RE: “The last two wars, with all respect to those who fought them, were a complete waste of blood and treasure.”
Without the September 11 terror attacks, the Afghan war would never have been fought.
Hard to be certain what might have happened in Iraq, but I’ll guess that Saddam was more willing to throw the dice on war since we were already fighting in Afghanistan.
I never understood Bush’s rationale for attacking Iraq since North Korea, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Pakistan already had nuclear weapon programs, and since Russia, and possibly China, were actively helping some of them.
Just curious - if you had been President on 9/11, how would you have responded, since you would not attack Afghanistan?
I am retired CIA so that is the context for my comments:
First, in my administration most of the senior staff would be educated well enough in Islam and Islamic and world history so that they would understand we are at war with Islam - not terrorists. For the most part that could not be articulated publically but it would be what we based policy on.
I would begin intense, behind the scenes efforts to educate our allies to that fact – at various levels from heads of state and government down to military exchanges. That would be a slow and painful process but given time (more than one President) would yield results.
The same process would take place in the US military, federal law enforcement, US intelligence and Foggy Bottom and I would not hesitate to purge officers who resisted. That is an ugly tactic that the current administration is using well but the stakes are too high to not use it. (When taking office I would have accepted the resignation of unprecedented numbers of SIS and SES so some of that purging would have already taken place).
I would use the CIA to set the Islamic world against itself as Reagan did using false flag operations. Sunni against Shia, country against country, terrorist group against terrorist group etc.
I would use the CIA, SOCOM and other, more benign tools to limit Islam expansion. For example, the Saudi’s have a big program in Africa where they go in and provide villages water and electricity – but only let villagers that convert to Islam use those services. A program like that could be ended quietly and would probably only take a phone call. Comply or face all manner of consequences.
I would use the CIA and SOCOM to destabilize Muslim countries in order to bring about secular regimes – which would in most cases have to be totalitarian in nature. This could be effective in many countries but certainly not all. Tactics would run the gamut from support nations in Africa that have banned Islam up to and including terrorizing individual influential members of Islamic groups, tribes and governments.
Targets would have to be prioritized as what could be done is very limited by the politically correct mindset of the West. This would all have to be covert.
Overtly – I would have hunted Bin Laden and authorized limited strikes on perceived high value terrorist targets in order to satiate the public. I would have never gone into Afghanistan. Iraq would have been a more difficult issue given the intel at the time. Saddam Hussein had WMD’s. He had tons of WMD’s – at one point. However, once you invade in order to destroy his regime you were left with either fixing their culture (not possible) or leaving and watching a bloody and brutal civil war that the US would be blamed for. At the time I was for the invasion but dead set against staying – except we could have declared the north to be Kurdistan, a newly independent country, and set up a massive base there to dominate the entire region. Kurdish Muslims could have been marginalized and the majority Kurdish Christians could have provided use with internal security while we protected them externally. Win win and reasonably cheap and secure.
These are dirty, ugly policies but the world is a dirty, nasty place. And I would rather not watch it march into the second dark age.