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What We Lost

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« Reply #15 on: July 20, 2009, 11:49:30 pm »

The decision of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to press ahead with Iran's secret nuclear-weapons program confronted the U.S. with an agonizing strategic dilemma. Iran made no secret of the fact that it was supplying Hizballah with the missiles that rained down on Israel in the summer of 2006. Iran was also hell-bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Yet the essentially unilateral action that had been used against Iraq in 2003 was no longer possible against Iran. A U.S. Administration that had once confidently bypassed the U.N. found it had no option but to turn to the U.N. Security Council in the hope that international pressure could disarm Hizballah and keep Iran from going nuclear. The colossus that once bestrode the globe seemed to be stuck in the Middle Eastern sands--and unable to prevent the seemingly inevitable confrontation between Iran and Israel.
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« Reply #16 on: July 20, 2009, 11:50:13 pm »

III ENEMIES WITHIN

In the Bush Administration's final years, its reputation touched bottom. Many Americans complained that they had the wrong President. For a time, Bush's approval ratings sank below Richard Nixon's and Jimmy Carter's worst.

Yet history has been a kinder judge of Bush's presidency. Although many analysts had predicted that terrorists would strike again on U.S. soil within five years, there was no sequel to 9/11 on Bush's watch. It was just his bad luck that success in counterterrorism grabbed few headlines, since plots stifled at conception are nonevents in news terms. Moreover, the key point of his national-security strategy turned out to be correct. It was just that pre-emption had been used against Iraq when it should have been saved for Iran.

   
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« Reply #17 on: July 20, 2009, 11:51:23 pm »

(6 of 10)

Would another President have done better? That was the question posed by Christopher Hitchens in his best-selling biography Bush: A Study in Greatness, published in 2011, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Hitchens argued convincingly that neither Al Gore nor John Kerry would have been more successful than Bush in defusing the jihadist threat. "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they're a nuisance," Kerry said in an interview in 2004, drawing a parallel with the containment of prostitution, illegal gambling and organized crime. But Islamist terrorism was a much more imminent threat than climate change (Gore's bugaboo) and a much more serious threat than illegal gambling. In the wake of 9/11, defeating the terrorists had to be America's No. 1 priority. Bush understood this. Had it not been for the Iraq debacle, he would be remembered as the Avenger of 9/11.
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« Reply #18 on: July 20, 2009, 11:51:45 pm »

Yet not even Bush's defenders could explain away the fatal flaw in the U.S.'s post-9/11 strategy. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, less than five months after the terrorists had struck, Bush directed his fire against what he called an "axis of evil"--Iran, Iraq and North Korea--which he accused of sponsoring terrorism and "seeking weapons of mass destruction." Yet not one of those countries had been directly implicated in the 9/11 attacks.

In fact, nearly all the terrorists originated in countries that were closely allied or at least friendly with the U.S. Fifteen of the 19 identified hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Lebanon, and the last was from Egypt. Moreover, they had drawn up their murderous plans not in the Middle East but in Europe and the U.S. itself--right at the heart of Western democracies. All the terrorists had been in the U.S. for months before 9/11, entering the country legally, traveling widely and taking flying lessons. They had obtained driver's licenses, rented apartments, opened bank accounts, made airline reservations online and even got speeding tickets.
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« Reply #19 on: July 20, 2009, 11:52:03 pm »

Of course, much was done after 9/11--or, at least, much money was spent--to improve America's homeland security. Airline passengers said goodbye to their nail scissors. After 2006 they said goodbye to their hair gel. They got used to having their luggage searched and their bodies frisked. Western intelligence agencies stepped up their efforts to monitor and penetrate terrorist networks. And there were some major successes. In June 2006 Canadian police arrested suspected terrorists who had about 3 tons of ammonium nitrate in their possession. Two months later, British authorities were able to announce the disruption of a plot to blow up multiple transatlantic flights--which would have caused, in the words of the deputy commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."
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« Reply #20 on: July 20, 2009, 11:52:39 pm »

(7 of 10)

Yet the terrorists also had their bloody successes, in Madrid in March 2004 and London in July 2005. What was particularly disturbing was the social background of those responsible for the atrocities--the successful and the foiled alike. Some of those responsible for bombing the London Underground, for example, were British born. Shehzad Tanweer grew up in Leeds and was a keen cricketer. His father owned a fish-and-chips shop. And it was not only the sons of prosperous immigrants who were being attracted to terrorism. Two of those arrested for their suspected role in the Heathrow bomb plot were Muslim converts. One of them was the son of a deceased Conservative Party employee with an impeccably British double-barreled surname, Stewart-Whyte.
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« Reply #21 on: July 20, 2009, 11:53:05 pm »

The U.S. did not have an effective strategy for dealing with the penetration of Western Europe by radical Islamism. On the contrary, differences over policy in the Middle East had succeeded in driving a wedge between the U.S. and the most important continental European countries, Germany and France. British Prime Minister Tony Blair was unwavering in his support of U.S. strategy, but the British public came to regard Blair as an American poodle, and his Conservative successor David Cameron was far cooler toward Washington.

