William Burns held a leadership position in the U.S. Department of State when terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. In an article in politico.com (March 13, 2019), he speaks of that time when the country, reeling from shock, was deciding on responses to the attacks.
The title of the article is “How we tried to slow the rush to war in Iraq and why the lessons from my time in the Bush administration are relevant today.” It speaks of Burns’ attempts to come to terms with that time and the wrong decisions made.
Even as Burns watched from his office window at the plumes of smoke from the attacked Pentagon, he wrote in a memo: “We could shape a strategy that would not only hit back hard against terrorists and any states who continued to harbor them, but also lay out an affirmative agenda that might eventually help reduce the hopelessness and anger on which extremists preyed.”
In hindsight, we chose to hit back hard but tended to ignore the need to also craft a positive policy to reduce the factors that led to the attacks.
Burns writes: “In the 18 months that followed—that rare hinge point in history between the trauma of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in early 2003—we took a different and ultimately disastrous course. This is a story of the road not taken, of the initial plan of coercive diplomacy in Iraq, which turned out to be long on coercion and short on diplomacy.”
Burns writes of how the campaign in Afghanistan morphed into a tragic focus on Iraq and became quicksand from which we are still trying to free ourselves.
In a memo from the time before the decision to invade Iraq, Burns wrote: “we needed ‘to show that we will finish the job [and] restore order, not just move on to the next Moslem state.’”
We did not finish the job in Afghanistan. While the work was unfinished there (and remains to this day) we moved on to Iraq, then Syria, and now Iran.
The hardliners won after 9/11, and they are continuing to win today in our policies on Iran. “The Iraq invasion was the original sin,” Burns writes. Unfortunately, we are still following the path begun then.