How has a cave-dwelling trust-fund baby with a video camera and a chip on his shoulder managed to outfight the most powerful nation in the history of Earth?
Next month is the sixth anniversary of the War on Terror™.
Six years is a mighty long time.
That's longer than it took the Union to subdue the Confederacy. Longer than it took the Allies to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Longer than it took Frodo to get the Ring back to Mount Doom. Longer than it took me to graduate college.
Of the United States' major conflicts, only the Revolutionary War, Vietnam, the Battle of the Network Stars and the Cola Wars lasted longer.
And what have we gotten for our six-year, trillion-dollar war?
A debacle of historic proportions that has left hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, weakened the U.S. military, earned the animosity and distrust of the world, and left the United States with stronger enemies.
The United States is losing the War on Terror™.
Badly.
So what happened?
Simple.
America is losing the War on Terror™ because it put a feckless man-child in charge, then turned and watched American Idol, CSI: Miami and YouTube videos of teenagers making rockets out of Diet Coke and Mentos.
Let's start at the beginning.
The pilgrims came to America for religious freedom and turkey dinners in Massachusetts.
OK, maybe not that far back.
Let's try Sept. 20, 2001.
President Bush preempted both Will & Grace AND Temptation Island to formally announce the nation's response to the 9/11 attacks:
"Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."
Hold it right there.
Loser Move No. 1: The war's objective was defined so broadly, the war can never be won.
A group of violent Muslim fundamentalists with bases, operatives and national allies attacked U.S. civilians.
But instead of declaring war on them and their supporters, the president declared a war on terror — a war to fight the feeling they instilled in us.
It's as if FDR walked into Congress the day after Pearl Harbor and said "Yesterday is a day that will live in infamy, but instead of declaring war on Japan, I've decided to declare war on infamy."
Terror is an emotion. Terrorism is a guerilla warfare tactic. It's possible to fight and even defeat groups of terrorists, but the tactics and the emotions they generate cannot be eradicated.
Declaring war on an emotion or a tactic is to declare either a) a state of perpetual war or b) a war that will end in certain defeat.
Let's not forget the second part of Bush's war declaration — the bit about a war that will not end until every terrorist group with global reach has been defeated. Huh?
Every terrorist group didn't attack us. Al-Qaeda attacked us. What's the point of declaring war on terrorist groups who didn't attack us and never will?
Hey, Lord's Resistance Army, leaving piles of dead bodies all over Central Africa — I'm talkin' to you. Kashmir separatists in India: So what if most Americans think you're a sweater, a scarf or a Led Zeppelin song? We're coming after you.
Except, we're not really.
War on Terror™ is a brand and therefore required a hyperbolic marketing hook, kinda like how tooth-whitening products are marketed as "revolutionary." "Every terrorist group with global reach" sounds better than "We'll fight some of you. The rest can carry on terrorizing."
Loser Move No. 2: President Bush's inability to finish what he starts.
On Oct. 7, 2001, U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan. Kinda sorta.
Instead of a full-scale invasion, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom. Enduring Freedom was a massive air campaign backing the ground forces of the Northern Alliance, a confederation of anti-Taliban rebels fighting in Afghanistan since 1996.
With our help, however, Northern Alliance started kicking ass. Its forces swept across Afghanistan in weeks.
By early December, the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar had fallen and bin Laden was hunkered down in Tora Bora, a rugged mountain region near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan.
Three months after his followers killed 3,000 Americans in a single morning, we had bin Laden surrounded.
And Bush choked.
Instead of sending our best soldiers into Tora Bora to get him, President Bush outsourced.
The United States paid local tribal militias to do the job for us.
Up against soldiers whose only incentive to capture him was cash, bin Laden opened his fat wallet and offered them even more cash.
He bribed local militiamen and nearby villagers to get him and his people across the border to safety in Pakistan.
Faced with the war's first major setback, Bush did what bratty children tend to do when they don't get their way: He lost interest.
"I truly am not that concerned about him," he said of bin Laden at a news conference in March 2002.
And so, as swiftly as he vanished into Pakistan, bin Laden all but vanished from the president's speeches.
Bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans in a single morning and didn't have the decency to surrender on schedule, so President Man-Child got bored and moved on.
To Iraq.
By early 2002, the White House was already planning the Iraq war — even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no military threat to the United States.
Afghanistan was left to wither.
We sent a big enough force to remove the Taliban from power, but it was too small to secure the peace or prevent the Taliban from regrouping across the border in Pakistan.
It has gotten stronger every year since 2002 and now controls much of the countryside it abandoned in late 2001.
And Afghanistan is desperately poor, violent and unstable — just like it was when the Taliban took power in the first place.
The only industry doing well in the post-Enduring Freedom Afghanistan is opium. Oh, and Kabul has a golf course and a boutique hotel.
And al-Qaeda?
