At the time, analysts who questioned the decision by the US and its allies, including the UK, to go so readily to war were ignored. Ten years later, a Franco-British coalition backed by the US and Italy terminated the Gaddafi regime in Libya.
Though Western leaders were quick to claim victory in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, all three wars would eventually go badly wrong.
The 20-year conflict in Afghanistan ended with Western forces leaving in disarray. In Iraq, a violent insurgency combined with deep interconfessional conflict to result in a failing country. Even in Libya, what was expected to be a peaceful transition to an oil and gas-rich country ended in a failed state acting as a conduit for radical Islamist paramilitaries and their weapons down through the Sahara to the Sahel region.
Three wars and three failures, all in barely a decade. Yet more was to follow, with 2014 seeing the sudden spread of the ISIS movement, which took over much of Syria and northern Iraq in a matter of weeks.
This time around, a powerful US-led military coalition responded with an intense air war against the insurgents, rigorously avoiding ground engagements. Over the next four years, tens of thousands of targets were destroyed and at least 60,000 people killed, including thousands of civilians.
ISIS lost almost all the territory it had taken over but it still exists and has plenty of associates in the Sahel.
The group also still stages attacks in Iraq and Syria, where around 3,500 US troops are still stationed, backed up by many hundreds of civilian contractors, both local and international. The Pentagon has reported that, since the start of Israel's war on Gaza 15 months ago, these US soldiers have been attacked more than 200 times by an ISIS resurgent.
What makes the Afghanistan and Iraq failures so distinctive is that although Western leaders seemed sure of success in both cases, the signs were already there of substantial problems ahead. At the time of Bush's State of the Union speech in January 2002, all seemed to be going very well in Afghanistan, yet within a month US troops were meeting far more determined resistance than they had expected.
Operation Anaconda, for example, was part of an American military campaign to limit al-Qaida forces leaving Afghanistan for northern Pakistan. Rather than a straightforward control of the exit routes, it turned into a bitter and costly conflict that killed or wounded many US soldiers and scores of al-Qaida and Taliban fighters, with Washington having to rush in reinforcements and helicopters from warships out in the Indian Ocean.
It was the same with Iraq. The Hussein statue in Baghdad Square was toppled three weeks into the war and Bush gave his "mission accomplished" speech three weeks after that.
Yet attacks on US supply lines had already started weeks earlier, and even on the day that Bush appeared at the podium in front of the White House, British troops were engaged in bitter fighting.
Another way was possible
Looking back now, we can see clearly the consequences of almost 25 years of war.
Two decades of fighting in Afghanistan culminated in a disastrous defeat for the US and an impoverished country, where women are in a worse position than before the US invasion.
In Iraq, the war lasted eight years, up until 2011, but the country was again reduced to violence three years later, when the rapid rise of ISIS was followed by the US-led air war.
Even that has not been the end, with the US Air Force still repeatedly bombing resurgent ISIS units in Iraq and Syria as a multiplicity of Islamist paramilitary movements is active right across the Sahel region of Africa.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a handful of analysts argued that the response should be to treat the massacres as examples of appalling transnational criminality and bring the leaders of the attacks to justice – likely at an international tribunal under UN auspices – however long it took.
That argument got nowhere at the time, having been dismissed as irrelevant by Western governments. Now, it is possible to argue the case with audiences in military colleges and get a thoughtful hearing.
The insecurity trap
What explains these grievous failures?
There are two elements to consider. One is the timing of the 9/11 attacks. They were obviously traumatic for the US political system, but doubly so as Bush had come to power earlier that year with the much-vaunted Project for the New American Century in mind. For him and his allies, such a blatant attack on the US position as the world leader meant anything less than war was unthinkable.
That may account for Afghanistan but far less so for Iraq or the wars that have continued for more than two decades.
This is where the second element comes in; the Insecurity Trap, on which I have recently written a book of the same name. This can be expressed neatly in the activist comment:
"If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
States with substantial armed forces and especially those with sizeable military industries end up with military-industrial complexes that need arms races, and even wars, to thrive.
The complexes are closely integrated systems with considerable political power and influence – made up of the military, civil servants, politicians, corporations, security and intelligence outfits, think tanks, universities and lobbyists – and are especially prominent in the US, the UK, Russia, China, India, Germany and France.
They focus on state-centred security and see challenges primarily in terms of threats that must be met with firm control. Their approach tends to be one of 'liddism' – keeping the lid on a problem rather than probing the underlying cause.
Military-industrial complexes are profitable endeavours, they have a propensity to waste money on badly managed projects and systems, and are prone to corruption, especially when it comes to the international arms trade.
The whole military system also has two key advantages to help it avoid being challenged. The first is that it is designed with high levels of secrecy built in, which makes informed discussion difficult, if not impossible. The second is that any criticism of the system is easily dismissed as unpatriotic, if not defeatist.
Despite all their failures, military-industrial complexes seem to go on regardless. Russia expected to take control of the Kyiv government within two weeks of its invasion but will shortly enter the third year of a grinding war.
Similarly, Israel intends to crush Hamas and Hezbollah and exert rigorous and violent control over the Palestinians in the West Bank. In doing so, it is simply unable to understand that the result will be many hundreds of thousands – at least two generations – of angry and radicalised young Palestinians determined to respond to what has been done to them and especially their families.
Yet the greatest challenge is the insecurity trap itself. The current system is chronically incapable of meeting the global challenges ahead – a deeply divided world facing severe environmental limits to growth and grotesque wealth inequalities.
These problems simply cannot be controlled by traditional military responses, so the insecurity trap must be robustly challenged. That is a hugely important task for 2025 and beyond.
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