9/11 ten years on: Bush and Blair were right

In the last ten years, it has become increasingly fashionable to knock both George W Bush and Tony Blair for their response to the attacks of 9/11. The ‘War on Terror’ has become a less and less fashionable concept. But ten years on from the attacks, I would argue that - while mistakes have certainly been made – Bush and Blair basically got it right.

Following the loss of thousands of innocent lives on 11th September 2001, George W Bush stated that this attack would not stand and that there would be action against the terrorists responsible. Tony Blair, rightly, recognised that 9/11 was not simply an attack against the US but against the Western democratic world in general, and offered the US his support.

It is difficult to argue that the war to oust the Taleban from power in Afghanistan was not the right response. Here was a clear-cut case of a just war - the US was responding to an attack on its soil, by a terrorist group based in Afghanistan and hosted by the Islamist regime there. The Taleban were even given the chance to hand over Osama Bin Laden – they refused. What viable alternative was there to military action? Any lesser response would have looked pathetically weak in the eyes of the world and – of course- in the eyes of the terrorists, leaving them to think that they could strike at the US with impunity. Without the war, Afghanistan would have remained as a base for Al-Qaeda. This was surely not an attractive option. Whatever challenges remain in Afghanistan, they do not alter the justness of the war.

But what about Iraq? The lesson the US administration and British government took from 9/11 was that threats should not be left alone until they struck first. Saddam Hussein had been an ongoing problem for years, repeatedly obstructing and finally barring the UN weapons inspectors who were there to verify the disarmament which was one of the conditions of the ceasefire after the first Gulf War. The sanctions regime against him was crumbling due to a lack of support from other countries.
Here was a dictator who had not only killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and invaded neighbouring countries twice, but who was in breach of seventeen UN Security Council Resolutions, had used chemical weapons against his own people and who had a record of harbouring and collaborating with Islamist terrorists – those who deny this last point should explain why Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was already in Iraq before the war, despite requests for extradition. While we now know in hindsight that the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was badly wrong, at the time, with Saddam Hussein still not fully cooperating with the UN weapons inspectors, this was too much of a risk to take.

Of course, many people became legal experts overnight and declared the war ‘illegal’, despite the Attorney General’s advice that it was lawful, despite the seventeen UN Security Council Resolutions and despite a vote of Parliament. Why the vetoes of countries like China at the UN should have more legitimacy than the decision of our democratically elected Parliament has never been properly explained.

Many more condemned, and still do condemn, the US and the UK for the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet they ignore the plain fact that the vast majority of civilian casualties have been caused not by US or allied forces, but by the Islamist insurgents fighting against us. In Iraq, Islamist and sectarian terrorist groups launched an unprecedented wave of suicide bombings against Iraqi civilians on a daily basis. They went out of their way to slaughter as many civilians as possible, yet received notably less condemnation than the US and Britain. Similarly, in Afghanistan, a UN report this year showed that the Taleban are now responsible for more than six times as many civilian deaths as NATO forces – and the proportion is growing.

Yet many in the West have a masochistic desire to always blame ourselves. Some find it much easier to reflexively condemn the US and Britain rather than accept that we are genuinely facing a vicious enemy and have the right to defend ourselves. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, it became commonplace even to blame the West for ‘creating’ the forces that we were battling, as a way of highlighting supposed Western hypocrisy. In the case of Afghanistan, it is still widely believed that the CIA funded and supported Osama Bin Laden during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, even though there is no evidence to support this and Bin Laden brought his own funding with him from Saudi Arabia. In the case of Iraq, it was often said that it was the US that had armed Saddam Hussein in the first place, during his war with Iran. In fact, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the US and UK combined provided Saddam Hussein with less than 1% of his purchased weapons – against 57% from the USSR, 13% from France and 12% from China.

Similarly, it was argued that we were really to blame for the terrorist attacks against us due to our foreign policy. It was claimed that the War on Terror, and particularly the Iraq War, radicalised many Muslims against us. It should hardly need pointing out that it was Al-Qaeda that started the war, not us, through 9/11 and its previous attacks against US targets. If it is argued that we cannot fight back because it would radicalise future terrorists, then that would leave us completely unable to defend ourselves. Aside from which, arguing that we should not do anything which might radicalise would-be terrorists would effectively be to hand Islamist terrorists a veto over our foreign policy. A lot of time was wasted in Britain on arguing about whether the Iraq War inspired more terrorism – even if it did, the argument is of little value. The fact that Al-Qaeda disapprove of something does not mean that it is wrong, unless Al-Qaeda are to become our new moral arbiters.

