Human Rights Backsliding Recalls Fallacies of Bush’s Freedom Agenda
In our fast-moving, social media-driven news cycle, events that took place two days ago are generally considered “old news” while events that took place two decades ago are basically “ancient history.” The rapidity and sheer volume of as-it-happens news tends to smother memories of our recent past.
Occasionally, though, a news story breaks that compels a re-examination of our government’s previous decisions and a reassessment of those policies’ long-term impacts on the world.
This is the case today as events unfold that have prompted reflection on the fateful decision more than 20 years ago to launch a series of military interventions in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The wars that followed — first in Afghanistan and then Iraq, and later with interventions in Libya and Syria — were known, collectively, as “the Global War on Terror,” or “the Long War.”
President George W. Bush (R-Texas) dubbed it “the Freedom Agenda.”
A fact sheet on the Freedom Agenda published by the White House in late 2008, just before Bush handed over the reins to Barack Obama (D-Illinois), boasted that Bush’s leadership had “freed 25 million Iraqis from the rule of Saddam Hussein,” and “supported the creation of a freely elected Iraqi government that is operating under one of the most progressive constitutions in the Arab world.”
In Afghanistan, meanwhile, Bush “helped improve the lives of the Afghan people, especially women and children.” Specifically, the White House pointed out, “more than six million children, approximately two million of whom are girls, are now in Afghan schools, compared to fewer than one million in 2001.”
These triumphs were held up as proof by Bush and his neoconservative allies that despite the enormous cost in blood and treasure, with thousands of U.S. servicemembers’ lives lost and trillions of dollars spent, the military adventurism was well worth it.
Yet, despite the vaunted achievements of the Freedom Agenda, today we are greeted by the unpleasant news that in Afghanistan, a generation of girls is being denied basic education by the ruling regime.
Three years after Taliban militants reclaimed power after a 20-year war with U.S.-led forces, “secondary and higher education is strictly forbidden to girls and women,” UNESCO notes in a new report. According to newly released data, 1.4 million Afghan girls have been banned from school and access to primary education has also fallen sharply among boys.
“Today, Afghanistan is the only country in the world to prohibit access to education for girls over the age of 12 and for women,” said UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay. “This situation must concern us all.”
In an apparent attempt to rub the West’s noses in the fact that they are working methodically to return Afghanistan to the Stone Age, last week members of the Taliban commemorated the third anniversary of their victory by parading through a former American air base with U.S. weapons and vehicles.
Afghan soldiers carrying the Taliban flag marched with machine guns and drove military vehicles that U.S. forces had abandoned after the chaotic and rushed withdrawal from the country in August 2021. In speeches celebrating their triumph, Taliban leaders touted their achievements in strengthening Islamic law, which in practice means curbing human rights and oppressing women and girls.
Child Marriage
So much for the Freedom Agenda’s successes in Afghanistan. Now let’s see how it’s going in Iraq, with its constitution that the Bush White House hailed as “one of the most progressive … in the Arab world.” Not so well, it turns out.
In Baghdad, the “freely elected Iraqi government” is currently considering a draft law that would allow the marriage of girls as young as nine.
The move by parliament, which mirrors a similar attempt in 2017, would grant religious bodies the power to exercise authority on family affairs, including marriage. It follows more than a decade of efforts by Shia Muslims who dominate the Iraqi political system to erode women’s rights in the country, and would essentially legalize an already widespread practice of unregistered child marriages.
As many as 28% of girls in Iraq are illicitly married before the age of 18, according to UNICEF, and 22% of unregistered marriages are with girls below the age of 14. These marriages evade legal restrictions and prevent women and girls from obtaining government services, registering their children’s birth, and claiming their rights.
“Iraq should prosecute religious leaders who officiate at marriages in violation of Iraqi law,” Human Rights Watch stated in a report earlier this year. Instead, Iraq is moving towards legalizing the practice.
