ALL THE PRESIDENTS’ WARS: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror, by Peter Bergen
Quite early in “All the Presidents’ Wars,” the journalist Peter Bergen’s chronicle of the “war on terror,” the reader is likely to conclude that the groups of American officials who have presided over the past two and a half decades of conflict in the Middle East consist of idiots, fools or knaves. The further one progresses into this damning and meticulously researched book, the more this assessment seems confirmed.
In fairness, the war on terror hasn’t been an unmitigated catastrophe. The development of advanced weaponized drones facilitated the killing of Qaeda leaders at long range and with little risk. American military commanders also eventually adopted counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq that proved very effective, even if they failed to change the ultimate outcome of that conflict. And while it is difficult to get all hopped up over something that didn’t happen, the fact is that there hasn’t been a large-scale terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11.
Still, at the cost of trillions of dollars, the lives of some 7,000 U.S. servicemen and women, as well as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and two failed war efforts — with a third in progress — one would hope for some more bright spots.
Bergen covers a tremendous amount of ground in his book. Starting with the many pre-9/11 missed warnings that Al Qaeda was planning a major attack in the United States, he swiftly moves on to the ousting of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, followed by the disastrous invasion of Iraq, on up through the rise of ISIS and the Taliban’s return to power. The book was sent to the printers soon after President Trump launched his air war against Iran this past winter.
Bergen is distinctly suited to tell this sprawling story. A veteran journalist, professor and CNN national security analyst, Bergen had his first major brush with history in early 1997 when he journeyed to Afghanistan as part of a CNN team that was interviewing an Islamic extremist then barely on anyone’s radar: Osama bin Laden. In the years since, he has written or edited a dozen or so books on the themes of terrorism and counterinsurgency.
He also is in possession of a formidable Rolodex. In the wake of fiasco, there is nothing more likely to get an American government official to blab to a journalist than the fear that one’s bureaucratic rivals are already doing so. It is testament to both Bergen’s tenacity and the sheer number of fiascoes under discussion here that his collection of interview subjects runs to over 500 people.
The result is less an edge-of-your-seat narrative — to attentive newshounds, the book’s broader canvas will be familiar — than a steady accretion of revealing anecdotes and insider details that transport the reader from surprise to a peculiar sense of wonderment at the scale of the ineptitude.
Bergen delivers a particularly scorching portrait of the way George W. Bush groped for pretexts to invade Iraq after 9/11, and then expended tremendous energy trying to minimize the political fallout as the quagmire there deepened. Also coming in for Bergen’s opprobrium: the first administration of Donald Trump. Ironically, Trump’s original 2017 team of foreign and defense policy advisers included some of the military officers who’d proved most successful in fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Trump steadily shed this talent pool, preferring to follow his “instinct” over anything that smacked of strategy, consistency or logic.
Trump often seemed most interested in optics. In one darkly hilarious anecdote, Bergen recounts how Melania Trump inexplicably wandered into the Situation Room on Oct. 27, 2019, while her husband and his advisers were watching a live feed of an operation to kill or capture Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS.
After an American K9 dog chased Baghdadi into a tunnel where he blew himself up with a suicide vest, the high-level discussion turned to how the president might best convey the news to the public. “You should talk about the dog,” Melania advised. “Everybody loves dogs.” Proof that Trump does sometimes listen to advice, he told the press about the K9, which had been slightly injured — “a beautiful dog, a talented dog.”
Far less amusing, in Bergen’s view, was Trump’s betrayal of the American-allied Afghan government. Anxious to be able to announce a withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan before the 2020 election, Trump had his representatives negotiate a peace settlement with the Taliban while excluding the democratically elected government, enabling him to announce before the election that the last American soldiers would leave the country as early as May 2021.
As Bergen archly points out, when one side in peace talks offers up a withdrawal date, the talks are no longer a negotiation but a surrender — or, in his word, a “giveaway.” While holding Trump chiefly responsible for this shameful episode, which hastened the fall of the Afghan government, Bergen also blames Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, for failing to countermand the deal. That decision turned an embarrassing retreat into a truly disgraceful and tragic one. The image of a quavering America, Bergen argues, may also have helped embolden Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine the following year.
Bergen goes easier on Barack Obama. Certainly, Obama benefited from the growing proficiency of the drone, a weapon that allowed the United States to wage war remotely, but he turned to the weapon with such frequency that it resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths and fueled growing resentment throughout the Middle East. As Obama himself reportedly noted, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was going to be a strong suit of mine.”
One might wish that “All the Presidents’ Wars” was coming out a few months from now, in time for the full magnitude of the stupidity attending Trump’s war of choice against Iran to be realized. As it is, Bergen’s last words were penned in mid-March 2026, just a few weeks into this latest American misadventure.
As has been the case so many times over the past 25 years, this folly, too, was peddled as part of the war on terror, but undertaken with even less forethought than its predecessors. Incredibly, Trump seemed to take no notice of how the weaponized drone has enabled Ukraine to keep the vastly larger Russian Army at bay for over four years. Nor did he seem to consider how this innovation might factor into a conflict with Iran, one of the world’s pioneers in the manufacturing of cheap and sophisticated drones.
A major theme of Bergen’s book is the repeated failure of American leaders to plan for “the day after” a military action is taken, but in Iran, he makes clear, Trump didn’t even plan for “the day of.” As a result, it is now all but certain that the United States is headed for another major defeat in its war on terror. For the gory details on that, though, one will have to wait for Bergen’s next book.
ALL THE PRESIDENTS’ WARS: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror | By Peter Bergen | Norton | 401 pp. | $32.99
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