It was one of the great ironies of the war on terrorism that just five years after 9/11, many counterterrorism experts were convinced that the most likely source of another big attack on the U.S. was not the axis of evil but conceivably America's closest ally, Britain.
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« Reply #22 on: July 20, 2009, 11:53:37 pm »

IV THE GREAT ASIAN DEPRESSION

Had another terrorist attack--or an Iran-Israel war--happened sooner, it might have made the difference in the 2008 presidential election. After all, a large part of John McCain's appeal as a presidential candidate was his--and his family's--distinguished record of military service. Many Republicans bitterly regretted that McCain had not been their candidate eight years before. "He might have been the greatest war leader we never had," his campaign manager said on Nov. 3, 2008, after McCain conceded defeat to Mark Warner, the former Governor of Virginia.

The Democratic candidate owed his victory, above all, to the return of the economy to the top of the political agenda. To most Americans, the key issue in 2008 was--as it had been when another Southern Democrat won the presidency 16 years previously--"the economy, stupid." Some experts argued that the economy had never stopped mattering. Bush won in 2000 because the dotcom bubble burst that year. He won in 2004 because his tax cuts and the easy-money policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had generated a sustained economic recovery. Unfortunately for the Republicans, that recovery could not last forever.
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« Reply #23 on: July 20, 2009, 11:54:13 pm »

The economic slowdown of late 2006 was part of a wider crisis of globalization, as energy prices soared and the drive toward free trade lost momentum. With oil stuck above $70 per bbl. and the Doha round of trade negotiations defunct, growth was bound to slacken. But what made matters unexpectedly worse was miscalculations by the world's central bankers.
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« Reply #24 on: July 20, 2009, 11:55:33 pm »

(8 of 10)

Greenspan's successor at the Fed, the academic economist Ben Bernanke, was in a quandary. Should he worry about growth or inflation? Inflation was creeping up, and yet the combination of higher interest rates and higher fuel prices threatened to depress consumption. Bernanke's apparent indecision unnerved the financial markets. By the time the slide in real estate prices signaled the onset of a full-blown recession, the Fed was badly behind the curve.
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« Reply #25 on: July 20, 2009, 11:55:52 pm »

That the U.S. economy should slow was perhaps inevitable. In 2005 there were just 10.7 million Americans age 80 and older. By 2030 there were nearly 18 million--1 out of every 20 people. Continued advances in medical science meant that more and more people were living as long as a century--good news for the likes of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who celebrated his 100th birthday in 2031. But the rising proportion of the population in retirement imposed an ever higher tax burden on those still working. It also placed a sustained strain on the U.S. balance of payments, as the country consistently imported more than it exported, financing the difference by selling securities to foreigners.

In the first decade of the 21st century, that arrangement worked well. The booming Chinese economy seemed ready to absorb any amount of U.S. debt, provided that America kept its market open to China's exports. High savings rates and low wages in China complemented the high indebtedness and high living standards enjoyed by Florida's elderly.
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« Reply #26 on: July 20, 2009, 11:56:32 pm »

However, that Sino-American interdependence left the U.S. vulnerable to a crisis in China. When it came, the Chinese stock-market crash sent a shock wave through the entire Asian economy. Some blamed the powerful new Middle Eastern Shari'a-law banks, which had terminated their zero-interest-rate facilities for Shanghai hedge funds. Others saw the sinister hand of the Russian-controlled OGEC (Organization of Gas Exporting Countries), which had stunned energy importers in Asia by trebling natural gas prices. Either way, the impact was disastrous. Output collapsed. Unemployment soared. The Chinese banking system, which had never been entirely free of corruption, imploded.

A few hard-nosed foreign policy realists insisted that China's collapse was to the U.S.'s advantage. Some veteran cold warriors looked forward to the demise of the last communist regime in the world. To most Chinese, however, free elections were just a way for the party to pass the buck for its economic failure. To most Americans, the China crisis was just an addition to their existing economic woes, as Chinese investors frantically unloaded their U.S. assets.
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« Reply #27 on: July 20, 2009, 11:57:02 pm »

V THE NEXT AMERICAN CENTURY

In 1941 the publisher of this magazine called on readers to help make the postwar era "the first great American Century." There had certainly been an American Half-Century, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the post--cold war phase of hyperpower could not last forever. In the years after 9/11, the U.S.--though still the world's dominant nation--faced multiple and growing challenges.
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« Reply #28 on: July 20, 2009, 11:57:47 pm »

(9 of 10)

They included not just the continued activity of the Islamic terrorist network. In the turbulent years after 9/11, new powers arose to challenge American might. Iran--thanks to raw demography, the reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq and advances in its nuclear program--emerged as the dominant power in the Middle East. Despite the trauma of financial crisis and depression, China became the new hegemon of East Asia. And Russia used its oil riches and nuclear leverage to restore its dominance over Eastern Europe, rolling back the frontier of the European Union. Although all adopted the outward forms of democracy, none of those three powers had much interest in advancing individual liberty and the rule of law, without which elections are a sham. All three had an interest in weakening America.
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« Reply #29 on: July 20, 2009, 11:58:08 pm »

With the rise of these rivals came one benefit: as time passed, the once hated Great Satan was no longer everybody's favorite whipping boy. Since the U.S. presence in the Middle East had wound down after 2008, it was no longer obvious why Islamist terrorists would expend their energies attacking American cities. That was why, by the 30th anniversary of 9/11, many younger Americans looked back on that event as a strange aberration.

Yet reports of America's decline proved to be premature. In 2012 President Warner's successor surprised the foes of the U.S. with a bold reinvention of America. The reform of Medicare and Social Security, combined with a radical overhaul of the federal tax system, had quite dramatic consequences. Growth surged. So did productivity.
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