As we entered the 21st Century, Saddam had continued to rattle his cage and his sword. There was a new President to test, and he looked weak given the contentions of the 2000 elections. It wouldn't be Saddam that tested him, but a plot long in the works from Al-Qaeda. It came close to cancellation. It was delayed by a few months. Had word gotten out that one of the 20 terrorists had gotten arrested, it wouldn't have gone off, but little enough was known of the threat to understand an entirely new and different technique would be tried, and partially succeed.
Americans had been trained to comply with the orders of hi-jackers, to not be the dead hero, but the live survivor. So, on 9/11/2001, when Islamist Terrorists slaughtered the crews of 4 airplanes, the passengers initially responded in the manner they had been taught to. They obeyed the orders of the terrorists, expecting to be rescued eventually by Law Enforcement or Better. They didn't expect they'd be flown into the twin towers in a fiery explosion.
The towers were built to withstand the impact of an errant 707, so the authorities thought they could deal with the fire and it would be a smaller number of fatalities. They didn't initially think the towers would fall, but the planes were bigger than what the towers were built to withstand and the planners had not expected the planes to be purposefully crashed into the towers with full tanks of fuel. The explosion blew off the fire proofing. The fuel flooded to the depths of the building. As the fire burned against the unprotected steel, it bent and twisted, under the weight of dozens of floors of concrete above it. The steel buckled, with thousands of unarmed civilians killed.
A third plane was flown into the Pentagon, which was also designed to withstand an attack, but not of the impact of a 747 loaded with fuel. The building burned for days, but did not have 50 stories above to cause it to fall into itself. It would be re-built within a year. Red-tape and squabbling would delay the re-construction of the World Trade Center for a decade, but the Pentagon was quickly rebuilt.
The terrorists had hoped to murder 250,000 American Civilians on that day. In that aspect they failed. The passengers of the fourth plane got word of the attacks. It broke them of the sheep mentality of obeying the orders of Islamist terrorists, as death was the worst that could befall them, and death was a given if they complied. They chose to fight, for their lives, and the lives of their fellow Americans.
"Let's roll!" Todd Beamer shouted as the passengers rushed the terrorists.
America was shocked. The World was shocked. And for a moment, Americans were united, determined and resolved. The question still remained of how we would respond, but there was little doubt we would respond. And the new President determined it would not be the manner of the past. It would not be just a few million dollar cruise missiles blowing up mud huts and rocks in a land lost to time. This time, we would bring the terrorists to justice, or bring justice to them. The President had been in office long enough to submit a DoD budget, but not long enough to see the budget enacted. Congress still had to pass it.
On 9/11/01, two teams of the 5th Special Forces Group had been packing up in conclusion of their mission to train our new Uzbekistan allies. Their mission had just changed. Their new mission was to prepare for their brothers to arrive, to convince the Uzbek government to allow it, to find a place for their brothers, to help plan the invasion of the Taliban led government of Afghanistan. Within weeks, a few hundred members had deployed from Fort Campbell, Kentucky through Uzbekistan, and into Afghanistan. Within 2 months, the Special Forces Troops of 5th SFG(A) had inserted into Afghanistan, linked up with the local opposition to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and had begun raining down explosives on Taliban Government Troops.
Americans cheered Victory after Victory, as the Taliban fell and then Kabul and Kandahar faster than anyone had dreamed possible. By the Anniversary of 9/11 in 2002, it appeared that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were defeated in Afghanistan. They had been killed, captured, or escaped, like cockroaches with the lights on, to melt into the populations of other lands. We hadn't yet caught Osama bin Laden, al-Zawahari, or Mullah Omar, so there was still work to be done, but our Troops had to go find the fight, and the Taliban were slinking away in the few times we found them.
Pakistan was helping to round them up on their side of the border. The #3 position in Al-Qaeda was regularly getting killed or captured. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Zubadiyah, and others were regularly captured.
Both sides of the aisle were "determined" to end terrorists and their state sponsors. Iraq had one of the longest records of supporting terrorists. It had been paying $25,000/head for suicide bombers in Israel for decades. The Fallujah and Nasiriyah Al-Qaeda camps were known and reported about to Congress, but not widely outside of it. It was just a mundane point with little surprise to those with a real knowledge of the Middle East. Only on the surface did it seem strange.
When Bush Junior went to Congress for authorization for military action against Iraq, Pelosi, Hillary, Bill Clinton, and Harry Reid attested to the "fact" that this wasn't a ploy, that they knew Saddam had WMD, because they had the same information when Clinton was President. But while WMD was the most advertised reason, it was only one of dozens of reasons, BOTH sides of the aisle voted to authorize war. The Egyptians, the British, and others confirmed that Saddam had WMD. And it was a matter of historical record that he had used them against both the Kurds and the Iranians. The French and Germans opposed the War, mainly because they had their hand in the cookie jar. They were selling Saddam weapons, and getting cheap oil on the black market from Saddam. They knew the evidence would be damning, when we went in.
