The Audacity of Hope

headline “Nous sommes tous Américains” (“We are all Americans”). In Cairo, local
mosques offered prayers of sympathy. For the first time since its founding in 1949,
NATO invoked Article 5 of its charter, agreeing that the armed attack on one of its
members “shall be considered an attack against them all.” With justice at our backs and
the world by our side, we drove the Taliban government out of Kabul in just over a
month; Al Qaeda operatives fled or were captured or killed.
It was a good start by the Administration, I thought—steady, measured, and
accomplished with minimal casualties (only later would we discover the degree to
which our failure to put sufficient military pressure on Al Qaeda forces at Tora Bora
may have led to bin Laden’s escape). And so, along with the rest of the world, I waited
with anticipation for what I assumed would follow: the enunciation of a U.S. foreign
policy for the twenty-first century, one that would not only adapt our military planning,
intelligence operations, and homeland defenses to the threat of terrorist networks but
build a new international consensus around the challenges of transnational threats.
This new blueprint never arrived. Instead what we got was an assortment of outdated
policies from eras gone by, dusted off, slapped together, and with new labels affixed.
Reagan’s “Evil Empire” was now “the Axis of Evil.” Theodore Roosevelt’s version of
the Monroe Doctrine—the notion that we could preemptively remove governments not
to our liking—was now the Bush Doctrine, only extended beyond the Western
Hemisphere to span the globe. Manifest destiny was back in fashion; all that was
needed, according to Bush, was American firepower, American resolve, and a “coalition
of the willing.”
Perhaps worst of all, the Bush Administration resuscitated a brand of politics not seen
since the end of the Cold War. As the ouster of Saddam Hussein became the test case
for Bush’s doctrine of preventive war, those who questioned the Administration’s
rationale for invasion were accused of being “soft on terrorism” or “un-American.”
Instead of an honest accounting of this military campaign’s pros and cons, the
Administration initiated a public relations offensive: shading intelligence reports to
support its case, grossly understating both the costs and the manpower requirements of
military action, raising the specter of mushroom clouds.
The PR strategy worked; by the fall of 2002, a majority of Americans were convinced
that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and at least 66 percent
believed (falsely) that the Iraqi leader had been personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Support for an invasion of Iraq—and Bush’s approval rating—hovered around 60
percent. With an eye on the midterm elections, Republicans stepped up the attacks and
pushed for a vote authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein. And on October
11, 2002, twenty-eight of the Senate’s fifty Democrats joined all but one Republican in
handing to Bush the power he wanted.
I was disappointed in that vote, although sympathetic to the pressures Democrats were
under. I had felt some of those same pressures myself. By the fall of 2002, I had already
decided to run for the U.S. Senate and knew that possible war with Iraq would loom
large in any campaign. When a group of Chicago activists asked if I would speak at a
large antiwar rally planned for October, a number of my friends warned me against
taking so public a position on such a volatile issue. Not only was the idea of an invasion
increasingly popular, but on the merits I didn’t consider the case against war to be cut-