” the essay has reviewed some astonishing fact findings.
Bin Laden had recalled his first idea of jihardist attack inside America in 1986 because of what he believes the US’s supportive for Israel to occupy Palestine. He published “Declaration of Jihad” in 1996, orchestrated simultaneous bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, organized attacking at USS Cole in the port of Aden in Yemen on October 12, 2000. After the striking of the USS Cole, he decided to plot an attack on American soil to “break the fear of this false god and destroy the myth of American invincibility,” thus the 9/11 attack as of today in 20 years ago. Bin Laden, however, had never anticipated about evolved phenomenon after that including American full blown of global war on terror, not merely “take to the streets, replicating the protests against the Vietnam War and calling on their government to withdraw from Muslim-majority countries” as he previously thought.
Fast forward 20 years later, bin Laden had been killed in 2011 as well as ISIS’s Baghdadi to detonate a suicide vest after cornered by the US military dog, Conan, in October 2019. In bin Laden’s son, Saad’s letter to bin Laden, it is found that when fleeing to Iran, [Iranian authorities had repeatedly ignored the al Qaeda detainees’ medical conditions and how “the calamities piled up and the psychological problems increased.” When Saad’s pregnant wife needed to be induced, she was not taken to a hospital until after “the fetus stopped moving”; she was forced “to deliver him after he died.”] Iran is where the “greatest Satan reigns,” and detention there felt like “exiled from religion” Saad concludes. Al Qaeda’s influence on Islamic world has been fading. Several jihardist groups operate on their own autonomy if not distancing from al Qaeda, including the Taliban. Even some jihardist group that still loyal to al Qaeda like al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) was problematic since bin Laden couldn’t carry a timely fashion (because of scheduling messenger dependence) “his interventions often arrived too late and sometimes even proved counterproductive” such as a failure to negotiate on Western hostage because of this untimely meddling from bin Laden. Even despite these difficulties, bin Laden was determined to “protect these revolutions”, his daughters Sumayya and Maryam tried to help him polishing the latest message, but it wasn’t delivered because of the raid by the US Navy seals in the Abbotabad compound.
It was the Neocons’ agenda behind Bush-43, “The need to respond with decisive force in the event of a major theater war in Europe, the Persian Gulf or East Asia will remain the principal factor in determining Army force structure for U.S.-based units. However one judges the likelihood of such wars occurring, it is essential to retain sufficient capabilities to bring them to a satisfactory conclusion, including the possibility of a decisive victory that results in long-term political or regime change” written in page 25 of “Rebuilding America’s Defense”, published in September 2000 by The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), dubbed by Phillip Hammond as a blueprint for American domination of the world under a cover of war on terror. This was primarily inspired from “total war” on operation desert storm of Bush-41 in 1991 and was rooted in an open letter to Clinton on 1998 (“We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power. … In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.”). The operation was very efficient and perfect as a founding instrument of “Pax Americana” according to the PNAC’s paper. (see video clip below)
Now the US has learned the lessons in hard way to live with terrorism, or to use Israeli good-enough counterterrorism strategy: “mowing the grass,” “by conducting regular raids against terrorists and continually gathering intelligence, the government can keep terrorist groups such as Hamas weak, even if those groups’ attacks will always continue.” written by Daniel Byman, or as a formulation of American doctrine in Biden’s long experience on foreign policy wrote by Joshua Shifrinson and Stephen Wertheim.
This is not just a rhetoric considering from the US budget, the budget for the USCENTCOM has declined while the budget for USINDOPACOM is on the rise, but the highest portion of the budget is at USSOCOM and USTRANSCOM, reflects the strategic importance of both unified combatant commands.
It seems bin Laden has finally achieved his strategic objective to push the US out of the Middle East, not because of the 9/11 and the street protest like in Vietnam war as of his expectation, but because the US policy makers have realized what has been depicted in Paul Kenedy’s “Imperial overstretch” not to repeat what the Soviet Union had done during the cold war. Neocon’s dream has been evaporated, the new doctrine to live with the acceptable risk of terrorism has set in place. The balance of power by regional players in the Middle East has started to emerge. The US has moved on. The new hyper-competition between the US and China in the Indo-Pacific has turned its page to welcome the new era.
The best conclusion goes to Dmitri Trenin’s writing, “It is the success or failure of remaking America, not Afghanistan, that will determine not just the legacy of the Biden administration, but the future of the United States itself”.
References:
- The Good Enough Doctrine: Learning to Live With Terrorism [link]
- Bin Laden’s Catastrophic Success: Al Qaeda Changed the World — but Not in the Way It Expected [link]
- From 9/11 to 1/6: The War on Terror Supercharged the Far Right [link]
- Who Won the War on Terror? [link]
- Biden the Realist: The President’s Foreign Policy Doctrine Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight [link]
- The rise of the neocons: The Iraq war has been called a victory for the philosophy of neoconservatism. What do neoconservatives believe and how did they come to prominence? [link]
- CIA’s November 2017 Release of Abbottabad Compound Material [link]
- PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century [link]
- Were 1998 Memos a Blueprint for War? [link]
- Neocon’s open letter to Clinton [link]
- Why Afghanistan Policy Turns Out to be Bad? [link]
- Interpreting the Biden Doctrine: The View From Moscow [link]
- State-sponsored terrorism [link]
- Twenty Years After 9/11, the West Is Far from Defeated (see NATO’s Article V, according to which an attack against any member of the alliance is an attack against all) [link]
