Peter Bergen’s book reviews 25 years of US wars and highlights Washington’s strategic failures

Veteran US journalist and national security expert Peter Bergen examines the successes and failures of American presidents in his book “The Wars of the Presidents: 25 Years of the American War on Terror.” He argues that Washington became highly effective at finding and eliminating enemies, but repeatedly struggled to define the political outcome that military power was supposed to achieve.

Bergen notes that since the September 11 attacks, the US has prevented another foreign-directed attack on a similar scale, dismantled al-Qaeda’s original safe haven, killed Osama bin Laden and destroyed ISIS’s territorial caliphate. At the same time, he criticizes the invasion of Iraq, the use of torture, the spending of trillions of dollars and the expansion of presidential war powers, as well as the eventual return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan.

The book describes the Iraq War as George W. Bush’s “biggest mistake,” arguing that Saddam Hussein had no operational alliance with al-Qaeda and that the disbanding of the Iraqi army and banning of the Baath Party helped create conditions that fueled the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS.

Bergen also examines Barack Obama’s presidency, Donald Trump’s campaign against ISIS and the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as the Doha agreement that paved the way for the Taliban’s return. He further discusses Joe Biden’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal and Trump’s second-term war with Iran, warning about the absence of clear exit strategies and stressing that “destruction is an activity, not a strategy.”