The amendments have been heavily promoted by a coalition of fundamentalist Shiite parties that form the largest bloc in parliament. Some religious figures point out that historically Islam has allowed the marriage of pubescent girls from the age of nine, noting that the prophet Mohammed is believed to have consummated the marriage of one of his wives, Aisha, at that age.
Secular forces and human rights advocates, on the other hand, are calling it “a catastrophe” for women and girls. Raya Faiq, the coordinator of a coalition that opposes the draft law, points out that it would strip families from having a say in whether their children are forced into marriage.
“My husband and my family oppose child marriage,” Faiq said. “But imagine if my daughter gets married and my daughter’s husband wants to marry off my granddaughter as a child. The new law would allow him to do so. I would not be allowed to object. This law legalizes child rape.”
The proposed legal changes have prompted protests in several Iraqi cities. On August 8, demonstrators gathered in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, which, in the past, has seen massacres against protesters carried out by Iraqi forces.
Anti-draft law demonstrators in Baghdad carried banners that read “There is no Quranic verse that takes custody away from the mother” and “No marriage of minors.” Just over a hundred miles away, according to women’s rights activist Inas Jabbar, protesters in Najaf were attacked by hardliners who support the changes to the law.
Cultural Differences
The backsliding on human rights in Iraq and Afghanistan recalls a basic fact that U.S. policymakers and pundits, at one time, seemed to understand: democracy is not something that can simply be imposed by outside forces, but must be something that arises organically from within.
The conditions that led to the American Revolution in the 1770s, for instance, and the political philosophies that inspired the United States Constitution, with its protections of basic rights, were unique historical circumstances that cannot simply be replicated at will.
This is particularly the case in the traditionally conservative and Islamic countries of the Middle East. Deeply held religious beliefs and other cultural differences may prevent Western-style democracy from ever taking hold, which is a historical reality that was at one time widely understood but seemingly forgotten two decades ago when neoconservative fantasies took over common sense in Washington.
In 2002 and 2003, with war fever running high, the idea that the U.S. could utilize its military power to shape the world to its liking and thereby bolster its national security was taken as a given by the Washington establishment.
Few took issue, for example, with Bush’s declaration in September 2002 that “the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence,” and therefore should “create a balance of power that favors human freedom.”
Only by establishing “conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty,” Bush said, will we be able to “defend the peace” and “preserve the peace.” This was not just considered a truism or conventional wisdom in Washington, but indeed became a central tenet of neoconservatism.
With very little debate, the doctrine was codified as part of the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States. “Our first imperative,” the document read, “is to clarify what we stand for: the United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere.”
Toward this end, the United States “will champion the cause of human dignity and oppose those who resist it.” What this doctrine meant in practice was that the U.S. would assume the right to traverse the globe overthrowing governments and installing U.S.-friendly regimes, spawning the era of “regime change wars” that sought to spread democracy but instead ushered in global chaos.
Earlier Misgivings
In those heady days, it was nearly impossible to question the wisdom of this policy. The powers-that-be and major media considered dissent to be un-American, and Iraq War critics — ranging from former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter to the country music band the Dixie Chicks to talk show host Phil Donahue — saw their careers suffer and their loyalty questioned.
Ironically, however, many of those who pounded the drums of war had earlier expressed severe doubts about the possibility of using military power to shape the world to the U.S.’s liking. Many proponents of war against Iraq in 2003 were among the most vocal skeptics about marching to Baghdad at the end of the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who went to the United Nations in 2003 making the case for war, was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 war, and had earlier articulated the pitfalls of ousting Saddam Hussein and trying to transform Iraq into a U.S.-friendly democracy.
“There is this sort of romantic notion that if Saddam Hussein got hit by a bus tomorrow, some Jeffersonian democrat is waiting in the wings to hold popular elections,” Powell said in 1992. “You’re going to get — guess what — probably another Saddam Hussein.”
