Bush's Megalomania

It has been pointed out many times that you can't have a war against a concept. You war against an entity: a person, an organization, a political state. But the US has taken on a war against a concept. Sometimes presented as "evil" and sometimes as "terrorism". As many have pointed out you can't win a war against a concept. Here is an article by Mark Danner that exposes the ugly details of Bush's War on Terrorism:

President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that “our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

Astonishing words from a world leader — declaring that he would “rid the world of evil.” Just in case anyone thought they might have misheard the sweep of the President’s ambition, his National Security Strategy, issued a few months later, was careful to specify that “the enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism — premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.”

Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on “terrorism” — a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target — was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, “Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power.”
Six and a half years later, evil is still with us and so is terrorism.

How has this "war" gone for the US? Why is "victory" so far away? How did Bin Laden achieve his successes? Danner makes this point:

A small coven of America’s enemies, using the strategy of provocation so familiar in guerrilla warfare, had launched in spectacular fashion on that bright September morning a plan to use the superpower’s strength against itself. To use a different metaphor, they were trying to make good on Archimedes’ celebrated boast: having found the perfect lever and place to stand, they proposed to move the Earth. To an extent I am sure even they did not anticipate, in their choice of opponent — an evangelical, redemptive regime scornful of history and determined to remake the fallen world — lay the seeds of their success.

As for the details of what "successes" this "war" by the US has wrought. Here is the simple picture drawn by Danner:

To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the “mixed” neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.

And what has been achieved by the US in Iraq?

That the Iraq War is “fueling the spread of the jidahist movement,” as the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate put it, has been a truism of intelligence reporting from the war’s beginning; indeed, from before it began. “[T]he Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating support for the global jihadist movement” — this point from the 2006 NIE is truly an example of a “chronicle of a war foretold” (to borrow from Garcia Marquez). In fact, that NIE cites the “Iraq jihad” as the second of four factors “fueling the jihadist movement,” along with “entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness”; “the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations”; and “pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims.”