It has often been argued that the War on Terror alienated Muslim opinion worldwide, and was perceived as a ‘war against Islam’. This probably says more about the state much of worldwide Muslim opinion was already in than about our actions. George W Bush and Tony Blair repeatedly went out of their way to emphasise that this was not a war with Islam and that Islam was neither the enemy nor the problem. Given that Al-Qaeda is a self-proclaimed Islamist terrorist group, and that they were harboured by an Islamist regime in Afghanistan, it was inevitable that the US and UK would end up fighting against Muslims – just as in 1999 Tony Blair had called for strong military action against the (Christian) Serbs in defence of Kosovar Muslims.

It has also been said that the US should have done more to ‘reach out’ to the Muslim world. In fact, in the early days after 9/11, there were many attempts at reaching out – particularly by Tony Blair, who tried to reach out to the Palestinians, the Syrians and the Iranians. But beyond expressions of sympathy for the victims of the 9/11, there was little reaching back, or even a willingness to give any approval to the West’s operation against Al-Qaeda and the Taleban. When it came to military action, given that the US had been attacked on its own soil, and given the record of many European countries and international institutions, can we really blame the US for taking a ‘unilateralist’ – or, as was often the case, bilateralist – approach?

Incredibly, after 9/11, some still persisted in claiming that the terrorist threat was ‘exaggerated’ or even ‘manufactured’ by governments who supposedly had some sinister desire to launch endless wars and terrify their populations in order to strip them of their civil liberties. In the UK, no apology was forthcoming from these people when we suffered out own attacks of 7/7. The reason there have not been even more terrorist attacks is not because Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have not had the intention of launching them but due to concerted military action against Al-Qaeda and the constant vigilance and undercover work of our security services.

Many have criticised the terminology of the ‘War on Terror’, pointing out that you cannot fight a war against something which is a tactic rather than a group or an ideology. They may have a point – perhaps ‘War against Islamist terrorist networks’ may be more accurate, but it is hardly more concise. But such quibbles over terminology are hardly helpful. Given the scale of the 9/11 attacks and the threat of further attacks, conceptualising the response as a ‘war’ was surely the right thing to do. Bush and Blair were absolutely right to recognise that these were not just isolated terrorist attacks against specific targets, but that they were indeed an assault on our values and way of life. Those who still doubt this should read Osama Bin Laden’s ‘letter to the American people’, in which he states: "You are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind: You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire... You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom."

Thankfully, Osama Bin Laden is now dead, his organisation weakened, and his ideology dwindling in popularity. These things did not happen by accident, but as a result of the War on Terror and the efforts led by George W Bush and Tony Blair.

It has been remarked upon, in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’, how the peoples of the Arab nations are now crying out for democracy and freedom, and not looking to Islamists or terrorists in their revolts against their undemocratic regimes. This is another thing which Bush and Blair got right: that democracy could be spread to the Middle East, that freedom was not an exclusively Western value that was incompatible with Muslim or Arab societies. Last year, as US combat operations drew to a close, the BBC could not resist pointing out: "Nor has the overthrow of Saddam Hussein led to a general domino effect towards democracy throughout the Middle East." That assessment already appears outdated. It is impossible to tell whether or not the Arab Spring would have happened if Saddam Hussein was still in power in Iraq. If it had, then he would almost certainly be doing his best to crush it with a bloody campaign of repression to rival what has been done in Syria and Libya. Instead, we had a democratically elected Iraqi government calling for action against the regime of Colonel Gaddafi. Now that is progress.

While we have had numerous successes in the War on Terror, the fight goes on, most notably in Afghanistan. The last decade has been tough, not least for the US. Tough but – given the enormity of 9/11 – necessary. It is difficult to see what would have been a better alternative to the War on Terror. At the end of the decade, it needs to be said: Bush and Blair did the right thing, and we are in a better position now than we would otherwise have been.