StudioGlyphic

The idea that states are the real issue and terrorists and their organizations are of secondary concern has been present throughout the Bush presidency. Although the 9/11 commission wrote its report in a spare, non-judgmental tone to preserve bipartisan unity, its description of the long, aimless road the administration took to the first meeting of its national security Cabinet on the issue of al-Qaida on Sept. 4, 2001, speaks volumes. By contrast, the first "principals" meeting on the issue of regime change in Iraq took place in January 2001, shortly after Bush's inauguration.

After 9/11, senior officials such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, simply refused to believe the assessment of the intelligence community that Iraq had no hand in the attack and that al-Qaida operated independently of state support. In the Pentagon's conduct of operations in Afghanistan, the overwhelming focus was on unseating the Taliban, the effective state power, while less attention was paid to pursuing al-Qaida, which had just killed nearly 3,000 people on American soil. Thus we had the debacle at Tora Bora, where our subcontractors, the militias of Afghan warlords, allowed Osama Bin Laden to escape.

Similarly, the relentless focus on Saddam Hussein has led to the removal from Afghanistan of key intelligence and special operations assets, including much of the elite commando unit Task Force 5. This, like the case of the pulled punch against Zarqawi, suggests that the Bush team continued to believe that states were the key threats in the post-9/11 world; terrorist groups could easily be swept up after the rogue nations had been dispatched. The much vaunted doctrine of pre-emption was employed against Iraq—a state that was effectively deterred from attacking the United States—while undeterrable terrorists were left to their own devices.