Your comment that after 9/11 we could either do nothing or do what Bush Jr did is an example of False Equivalency. Maj. Sjursen laid how in great detail many of the critical issues with how the Bush administration reacted to 9/11 with our poorly planned and disastrously executed invasion of Iraq. I remember having conversations with people in the Army who were highly critical of the political decision to gut our forces in Afghanistan in order to invade Iraq. The Bush administration ignored Intelligence warning about an imminent terrorist attack on the US and Bush ignored it. After 9/11, the Bush administration was obsessively focused on tying the terror attacks to Iraq rather than following the investigation through to its conclusion and acting on that information.
As Maj. Sjursen noted, those in the White House and Pentagon were woefully ignorant when it came to the history of the Middle East, the impact of Western interference in the region, and how the Sunni-Shia schism affected the political and social realities in the Middle East. This is especially true in Iraq where the Sunni Muslim Saddam Hussein was in control for more than 20 years, during which time he brutally oppressed Shia Muslims.
The current conflict in Syria has also been fueled by sectarian rivalries, which embattled President Bashar al-Assad and his family are members of the Shia Alawite-sect, while many of the insurgent groups in his country, including the Islamic State terror group, are Sunni adherents. The ongoing civil war in Yemen has become a sectarian proxy war, with Iran backing the Shia Houthi rebels who overthrew the country’s Sunni-dominated government, while a Saudi-led coalition has since intervened to reinstall the Sunni leadership. We just experienced the first known decision of President Trump in this region with the SEAL team strike on a suspected Al-Qaeda camp in Yemen’s Bayda province that left one SEAL dead along with 30 civilians.
The point of Maj. Sjursen’s cogent analysis is how the Middle East has been our Tar Baby. There is no question our government had to respond to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We had the support and sympathy of the vast majority of the world. We had the cooperation of almost every foreign government. We should have sent in Special Forces to take out bin-Laden and al-Qaeda hiding in Afghanistan. We should have marshaled our vast Intelligence resources and tracked down those responsible for supporting bin-Laden and al-Qaeda around the world. We should have worked with our allies and partners in the global Intelligence community and law enforcement to track, locate and take these people into custody. We would have put them on trial, and if found guilty, imprisoned or executed them like we did war criminals in Germany and Japan after WWII.
Instead, the Bush administration pissed away this great reservoir of goodwill, sympathy and understanding by going to war under false pretenses against a country that has ZERO to do with 9/11. We lost the moral high ground and became the best recruitment tool al-Qaeda and other Islamic jihadist groups had prayed for after 9/11. If we don’t learn the painful and costly lessons from these mistakes, we will keep hitting the Tar Baby and be stuck there for the foreseeable future with the same results.
