Bookman: Victory eludes us still, seven years later

ATLANTA — Seven years after Sept. 11, America fights on, no closer to victory than the day this started.

Even the most basic task — taking Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," as President Bush put it — has yet to be accomplished. In those early days after the towers fell, with the most powerful nation in the world united in righteous anger against our attackers, I could never have conceived that the mastermind of that attack would still be walking the Earth come 2008. Yet he is.

In Afghanistan, the country from which the attack was launched, we remain a long, long way from securing the country. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress Wednesday that "I'm not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan" and that "frankly, we're running out of time."

And of course, the main reason that we are no closer to victory after seven years, hundreds of billions of dollars and almost 5,000 dead soldiers is that we decided to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with Sept. 11. That remains by far our single biggest mistake in the war on Islamic extremism, and it cripples us still.

Even now, five years after the invasion, Iraq is consuming troops badly needed in Afghanistan. We will never know what Afghanistan might be like if we had concentrated manpower and resources there, but it's safe to assume that things would be much better than they are today. Among other things, bin Laden might not have escaped early in the war if we hadn't held troops back for later deployment to Iraq.

However, diversion of resources and attention is not the biggest reason the decision to invade Iraq has set us back so far. Over the past seven years, we've learned a lot about the nature of terrorist networks and how to fight a violent insurgency. At West Point, at the Army War College and other military institutions, young officers are now being taught that while you can suppress an insurgency by killing its members, you stop an insurgency by killing its narrative. They are learning that every insurgency has its own story line, its explanation for how the world works, which it uses to recruit members, justify violence and earn the support it needs within the population. If you can expose that story line as false, the insurgency falters.

On the other hand, if you act in ways that lend credence to the insurgents' narrative, you give that insurgency power and make it far more difficult to defeat.

That's what the invasion of Iraq has done. In the Arab world, the al Qaeda narrative long held that the United States is in effect an arm of Israel and that we are intent on conquering the Islamic world and stealing its oil. By invading Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with Sept. 11 or with Islamic extremism, we confirmed that narrative and gave it a power that will long outlive bin Laden.

In a recent story datelined Cairo, a New York Times reporter noted that across the Arab world, people see the invasion of Iraq as, in effect, a confirmation of the al Qaeda narrative.

"What happened in Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or Qaeda," as one Egyptian told him. "They went against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that's why."

Today, most Americans understand that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, even if we disagree about the best way to recover from that mistake. However, one very prominent American, Sen. John McCain, still believes the war was necessary.

That's nothing new.

Within a month of Sept. 11, McCain had publicly targeted Iraq for invasion. Within six months — long before any public sign the Bush administration was contemplating war on Iraq — McCain told startled European allies that "a terrorist resides in Baghdad" and that "the next front is apparent and we should not shrink from acknowledging it."

As Mullen told Congress Wednesday, "We cannot kill our way to victory." But it's a lesson that some have learned more quickly than others, and some haven't learned at all.

Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.