AN AMERICAN EMPIRE? ★^1113Bush gave the war in Afghanistan the name “Enduring Freedom.” By
the end of the year, the combination of American bombing and ground com-
bat by the Northern Alliance (Afghans who had been fighting the Taliban for
years) had driven the regime from power. A new government, friendly to and
dependent on the United States, took its place. It repealed Taliban laws deny-
ing women the right to attend school and banning movies, music, and other
expressions of Western culture but found it difficult to establish full control
over the country. U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan at least into 2017,
making the war the longest in American history.
The “Axis of Evil”
Like the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, September 11 not only
plunged the United States into war but also transformed American foreign pol-
icy, inspiring a determination to reshape the world in terms of American ideals
and interests. To facilitate further military action in the Middle East, the United
States established military bases in Central Asia, including former republics of
the Soviet Union like Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Such an action
would have been inconceivable before the end of the Cold War.
The toppling of the Taliban, Bush repeatedly insisted, marked only the
beginning of the war on terrorism. In his State of the Union address of Janu-
ary 2002, the president accused Iraq, Iran, and North Korea of harboring ter-
rorists and developing “weapons of mass destruction”—nuclear, chemical, and
biological— that posed a potential threat to the United States. He called the
three countries an “axis of evil,” even though no evidence connected them with
the attacks of September 11 and they had never cooperated with one another
(Iraq and Iran, in fact, had fought a long and bloody war in the 1980s).
AN AMERICAN EMPIRE?
The “axis of evil” speech and National Security Strategy sent shock waves
around the world. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, a wave of sym-
pathy for the United States had swept across the globe. Most of the world sup-
ported the war in Afghanistan as a legitimate response to the terrorist attacks.
By late 2002, however, many persons overseas feared that the United States was
claiming the right to act as a world policeman in violation of international law.
Critics, including leaders of close American allies, wondered whether divid-
ing the world into friends and enemies of freedom ran the danger of repeat-
ing some of the mistakes of the Cold War. Anti- Americanism in the Middle
East, they argued, reached far beyond bin Laden’s organization and stemmed
not simply from dislike of American freedom but, rightly or wrongly, from
How did the war in Iraq unfold in the wake of 9/11?