278 e lusive v ictories
sheltered not by Saddam Hussein but by the Islamic fundamentalist
Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Th e president saw value in a fi nal reck-
oning with Saddam—Iraq occupied a far more important geo-strategic
position than did Afghanistan—but he recognized that domestic
opinion would demand prompt retaliation against the 9/11 perpetrators.
Accordingly, the Iraq option was shelved in favor of a military campaign
to topple the Taliban, destroy al-Qaeda’s Afghan sanctuary, and elim-
inate bin Laden. Rumsfeld oversaw the planning of a military
campaign, which would be launched under the auspices of CENTCOM
commander General Tommy Franks. Th e operation, which relied on a
combination of air power, light Special Operations forces, and anti-
Taliban Afghan troops, drove the Taliban from power in a few short
weeks. Although bin Laden eluded capture, it seemed but a matter of
time before he would be brought to heel.
With things proceeding well in Afghanistan, the president began to
weigh his next move. Th e administration found itself in extraordinarily
permissive circumstances. In part, these refl ected the aftermath of the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War a decade
earlier: the United States enjoyed a position of hegemony or primacy in
international aff airs without any recent historical parallel. Still, Amer-
ican leaders had reacted tentatively to their newfound strength in the
1990s, hesitating to use force other than under the auspices of interna-
tional organizations and multilateral frameworks. Th e 9/11 attacks
swept aside all hesitation about using American power.
Equally important, the attacks revived American anxiety about
threats looming in distant places that might endanger the homeland.
Such anxiety has often primed the citizenry for military action abroad,
even absent an immediate risk to American national security. Post-9/11
popular fear manifested itself in a willingness to tolerate signifi cant
curbs on civil liberties, as evidenced in October 2001 by passage of the
USA PATRIOT Act. Gideon Rose captures the situation facing the
president and his advisors: “Primacy removed constraints coming from
the world at large, and the 9/11 attacks swept away constraints coming
from the domestic political system. Th e administration’s leading fi gures
found themselves with extraordinary freedom of action, greater in some
ways than that any of their predecessors had ever had, and the only
question was how they would use it.”