This reorientation was part of Obama's reset of America's relations with the world. Bush, having gradually expanded his definition of the war to include all Islamic "extremists," had condemned the United States to a kind of permanent war, one that Americans had to fight all but alone because no one else agreed on such a broadly defined enemy. (Hezbollah and Hamas, for example, arguably had legitimate political aims that al-Qaida did not, which is one reason they distanced themselves from bin Laden.) In Obama's view, only by focusing narrowly on true transnational terrorism, and winning back all of the natural allies that the United States had lost over the previous decade, could he achieve America's goal of uniting the world around the goal of extinguishing al-Qaida.
Bush had also portrayed al-Qaida and terrorism in general as a millennial threat; he and his top aides especially liked to compare the conflict to the Cold War. "This is the great ideological struggle of the 21st century--and it is the calling of our generation," Bush said in 2006, in a dramatic rendezvous-with-destiny speech timed to the fifth anniversary of 9/11. "Freedom is once again contending with the forces of darkness and tyranny"--the terrorists who would seek to impose what he called a "totalitarian Islamic empire."
But the comparisons to the Cold War or the fight against fascism in the 1940s were silly. Al-Qaida, even in its best days, never represented anything like the ideological threat from the Soviet Union or the hegemonic threat of Hitler's Germany. As Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison wrote in a little-noted article in The Atlantic in September 2004, on the eve of 9/11, al-Qaida was a small, fractious group whose members could not even agree among themselves what its goal was. Quoting a remarkable series of letters he found on Ayman al-Zawahiri's old computer in Afghanistan, Cullison wrote that jihadis who were members of Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad--the biggest component of al-Qaida--still wanted to make Egypt the main enemy. They wanted to focus on the jihadis' old adversary, the "near enemy" of the repressive Arab regimes, rather than endorse bin Laden's rather grandiose effort to take on the "far enemy," the United States.
By invading Iraq, the Bush administration resolved the debate for al-Qaida, turning America into the "near enemy." Years of relief followed for al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan as Bush dealt with the Iraqi insurgents, lumping them together with the "terrorists" of 9/11 as though one static group of global bad guys existed whom Americans would be fighting at home if they weren't in Iraq. The 43rd president, in effect, concocted a new war in the middle of a half-finished one, sapping our military, our credibility, our economy, our morale, and our moral standing; alienating much of the world; and diverting our attention from destroying the chief culprit of 9/11.
