All the posturing over those nations that didn’t “support” the US/UK invasion of Iraq is a big lie. The unilateralism is intentional, and the criticism of the UN, France, et al, is propaganda. It is part of a larger campaign that also levelled Afghanistan. To quote
The Politics and Costs of Postmodern War in the Age of Bush By Douglas Kellner:
For several weeks following the September 11 terror attacks the global community appeared to be building an effective strategy to fight terrorism by arresting suspected members of the al Qaeda network, tracking and blocking their financial support, and developing internal and global mechanisms and policies to fight terrorism. Suddenly, however, the campaign against terrorism turned to war. On Sunday, October 7, just short of one month after the terrorist attacks on the U.S., the Bush administration unleashed a full-scale military assault on Afghanistan, purportedly to annihilate the bin Laden network and the Taliban that had been hosting it. The unilateralism of the U.S. response was striking. Indeed, leading American newspapers provided a rationale for U.S. rejection of a UN-led or NATO-led coalition against international terrorism:
In the leadup to a possible military strike, senior administration and allied officials said Mr. Rumsfeld’s approach this week made clear that the United States intends to make it as much as possible an all-American campaign.
One reason, they said, is that the United States is determined to avoid the limitations on its targets that were imposed by NATO allies during the 1999 war in Kosovo, or the hesitance to topple a leader that members of the gulf war coalition felt in 1991.
“Coalition is a bad word, because it makes people think of alliances,” said Robert Oakley, former head of the State Department’s counter-terrorism office and former ambassador to Pakistan.
A senior administration official put it more bluntly: “The fewer people you have to rely on, the fewer permissions you have to get” (New York Times, October 7, 2001).
In a September 25 speech to Congress declaring his war on terrorism, Bush announced what his administration would describe as “the Bush doctrine.” Calling the crusade against terrorism as a war between freedom and fear, between “those governed by fear” who “want to destroy our wealth and freedoms,” and those on the side of freedom, Bush asserted that “you’re either with us, or against us.” Bush also said that his administration held accountable those nations who supported terrorism, and in his October 7 speech announcing a bombing campaign against the Taliban, he claimed that the Taliban leadership had sustained the al Qaeda network and would be subject to military retaliation. Bush warned that his administration was planning to go after other targets later, and there was talk that the war against terrorism and resultant Jihad of Islam against the West could lead to World War III.
As the U.S. continued its bombing campaign through the end of 2001, threatening to expand its military actions to states like Iraq, worries began to circulate that the U.S. military intervention might create more problems than it would solve. When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld compared the war on terror to the Cold War, which lasted roughly forty years, the spectre of endless war was invoked. This is perhaps what the Bush administration and Pentagon had in mind when they first named their military intervention “operation infinite justice.” Jokes circulated through the Pentagon that an endless war on terrorism would drag them into “Operation Infinite War.” President Bush regularly referred to World War III in speeches and pledged that he would dedicate his administration to this cause.
“Endless war” would no doubt be a hard project to sell the public for the long-term and one wondered how long it would take for the costs to overwhelm the benefits. Although war throughout the new millennium would keep America’s troops fully employed and the Pentagon budget ever escalating, it would keep U.S. citizens in a state of fear from terrorist retaliation, for endless war would no doubt generate endless terror. Moreover, it was not clear how the U.S. could afford to finance an endless war against terrorism, nor how the global economy could function in a situation of perpetual fear and war.
The first weeks of U.S. bombing in Afghanistan unfolded high-tech warfare in a wildly uneven battle against Taliban and Islamic forces with ancient munitions, a first world military against a fourth world one that still used horse-back troops and revered swords. Old-fashioned B-52’s saturated large areas with explosive munitions while winged B-2 Bombers aloft for days flew from the U.S. to drop bombs directed by Global Positioning System Satellites often with mixed results. With its 172-foot wingspan, these giant flying birds deployed Joint Direct Attack Munitions (J-DAM) to fire a wide array of weapons. Heavy AC-130 gunships armed with howitzers, cannon, and machine guns blasted supposed Taliban and Al Qaeda camps and material, while land-based F-15Es bombed enemy positions, with giant fuel-air explosive “bunker bombs” used to blow up munitions dumps and possible mountain and tunnel hide-outs.
Military theoreticians described the conflict as “asymmetrical” since the Taliban had no sophisticated weaponry or modern military organization. While the U.S. military claimed that it was destroying Taliban “command and control” centers, there was in reality no command or control, at least in the sense normally defined by the contemporary military. Videos showed daily in U.S. military briefings depicted U.S. bombs hitting obscure buildings or vehicles, but it wasn’t clear that these were really military targets, or that the Taliban had a military force in the conventional sense.
Moreover, while during the first weeks of bombing, the U.S. bombing had destroyed many seemingly military targets on the ground in Afghanistan, it had also hit many civilian facilities, including Red Cross facilities and a UN supplies depot, generating many pictures of wounded or murdered Afghan children, and destroyed civilian houses. Such pictures circulated daily throughout the world, and were turning public opinion against the U.S. intervention, especially in the Islamic world where large anti-war demonstrations were a regular feature of everyday life and threats against the U.S. escalated. A flood of refugees was producing heart-breaking images of people fleeing war and facing disease and starvation. Aid agencies continued to plea for a bombing halt so that food could be delivered to refugees, yet the bombing continued unabated into a third and then a fourth and fifth weeks.
In late October 2001, there were reports of helicopter assaults on Taliban positions, Special Ops forces landing seeking Taliban and al Qaeda forces, and the beginning of a longer, more complex campaign. There was much speculation that this was the beginning of a ground war in which U.S. troops would rout the Taliban. U.S. ground forces never intervened, however, and although the Taliban regime collapsed, Osama Bin Laden and major Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders escaped. Consequently, as of early 2002, the results of the U.S. military intervention are mixed at best, with Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders still at large, millions of refugees and war victims facing starvation, and Afghanistan in chaos.
In retrospect, the Afghanistan intervention represented a new step toward postmodern war. New armed unmanned aircraft like the RQ-1 Predators were reportedly in the field, armed with Hellfire antitank missiles, although reports emerged that bad weather was limiting their effectiveness and many were crashing. An even larger and longer-range unmanned surveillance aircraft armed with missiles, the RQ-4A Global Hawk, that could bring weapons from the U.S. to the other side of the world, was also reported to be in action. Afghanistan thus emerged as yet another testing ground for new weapons and strategies where humans would be replaced by machine satellite-guided planes, taking “postmodern war” and the “revolution in military affairs” to a higher level.
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