Twenty years on, reality’s brutal triumph over an empire of fantasies

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works any more,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’

Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”, October 17 2004, The New York Times

Reality, alas, had the last word, as it so often does. When Karl Rove — who denies he actually said those words — claimed to be “history’s actor” in 2004, few would have disputed that the Bush administration was creating its own reality. The problem was, it believed its own reality as well.

Now, nearly 20 years after the Twin Towers fell and a new era of US interventionism commenced, we’re left to view the smoking ruins of an all-too-brief empire. An Iraq dominated by Iran, which intervened to quash a resurgent al-Qaeda offshoot even more barbaric, the product of the disastrous US occupation and failed nation-building. Afghanistan returned to the control of the Taliban, with Islamist extremists within the Pakistani government gloating at their victory. A new refugee crisis unfolding as Afghans flee a new dark age under fundamentalist brutality.

And the dead, so many dead, hundreds of thousands of them, killed in civil wars, terrorist attacks on fellow Muslims, warring between local gangs, incinerated in Western drone strikes, stillborn in the ruined hospitals of Fallujah. All for outcomes that compare poorly with the status quo of September 10, 2001.

“History’s actors” was meant to convey a sense of purposive action. Here, at last, were Western leaders prepared to do what was necessary, to brook no opposition, unrestrained by the kind of high-minded statecraft that had restrained previous leaders; George W would, unlike his father, go all the way to Baghdad, and beyond, to wherever the purifying fire of US military might was required to burn Islamist terrorism to the ground and erect bright, shining capitalist democracies amid the ash. And he would be cheered on by a whole generation of neoconservatives, especially in the right-wing media. George W Bush was “one of the great presidents of the United States”, an excited Greg Sheridan claimed in 2006.

But the reality was defeating the neocon delusion even then. Western security and intelligence officials charged with protecting us from terrorism were already admitting that the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq had fuelled terrorism.

As late as the Trump administration, officials were insisting the Afghanistan occupation was worthwhile because it meant the US was killing terrorists over there rather seeing them let off bombs in Times Square — regardless of the fact that an actual terrorist who had tried to detonate a bomb in Times Square had done so out of rage at the US occupation of Afghanistan.

Trump ended up saying “the top people in the Pentagon … want to do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy”. He was wrong about it being the military brass who wanted to fight — that was more correct about Congress and successive administrations — but it was remarkable that less than two decades on from the invasion of Afghanistan an American president, even one as rogue as Trump, could say something that was muttered only by the isolationist right and the hard left during the Bush years.

Trump’s statement reflected that what was once overwhelming voter endorsement for the early shock-and-awe stages of US military interventions would inevitably turn into disengagement, then active hostility as the occupations wore on and body bags kept being flown back in and damaged veterans returned, sometimes only briefly back with family and friends before taking their own lives.

No future US president can assume automatic support for foreign military ventures any more — justified or not. Barack Obama baulked at involvement in Syria even after his self-declared “red lines” were crossed, painfully aware both of voter disenchantment over such involvements and the memory that Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard had lied about Saddam’s weapons. David Cameron encountered the same problem when the House of Commons voted against British engagement in Syria.

The view in other capitals that Trump had undermined US alliances to the point where there was a real question about whether the US could be relied on any more was overly personalised — the same voter disenchantment and isolationism that fuelled Trump’s rise will also act as a restraint on more normal presidents like Biden and his successors.

Trump was correct about one aspect. The only winners out of 20 years of wars in the Middle East have been companies like Lockheed (share price up tenfold since 2001), Northrop Grumman (also tenfold) and General Dynamics (up sixfold).

The credibility of Western governments and domestic support for interventionism have been badly damaged, while delivering a less safe world and a triumph for brutal Islamist regimes like Iran and the Taliban.

And so very many dead — the biggest population in the reality-based community.