Powell said the American people would be “outraged if we had gone on to Baghdad and we found ourselves in Baghdad with American soldiers patrolling the streets two years later still looking for Jefferson.”
Even dyed-in-the-wool neoconservative ideologues who pressed for the 2003 invasion offered different advice in the early 1990s.
Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, William Kristol and Robert Kagan — all of whom backed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — supported the first Bush administration’s caution in 1991. Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, a think tank devoted to “promoting American interests in the Middle East,” warned in 1991 that “getting rid of Saddam increases the prospects of Iraqi civil war, Iranian and Syrian expansionism, Kurdish irredentism and Turkish instability.” Pipes added, “Do we really want to open this can of worms?”
A decade later, following the line of the rest of the neoconservative movement, Pipes dismissed similar warnings as alarmist. “The risks are overrated,” he said. “It’s in our interests that [the Iraqis] modernize and it’s in our interests to help them modernize and I think we know how.”
Underrated Risks
It is now clear that far from being overrated, the risks were drastically underrated. Not only have the aspirations of democracy and universal human rights been called into question by recent events, but the resulting destabilization of the West has come more clearly into focus.
The wars to “spread freedom” in the region led to a humanitarian disaster and refugee crisis, flooding Europe with asylum seekers and destabilizing its societies. Rather than help to contain extremism, the interventions helped to fuel it.
Although the link between U.S.-led wars and the rise of extremism was once primarily made by antiwar dissidents, the link became so obvious during the Bush years that even the intelligence community and foreign policy establishment began publicly stating this case.
In 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus view of the 16 spy services inside the U.S. government starkly warned that a whole new generation of Islamic radicalism was being unleashed by the U.S. occupation of Iraq. According to one American intelligence official, the consensus was that “the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse.”
The assessment noted that several underlying factors were “fueling the spread of the jihadist movement,” including “fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness,” and “pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims all of which jihadists exploit.”
This is precisely what happened in Iraq, where ex-Baathist military officials who had been disbanded from the Iraqi Army following the U.S. invasion joined the Islamic State, or ISIS. The early growth of ISIS was further facilitated by the mass detentions of Iraqis in prisons such as Camp Bucca, which provided a fertile networking and recruiting opportunity.
But rather than leading to substantive changes or reversals in U.S. policies, Washington doubled down on the failed policies that had given rise to radical jihadist groups. In fact, instead of ending the occupation of Iraq, the U.S. decided to send a surge of 20,000 troops in 2007, and the combat mission dragged on well into President Barack Obama’s first term.
After finally withdrawing in 2010, the U.S. then turned its attention to Libya, and decided to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi through a massive bombing campaign. Following Gaddafi’s ouster, his caches of weapons ended up being shuttled to rebels in Syria, fueling the civil war there. The U.S. also began directly arming groups attempting to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, with these weapons often ending up in the hands of jihadists such as the Nusra Front and ISIS.
Some of this was done in the full expectation that the policies would result in emboldening extremist groups. According to a classified 2012 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency memorandum, “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”
And yet, despite this knowledge, the U.S. helped coordinate arms transfers to these same groups, contributing directly to the rise of Islamic extremism.
At the same time, the U.S. brushed off pleas from the international community to devote at least as much attention to addressing the root causes of violent extremism as it did to addressing the military aspect of defeating jihadists on the battlefield. Among the principal causes identified included fighting global poverty and promoting human rights.
Ahead of a visit to the Central Asian region in 2015, for example, Human Rights Watch urged Secretary of State John Kerry to “publicly express concern over Central Asian governments’ distinctly poor human rights records.” Instead, Kerry largely downplayed human rights as he sought deeper U.S. ties with the region. As Reuters reported, “he took pains to avoid direct public criticism as he pursued security and economic concerns at the top of his agenda.”
This followed a long and well-established pattern.
Development Agenda
As far back as 2002, when the “War on Terror” was being rolled out, calls for more engagement on development aid grew louder, with some of the strongest pleas coming directly from World Bank President James Wolfensohn.
