The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works any more,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’
Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”, October 17 2004, The New York Times
Reality, alas, had the last word, as it so often does. When Karl Rove — who denies he actually said those words — claimed to be “history’s actor” in 2004, few would have disputed that the Bush administration was creating its own reality. The problem was, it believed its own reality as well.
Now, nearly 20 years after the Twin Towers fell and a new era of US interventionism commenced, we’re left to view the smoking ruins of an all-too-brief empire. An Iraq dominated by Iran, which intervened to quash a resurgent al-Qaeda offshoot even more barbaric, the product of the disastrous US occupation and failed nation-building. Afghanistan returned to the control of the Taliban, with Islamist extremists within the Pakistani government gloating at their victory. A new refugee crisis unfolding as Afghans flee a new dark age under fundamentalist brutality.
And the dead, so many dead, hundreds of thousands of them, killed in civil wars, terrorist attacks on fellow Muslims, warring between local gangs, incinerated in Western drone strikes, stillborn in the ruined hospitals of Fallujah. All for outcomes that compare poorly with the status quo of September 10, 2001.
“History’s actors” was meant to convey a sense of purposive action. Here, at last, were Western leaders prepared to do what was necessary, to brook no opposition, unrestrained by the kind of high-minded statecraft that had restrained previous leaders; George W would, unlike his father, go all the way to Baghdad, and beyond, to wherever the purifying fire of US military might was required to burn Islamist terrorism to the ground and erect bright, shining capitalist democracies amid the ash. And he would be cheered on by a whole generation of neoconservatives, especially in the right-wing media. George W Bush was “one of the great presidents of the United States”, an excited Greg Sheridan claimed in 2006.
But the reality was defeating the neocon delusion even then. Western security and intelligence officials charged with protecting us from terrorism were already admitting that the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq had fuelled terrorism.
As late as the Trump administration, officials were insisting the Afghanistan occupation was worthwhile because it meant the US was killing terrorists over there rather seeing them let off bombs in Times Square — regardless of the fact that an actual terrorist who had tried to detonate a bomb in Times Square had done so out of rage at the US occupation of Afghanistan.
Trump ended up saying “the top people in the Pentagon … want to do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy”. He was wrong about it being the military brass who wanted to fight — that was more correct about Congress and successive administrations — but it was remarkable that less than two decades on from the invasion of Afghanistan an American president, even one as rogue as Trump, could say something that was muttered only by the isolationist right and the hard left during the Bush years.
Trump’s statement reflected that what was once overwhelming voter endorsement for the early shock-and-awe stages of US military interventions would inevitably turn into disengagement, then active hostility as the occupations wore on and body bags kept being flown back in and damaged veterans returned, sometimes only briefly back with family and friends before taking their own lives.
No future US president can assume automatic support for foreign military ventures any more — justified or not. Barack Obama baulked at involvement in Syria even after his self-declared “red lines” were crossed, painfully aware both of voter disenchantment over such involvements and the memory that Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard had lied about Saddam’s weapons. David Cameron encountered the same problem when the House of Commons voted against British engagement in Syria.
The view in other capitals that Trump had undermined US alliances to the point where there was a real question about whether the US could be relied on any more was overly personalised — the same voter disenchantment and isolationism that fuelled Trump’s rise will also act as a restraint on more normal presidents like Biden and his successors.
Trump was correct about one aspect. The only winners out of 20 years of wars in the Middle East have been companies like Lockheed (share price up tenfold since 2001), Northrop Grumman (also tenfold) and General Dynamics (up sixfold).
The credibility of Western governments and domestic support for interventionism have been badly damaged, while delivering a less safe world and a triumph for brutal Islamist regimes like Iran and the Taliban.
And so very many dead — the biggest population in the reality-based community.
And here we have those same military-industrial behemoths, through their hired mouthpieces in ASPI and the monopoly media, ginning up a nice, profitable war with China. Australia will stand proudly with our great and glorious ally in bringing the Dreadful Dragon to heel. Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi! Of course, when the US decides it’s all too much and cuts and runs…
… we’ll all be rooned.
