When former Vice President Cheney was asked if he thought President Obama’s changes in the “terrorism-fighting” policies of the Bush administration have made Americans less safe, he answered: “I do.” Fortunately, it would not be the first time that Cheney might have been wrong in his assessment of facts and policies.
Contradicting all the available evidence that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were “natural enemies,” Cheney continues to claim that they were allies and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Hence, shortly after al Qaeda’s attack on New York City and Washington D.C., Cheney announced that eliminating Saddam was an “absolute necessity.” Ron Suskind, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, observed in 2006 that this obsession, the so-called Cheney Doctrine, “would frame events and responses from the administration for years to come.”
Cheney apparently persuaded President Bush that the United States could take preemptive action whenever and wherever he considered it to be in the national interest, even if there was insufficient evidence of a credible threat. Cheney and Bush persist in claiming that their methods of fighting potential terrorism have been effective because no large terrorist attacks on U.S. soil have occurred since 2001.
Yet, worldwide the total number of suicide attacks on Americans and their supporters has climbed steadily. Does that not show increasing anti-American hostility from Muslim extremists?
Critics of the Bush administration have convincingly argued that its “war on terrorism” has played right into Osama bin Laden’s hands. Every time the world heard Bush and Cheney defending torture of “enemy combatants” as justified and necessary, or of women and children being killed by American drone attacks, anti-American terrorists likely gained more zealous recruits and clandestine funding. Among the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, our “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq and our open-ended military presence in the Middle East have been routinely denounced as an intolerable overreaction on our part.
There is no substantial evidence for Cheney’s and Bush’s claim that “Muslims hate” the freedoms Americans enjoy. We Americans, who in 1783 gained our independence from foreign occupation, ought to understand well why Muslims want an end to the U.S. domination of the Middle East and an end to our massive support for the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Mr. Cheney has never bothered to look into the root causes of anti-Americanism among Muslims in general and Arabs in particular because their aspirations are irrelevant to him. He still does not understand that the anti-terrorist policies he advocated were counterproductive.
If the Obama administration is going to practice what it has preached so far, there will be an end to our military presence in Iraq. Not talking to our perceived adversaries makes us look arrogant. It denies us opportunities to make progress in our relations with them, and it makes it harder to rally international support for American leadership. We need it badly, whether it is in fighting terrorism or drug smuggling, disease or economic chaos.
As President Obama is signaling his willingness to negotiate with friend or foe, he already finds foreign leaders more willing to listen and consider negotiating mutually satisfactory deals. With regard to the Middle East, our highest priority must clearly be our insistence on a permanent and even-handed settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It may prove to be the most effective way to counteract the anti-American extremists in Muslim societies.