Truth - Al Franken [116]
Seven months into the war, Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo asking whether we were creating more terrorists than we were eliminating. “We lack the metrics to know,” he lamented at the time. Nine months later, he gave a speech indicating that he had made no progress in creating such metrics:
What we don’t know is what’s coming in in the intake. How many more of these folks are being trained and developed and organized and deployed and sent out. The civilized world doesn’t know the answer to that question.
While we don’t have an actual head count of terrorists, there are certain indicators. And all these indicators suggest that to the extent that the war in Iraq was ever about fighting terrorism, it has been a spectacular failure. An obvious metric, or as I prefer to call it, “measure,” of the success of the War on Terror is the number of terrorist attacks worldwide. At least that’s what the State Department boasted when it initially released its annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report in 2004. The report showed that the incidence of terrorist attacks was down to its lowest level in more than thirty years—a 45 percent decrease since 2001. “You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight,” Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage proudly announced.
It wasn’t long before the State Department realized they had made a number of small mistakes, including leaving out the terrorist attacks that had taken place during an unusually busy terrorist attack season from November 12 through December 31. An embarrassed Colin Powell did some damage control, telling the easily deceived Tim Russert, “I’m not a happy camper on this. We were wrong. We’re going to get to the bottom of it.” Once the books had gone through the State Department’s de-cookerator, they told a very different story. The number of “significant” terrorist attacks had shot up from the previous year, reaching, not the lowest, but the highest level ever recorded.
The next year, the State Department was determined not to repeat its mistake. Breaking with twenty years of precedent, the administration’s congressionally mandated report on terrorism did not include statistics on terrorist attacks—the very activity that defines terrorism. Which isn’t to say they didn’t collect the statistics. It’s just that when they learned that the number of “significant” attacks had tripled from the previous year’s record high, they realized that the number was useless as a metric to prove that terrorist attacks had gone down.
In May 2004, around the same time Ahmed Chalabi’s home and office were being raided, Paul Wolfowitz asked William Schneider, Jr., chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board and an old buddy from the Project for a New American Century, to conduct a study on how America could improve its strategic communication in the global war on terror. Wolfowitz wanted to know how America could convince the world’s Muslims that America was not their enemy. It was a move I had been calling for since President Bush referred to the War on Terror as a “Crusade” and Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for—get this—intelligence, said, in full dress uniform, at a church, that the War on Terror was a fight between “a Christian nation” and “Satan.”
Schneider’s report was slightly more critical of the Bush administration’s approach to fighting terror than, say, I am. It noted that “opinion surveys” of Muslims worldwide “reveal widespread animosity toward the United States and its policies.”
A year and a half after going to war in Iraq, Arab/Muslim anger has intensified. Data from Zogby International in July 2004, for example, show that the U.S. is viewed unfavorably by overwhelming majorities in Egypt (98 percent), Saudi Arabia (94 percent), Morocco (88 percent), and Jordan (78 percent).