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Is the War on Terror Over?

Podcasts Nov 19, 2019 Karen Greenberg and Elmira Bayrasli

On October 27, US President Donald Trump announced the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and declared that the caliphate he sought to create had been destroyed. But does that mean the war on terror is over?

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Karen Greenberg

Karen Greenberg is the Director of the Center for National Security at Fordham University. She is the author of several books, most recently, Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State.

Elmira Bayrasli

Writing for PS since 2016
3 Commentaries

Elmira Bayrasli is the co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted and the author of From The Other Side of The World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places.

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Petey Bee Nov 27, 2019

The interview didn't get off to the best start. "Was it [the WOT] a mistake?" To say it was not, simply because we were attacked, is completely missing the big picture. It was a mistake. Full stop.

The reason is that most of the resulting wars were not waged on any attackers. Therefore, to nobody's surprise, rather than defeating enemies, they made new ones where they had not existed before. ISIS in Iraq, Syria, and North Africa was a direct result of these wars, which were wars of choice. This cannot be emphasized enough.

In addition the interview guest is still presenting the 'intelligence failure' story. This is
a worn out excuse, that allows us to avoid examining how we allowed the foreign policy apparatus to make such disastrous decisions. The elephant in the room, and the true villains, accounting for more deaths by a factor of a hundred, are the architects of the Iraq war and the several facsimiles of it that followed.

One cannot take this discussion seriously without the central way in which the Bush II administration took advantage of the nation's state of fear, abused its power, and became the outlet for the frustrated ambitions of several cohorts of second rate imperialists, some in government since the time of Bush I.

This is not a historical nitpick. The regime change maniacs have never been removed from the halls of power. Not the generation of Bush I and Iran Contra. Not the generation of neocons who blossomed under Bush II. Not the confusingly similar generation that followed them under Obama, touting R2P principles yet doing the exact same thing. All are still there, still provoking conflicts where they can, as it is their hammer, and regimes ready to be overthrown are nails.

Terrorism comes and goes, but this stays the same.

In the Trump generation, the enemy is within. But exactly as we learned while "fighting terrorism" in the middle east, the enemy of your enemy is still your enemy. Some archetypal representatives of the warmongers who made the WOT the disaster
it was, like Brennan, are now respected pundits, playing the part of defender of the republic to a new generation of TV viewing public. We are now putting the exact individuals and groups responsible for the disaster of the WOT in a position to teach what is supposedly the foreign policy consensus, what it is that we actually mean by law and order, abuse of power, and the national interest. This does not bode well for any future direction that may be taken.
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Is the War on Terror Over?

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