America’s Wars: Afghanistan and Iraq

Abstract

The 9/11 attacks were the most devastating terrorist attacks in history. The death toll of 2977 people, old, young, women, men, from all walks of life, including over 400 firefighters and other emergency workers, and the spectacle of some 200 people choosing to jump to their deaths rather than die in the flames, were a tremendous blow. Nevertheless, despite its enormity, it was still a terrorist attack — a remarkably successful attack, but of no real strategic importance. Despite the number of fatalities (more than were inflicted at Pearl Harbor, where 2403, mainly servicemen, were killed), it was more a blow to American prestige and self-regard than it was a serious threat to US interests and power. The United States was by far the world’s most powerful country before the attacks and it remained by far the most powerful country after them. Indeed, 9/11 did not affect the strategic position of the United States at all. It was the ill-judged nature of the US response that did that. Al-Qaeda was a terrorist threat, at best a few hundred strong, certainly capable of symbolic, indeed spectacular, attacks, but it could not at any stretch of the imagination be seriously considered as a military threat. Instead of responding to the attacks as a terrorist threat, however, the Bush administration chose to use them as a way of reasserting US power in the Middle East, as an opportunity to move against those states — Iraq, Iran and Syria — that were seen as obstacles to US domination of the region.