Most of the gulf states are nearly as bad as the Taliban.
But, hey, oil and arms sales mean we continue to turn a blind eye.
Afghanistan will be forgotten soon enough, and no lessons , sorry, learnings , will be learned.
Yes, except Saudi Arabia. It has been exporting and funding its Wahaabi revolution for decades, which accounts for most international Islamic terrorism. It was, along with Pakistan, responsible for the Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan at the start of this century; without them, Afghanistan would have had no involvement in the World Trade Centre attack. (Whether that would have saved Afghanistan from invasion by the USA – who knows? A total lack of involvement did not save Iraq. There was never the slightest chance of the USA taking any action against Saudi, therefore the war launched after the World Trade Centre attack was lost before it began. All we are seeing now is a long-overdue acknowledgement of reality, accompanied with blood, betrayal and shame.)
So, Saudi is not ‘nearly as bad as the Taliban’. It’s in a different and far worse league, and yet, as you rightly say, ‘oil and arms sales mean we continue to turn a blind eye.’
Exactly. Another major strategic error the US made was to determine that the action to take against evil was inversely proportional to how much oil they had. We can only wish that Afghanistan had a mature oil industry – it may have saved a lot of heartache and lives.
Errors? I don’t think anything happenied here that wasn’t planned and utterly predictable. Follow the money…
I don’t recall Libya ever threatening international peace (unlike the Hegemon, constantly) and it even turned over its research facilities to international verification to prevent WMD claims.
That didn’t stop it being bombed, destabilsed and now it is the main launching point for the uncountable numbers crossing the Mediterranean to the soft underbelly of Europe – almost as if that was the intention.
The only country in the ME that has withstood the efforts of the US & its proxies is Syria.
How very odd, I wonder why?
Libya was not squeaky clean. Maybe this does not count as a threat to international peace, but it was happy to supply weapons and explosives to the IRA and other such as and the Red Army Faction. Even so it had stopped doing that years before so the final foreign-backed overthrow looked like an act of truly monstrous spite by powers who had much dirtier hands than Qaddafi and were entirely reckless of the destructive consequences.
And if you count Syria as resisting the US, why not Iran too? Although they have very different governments. Iran could have had a relatively secular government if events had played out differently after the Shah, but instead it became a Shia theocracy. Syria, on the other hand, had a government that was brutal to dissent but still tolerated and recognised most religions (e.g. something like elevent different Xtian churches were officially recognised by the state) and a diversity of customs and traditions were allowed. For example, wine and beer were made and sold openly in Syria, perhaps they still are.
I’m also hoping that the US finally abandon their tactically sound but strategically disastrous military creed, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. When your enemy is the Soviets, and their enemy is the Taliban, you don’t want to be arming them so that they can do your dirty work.
Or training a mad dog to bite your enemy, only for it to turn around and bite you.
The Taliban were the mad dogs of Pakistan’s ISI, conceived (sic!) in the teeming Afghan refugee camps.
The US created the mujahideen, almost 2 decades earlier.
What happens when you can’t see any further than you ego divided by your shortcomings.
As facile as it is, I think they may have watched too many John Wayne movies in their youth. That quote is gold, men of action always see themselves as the great movers and shakers. Unfortunately history tends to forget that almost all of these men of action end up as footnotes of deluded failure. The very few who make a difference are lionised, while the failures are forgotten. I think we could do without these so called men of action for a few generations.
Although we could do with some action on the home front, vaccines, quarantine and a little bit of decarbonising. Unfortunately those sorts of actions don’t seem to have the same appeal.
I’m not so sure. Peter Dutton seems to represent the man of action you’re describing here, and whilst he does have his supporters (frequently carrying baseball bats and Australian flags), he is not the most electable fellow around.
The failures of Churchill are all forgotten, even Gallipoli
As is his use of aerial bombing with poison gas of Kurdish hill villagers in Iraq, post WWI.
And keen participation in the first deployment of concentration camps for women & children during the Boer war.