Two years ago, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report, which reflects the collective judgment of the United States' myriad intelligence agencies, said al-Qaeda was on the run and in disarray.
The July 2007 NIE says al-Qaeda's core leaders have rebuilt their organization in the relative safety of Pakistan — the country Bush let bin Laden flee to in 2001. Al-Qaeda is organized, strong, and, in the words of the report, the "most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland."
Which brings me to …
Loser Move No. 3: President Bush doesn't know the difference between a goal and a plan.
For the sake of not boring you or me to death by rehashing old arguments about why the United States went to war in Iraq, let's just imagine the following:
Let's imagine the Bush administration did not link Saddam Hussein to 9/11 by repeatedly and falsely insinuating his affiliation with al-Qaeda.
Let's imagine the Bush administration did not cherry-pick intelligence for the purpose of falsely inflating Iraq's WMD abilities.
Let's imagine administration officials were just joshin' when they said Iraq would be a cakewalk, and that Iraqis would greet Americans as liberators.
Let's imagine every word President Bush told us prior to the war was true.
Let's assume adorable fairies with magic wands and little spangly ballerina outfits are, as you read this, filling your bathtub with gold and candy.
(As long as we're imagining things, we might as well imagine something pleasant.)
Imagine all of the, um, imaginings above are true — the war in Iraq was still an epic, catastrophic, humongous, ginormous error.
Because the president didn't just fail to plan adequately. He refused to plan at all.
It never occurred to Bush and his top advisers that Iraqis might not accept the U.S. invasion plan. It never occurred to him that Muslim extremists would attempt to fill the power vacuum in Iraq left by Saddam's removal.
It didn't occur to them. So they didn't plan for it.
Iraq is now doomed to a civil war, followed by a breakup. Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who dominated under Saddam, do not want to live under a government dominated by Shiite Arab theocratic political parties any more than you or I do.
Iraq's Kurds will declare their independence and fight the Arabs and Turkomen who don't want to live in a Kurdish state.
Or maybe our NATO ally Turkey will invade Iraqi Kurdistan with the 150,000 or so troops it has already massed on Iraq's northern border. Turkey doesn't want the Kurds to have their own state, for fear it will encourage the Kurdish separatists who live in eastern Turkey to break away and join it.
Iraq is now a training and testing ground for violent radicals who get their rocks off by attacking our planes, trains and gathering places — just like Afghanistan was in the 1980s.
You know how President Bush always says if we don't fight 'em there, we're gonna have to fight 'em here? He's wrong. We're gonna have to fight them there and here. For years.
And then there's Iran.
In the spring of 2003, Iran initiated talks with the United States aimed at a grand bargain. Iran said it was willing to negotiate away its nuclear program and its support of terrorism in exchange for normalized relations and a promise we wouldn't invade.
We told them to screw off.
Now its nuclear program is chugging away, its operatives are arming Shiite militias in Iraq and it has more influence over Iraq's most powerful politicians than we do.
We still might bomb Iran, but Iran knows perfectly well that, unlike in 2003, the United States has no capacity, and no stomach, for a regime-changin' invasion.
Iran is stronger vis-à-vis its neighbors than it has been at any point since the Islamic Revolution more than a quarter-century ago. And it's thought to be two or three years away from a nuke — a nuke it will never negotiate away.
Shockingly, even when confronted by the reality of the invasion's failure to transform Iraq into an oasis of peace, prosperity and American-style democracy, Bush refused to change course.
Critics of the war were greeted with Bush's "good progress" mantra, while his supporters berated critics as Negative Nellies, Henny Pennies and, worst of all, terrorist sympathizers — as if pointing out how badly the war was going was the reason it was going badly.
In December 2006, Bush finally acknowledged, three years and six months too late, that the occupation was going terribly and that his vision of a democratic, peaceful and prosperous Iraq was actually a hallucination.
His solution was a small escalation of the war popularly known as "The Surge."
It might have worked if it had started in May 2003 with an international force of 450,000. But with only 160,000 exhausted American troops, whose rotations will require a significant troop reduction by April 2008, it has no chance.
Which brings me to …
Loser Move No. 4: "You" haven't been paying any attention.
Yeah, "You."
I know "You" feel really good about yourself since Time magazine glued a mirror to its cover and declared "You" its 2006 Person of the Year.
But "You" have a lot to answer for.
"You" paid scant attention to all the smart people telling you Bush's policies were not only incoherent and illogical, but harmful to the cause of fighting terror.
Yet "You" cheered him on.
Now "You" are on the verge of making the same mistake in 2008. Some of "You" are bestowing first-tier status to candidates who either refuse to acknowledge how badly the current administration has screwed up, or others who criticize him, yet fail to articulate an honest, sensible alternative.
And some of "You" just don't seem to care.
This article appears in Aug 8-14, 2007.