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The ‘War
On Terror’
Is Over
There could be more terrorist attacks,
but the “war on terror” as an organizing
principle of American foreign and
national-security policy is ending.
By James Kitfield
F
or a generation of Americans remained potent and menacing. But then the Laden had sworn never to be taken alive in
seared by the horrific specta- hard men with guns came in the night, and his bid for “martyrdom,” and Navy SEAL
cle of 9/11, he was a shadowy he was just another terrorist at the end of his Team Six obliged, carrying its own message
figure of malice, a disembod- bloody run of luck. that the United States never forgets. Then
ied voice whispering messag- With bin Laden silenced, the overarching bin Laden was given a respectful Muslim
es of doom that even a decade question for Washington is, what becomes burial at sea, ensuring that his final resting
of war failed to silence. In of the movement he claimed to head? After place would not become a point of pilgrim-
more than 30 audio and video tapes released a leadership struggle, a much-degraded al- age for true believers.
since the deadliest terrorist attack in histo- Qaida will likely try to remain relevant in the It’s possible, of course, that bin Laden’s
ry, Osama bin Laden taunted U.S. leaders for extremist pantheon by plotting reprisal at- martyrdom narrative could reinvigorate
photo: get t y images /mario tama
their inability to bring him to justice even as tacks, and the scattered franchises that the interest in his ideas of a holy war with the
he seduced followers with his vision of a holy organization spawned may well do the same. West, inspiring new waves of recruits to
war between Islam and the West that would But the truly existential danger was always join the “global jihad.” As terrorism expert
drive the infidels from Muslim lands. the power of bin Laden’s ideas in enticing le- Peter Bergen points out in The Longest War:
Above all, bin Laden exhorted his “heroic gions of followers to his twisted narrative of The Enduring Conflict Between America and
warriors” to kill Westerners and Jews as the holy war. Al-Qaida, something similar happened to
path to redemption. Often, the complex or- Certainly, the manner of bin Laden’s Sayyid Qutb, a writer and founding father of
ganism of global jihad responded to his en- death suggests that both sides in this twi- the jihadist movement whose ideas caught
treaties with acts of wanton violence. For as light struggle understood their roles in what fire after the Egyptian government executed
long as he was free, the very idea of bin Laden are essentially competing narratives. Bin him in 1966.
19
COVER STORY: THE WAR THAT WAS
photos: (top to bot tom) get t y images /afp/fred dufour; get t y images /afp/ tim sloan
attacks, President George W. Bush famous- defined by the “war on terror,” when com- national consciousness.
ly warned the public that “there will be no bating terrorism was not only a national pre- Indeed, in the joyous faces of young cele-
surrender ceremony on the deck of a battle- occupation but was also elevated to the cen- brants hugging and singing “The Star-Span-
ship.” Years from now, however, Americans tral organizing principle of American foreign gled Banner” outside the White House on the
may look back on bin Laden’s quiet burial and national-security policy, is ending too. night of bin Laden’s death, it was easy to read
at sea from the deck of the aircraft carrier Of course, even Bush had moved beyond the emotional trauma carried by the genera-
Carl Vinson, along with the spontaneous cel- such rhetoric by the end of his second term. tion that came of age in the 9/11 era. In that
sense, bin Laden’s demise may prove helpful-
Fueling the fire: The war in Iraq, prosecuted by ly cathartic for a nation that remains trans-
Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, may have played fixed by the terrorist threat, despite the fact
into bin Laden’s hand. that al-Qaida has failed to launch a spectac-
ular attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, although
certainly not for lack of trying.
“I think the enormous reaction we saw to
bin Laden’s death does say more about us as
Americans than it does about the nature of
the Qaida movement or threat, because this
was just one man whose operational role in
terrorism had diminished greatly over time
and whose radical Islamist ideology had lost
much of its energy,” said Paul Pillar, former-
ly a senior Middle East and counterterror-
ism analyst at the CIA and now a professor
in Georgetown University’s security studies
program. “And I hope his death gives our po-
litical leaders a chance to declare a victory of
sorts and help move the nation beyond this
without understanding that bin Laden and power behind the thrones of the kings and of opinion in the Muslim world found that in
al-Qaida not only damaged America physi- despots of Arabia. Only attacks on this “far countries as disparate as Indonesia, Jordan,
cally but also psychologically. So, I hope enemy,” he argued, would force the United Morocco, and Turkey, bin Laden inspired
President Obama and other political lead- States to retreat and cause royal and military more “confidence” than President Bush—
ers in Washington use bin Laden’s death as a dictators of the Middle East to fall, restor- and by significant margins.
way to bring closure and reduce this gap be- ing the Islamist caliphate to its former glory “After the invasion of Iraq, bin Laden came
tween the actual threat of terrorism and its with dominion over all Muslim lands. to be seen as the most viable symbol of anti-
outsized hold on the American imagination, To realize his vision of a war between Is- Americanism, because he was the one Mus-
so that we can move on as a nation.” lam and the West, bin Laden adopted a big- lim who had dared to stick a finger in the eye
White House officials also see an opportu- tent strategy that united disparate and often of the much-loathed superpower,” said An-
nity in the fact that bin Laden’s demise comes bickering extremist groups under the Qaida drew Kohut, president of the Pew Research
just as the Arab Spring is offering an alterna- banner, in the process becoming adept at Center in Washington. Then, as Qaida-in-
him as the Islamic warrior standing up to the “paper tiger.” The marginalization of al-Qaida will not
loathed superpower,” he said. “Bin Laden was Based on such anecdotal evidence, the bring an end to the terrorist threat or free the
already widely discredited.” cloistered bin Laden launched his war against United States from the need for constant vig-
the United States. He failed to understand ilance. A major terrorist attack on U.S. soil or
FATAL ERRORS that Beirut and Mogadishu represented a the successful hijacking of a people’s revolu-
In retrospect, bin Laden made two fun- peacekeeping and a humanitarian mission, tion that brings Islamist extremists to power
damental, strategic miscalculations. The respectively, with limited national interests at in an Arab state could well shift the narrative
events of recent days and months exposed stake. Nor did he anticipate the national rage again. But the revolutionary vanguard that
both, with fatal results not only for the arch- that an attack on the homeland of the mag- Osama bin Laden envisioned leading, with
terrorist but also for his cause. nitude of 9/11 would provoke, or that the U.S. its inexhaustible legions of recruits bent on
First, he badly misjudged his adversary. response would be to invade Afghanistan, endless jihad against the West—that fevered
His experiences as a mujahedeen fighting the topple his benefactors, the Taliban, and send dream has been extinguished. The “war on
Soviets in Afghanistan convinced bin Laden al-Qaida scurrying across the mountains. terror” is over. n