Whether you wish to believe the politicians, that they believed the authorization for war was political theater, or their original words, that Saddam had to be taken out, one way or the other, they had authorized a war against Iraq.
It took several months for the forces to arrive in Kuwait, prepared for war, and about 3 weeks for the "smaller footprint" force to defeat Saddam's military. "No plan survives the battlefield intact," but the Iraqis did initially welcome Our Troops. The war was won at a pace faster than the Generals anticipated or wanted. There were miscalculations. The Generals had avoided permanent damage to the Infrastructure and expected they could repair the power grid quickly. They had not realized that Saddam had failed to maintain it during the decade of sanctions.
The Military planners had anticipated the large scale surrenders they had seen in Desert Storm, which would be convertible to an Iraqi Security Force, quickly. They had not anticipated that Iraqi soldiers and policemen would melt away into the population, on fears of the de-Ba'athification orders. The political administration set up in Iraq to oversee the transition to the people of Iraq had failed to learn the lesson of the Cold War; that people had been forced to join the party (Ba'ath or Communist) if they wanted to succeed behind the curtain.
When it came down to it, the transitional governing authority wasn't ready for the rise of criminals and the abandonment of posts of the Police Forces. Saddam had cast his hopes on surviving in hiding long enough for a guerrilla force to run the Americans out. Soon, he was captured, but the Al-Qaeda that had slipped out of Afghanistan were slipping through Syria to plan operations in Iraq. Some had been there all along, such as al-Zarqawi. He had a long history of terrorism, was already wanted in his homeland of Jordan, and had worked with Al-Qaeda as a trainer in Afghanistan. When push came to shove, and he needed a little more international support, he made the final pledge, a blood oath to bin Laden, in exchange.
Iran had grown quiet over the last few years, concerned that they were next. Libya's Qaddaffi had gotten more than a little concerned, considering past grievances. Qaddaffi decided it was time to give up his own WMD program, before US Troops took them from him. He upped the ante and started giving up information on Al-Qaeda and its operatives. He did everything he could to demonstrate he was reformed, and out of the terrorism business.
But Iran noticed the political discord in the United States. Quietly, it began to agitate the Shi'a against the US. It wasn't difficult. The Shi'a remembered that they had been slaughtered by Saddam in the 90's, after they had been encouraged to rise up against him. They had grievances with the Sunni. And it was a Sadr that had mentored Khomeni. Muqtada al-Sadr may have assassinated his own father to gain his own seat of power, but he had established himself as the leader of a Million Man slum, where no other was allowed to give out charity.
Zarqawi's Al-Qaeda and Sadr's Mehdi Militia found common cause in fomenting "sectarian violence" to embarrass the Americans, who had a policy, initially, of staying out of "Green on Green" violence, ie. disputes between locals. The 2nd War in Iraq had begun, and no one knew it. It worked well for Iran, as the more they funded and equipped the Mehdi Militia to kill Americans, and the more their allies in Syria slipped Al-Qaeda terrorists in, the more divided the American Politicians became.
The other side of the aisle began to remember how the "defeat" in Viet Nam had brought them to power, and pronounced Iraq a defeat every time they saw a camera.
Eventually, the Shi'a moderate, al-Maliki was forced to choose between giving up power, or embracing the Islamist firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr. He chose to remain in power, at all costs. He made alliances with Sadr and his Iranian allies. Maliki had not won the election, but in a parliamentary election he didn't need to. He built a coalition, of Shi'a extremists to vote him into power. He took up common cause with the Iranians, and insisted on US Troop withdrawals, long after Obama started begging him to let them stay.
As Al-Qaeda was defeated in Iraq, it abandoned the field of battle. It returned to Pakistan, to Afghanistan, and was reborn in Somalia and Yemen. Osama is dead, but Al-Qaeda is not. Islamist terrorism is but one means of Islamist oppression. Political Islamism is another tool in the arsenal to achieve Sharia Law, the oppression of women, and the elimination of Israel. And it was "political Islamism" that would prove organized and ready to take the reins of power when elections were rushed in Egypt and Tunisia. Tunisians fled as Islamists returned to write the new Constitution. The Muslim Brotherhood pushed for earlier votes, not later when Hosni Mubarrak fell. The sooner the better, for the only organized element on the political landscape. Egyptians, like Iranians, are not prone to oppressing the people, to forcing segregation of the sexes, to illegalizing the education of women.
If "rights of independent thought" were to be predicated with "as long as it doesn't contradict Islam or the laws of government" as stated in the Iranian Constitution, the Islamists would need to write it. And if they were going to write it, they would need to hold the elections while they had the organizational advantage.
We had recovered from the defeatist 70's.
And the Rewards of the 80's had carried through the early years of the Bush Admin.
Then came the "Peace filled 90's"
Stumble It!