In a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, Wolfensohn argued that to combat terrorism, global poverty and other international problems must be addressed. “We will not create a safer world with bombs or brigades alone,” he said. Poverty “can provide a breeding ground for the ideas and actions of those who promote conflict and terror.”
Yet, when it came to fighting global poverty, the U.S. displayed a seeming indifference to making this a priority, whether as part of a larger campaign against violent extremism or simply on humanitarian grounds.
Despite pressure placed on the U.S. following 9/11 to make development aid a central plank in the broader campaign against terrorism, the Bush administration resisted calls to increase funding for aid to the world’s poorest nations. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill insisted that foreign aid wasn’t proven to be effective, and so the U.S. blocked efforts to raise the level of aid going from international development organizations to poor nations.
After sustained criticism, the Bush administration reluctantly announced an increase in aid by $5 billion spread over several years. This would represent only a modest rise, however, in the U.S. contribution as measured by its percentage of GDP, which at that time was only 0.1 percent — far short of the 0.7% that the United Nations had set for the minimal target of industrialized countries.
While resisting calls to increase poverty-reduction efforts, the U.S. prioritized policies of regime change wars and security assistance. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute documented that the U.S. established itself as the world’s top exporter of weapons, noting that the volume of U.S. arms exports rose by 23% between 2005 and 2015. The biggest increase in transfers went to the Middle East.
Besides flooding the planet with small arms and light weapons, heavy artillery, armored vehicles, and warships, the U.S. expanded its military operations across the globe — now taking place in at least 78 countries, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
“The U.S. is deploying airstrikes against militant targets, engaging in combat with militants, leading military exercises and exporting a militarized counterterrorism model to dozens of countries through ‘training and assistance,’” Brown University’s 2023 study found. “The narrative, tactics, funding and institutional supports of the U.S. post-9/11 wars fuel repression and corruption and escalate cycles of violence.”
This escalation of violence, combined with the lack of economic development and failures of the so-called Freedom Agenda to spread democracy and human rights, has led, predictably, to increased mass migration, which in turn has precipitated unrest in Western countries, as recently seen in the United Kingdom.
Tensions over migration in Britain have intensified in recent years, as the number of arrivals started to accelerate dramatically. Since 2010, the British Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) notes in a recent report, some 10 million people have moved to the UK, increasing pressure on public services and infrastructure.
There has also been a dramatic spike in irregular migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats since 2022, with nationals of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria comprising the bulk of those arrivals.
These high levels of immigration have contributed to economic difficulties and a housing crisis in the UK, CPS notes, pointing out that migration and its social effects are unevenly spread among British social classes. With immigrants generally people of limited means, they tend to settle in working-class areas that are poorer than the national average. These deprived urban neighborhoods host about two-thirds of all migrants that have arrived since 2001.
“This is one reason the effects of migration can be less visible to more affluent people, or to those otherwise insulated from the evidence of migration,” the CPS report explains. “Politicians, journalists and leaders in government and business are more likely to live in affluent villages or unrepresentative affluent urban exclaves. Their experience of migration is very different from that of a majority of voters.”
While the CPS study was focused on the situation in Britain, similar dynamics are at play throughout the West. Because most policymakers belong to an upper strata of society that is shielded from the consequences of migration — and more broadly from the effects of destabilizing the Middle East — it is unlikely that they grasp the enormity of the crisis that they have helped unleash.
With the few remaining justifications for their interventions now being undermined by the backsliding on human rights seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, at least they will be denied one of their favorite talking points advocating for military adventurism. That is, of course, unless these lessons are swept under the rug and forgotten.
Nat Parry lives in Denmark. He is the author of Samuel Adams and the Vagabond Henry Tufts: Virtue Meets Vice in the Revolutionary Era and How Christmas Became Christmas. He is the editor of American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader. Follow him on X.
