Chapter One: The War on Terror and the Manufacturing of Stupidity
- john raymond
- Jul 3
- 4 min read
How Bush Made Us Blind and Putin Used That Blindness to Gift Us Trump
Section I: Opening Provocation — Why Didn’t We Get Smarter?
How does a global superpower fight a decades-long war against asymmetric enemies—and emerge dumber?
It’s a haunting question. One that seems, at first, almost ill-posed. After all, the United States poured trillions into defense, intelligence, and warfighting after 9/11. Entire agencies were reshaped, new ones created, and vast new doctrines were drafted. America was, by any measure, the most powerful and data-rich actor in the world. Surely twenty years of conflict would yield better understanding—better strategy, better language, better public awareness of the asymmetric realities we now live in.
And yet it didn’t. Our national discourse did not mature. Our institutions did not adapt. The American public did not become more literate in the strategies of modern war. Quite the opposite. We became dumber, strategically speaking—less able to discern truth from propaganda, less able to understand our enemies, and less equipped to anticipate the shape of the wars to come.
The question, then, is not why did we fail to learn? The proper question is: Who had the incentive for us to remain ignorant? Who wanted us not to learn?
Because the War on Terror, far from being a learning experience, was never intended to be one. It was not structured to educate the public about asymmetric threats. It was structured to manage them. The American people were not treated as strategic partners in a new age of distributed threats and ideological combat. They were treated as an audience—one to be frightened, manipulated, and steered.
In this light, our strategic blindness was not a failure. It was the product of design. It was manufactured.
The Expected Arc vs. The Real Arc
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, America stood at a rare inflection point. We had just been attacked by non-state actors using asymmetric tools: ideological networks, plane hijackings, soft power recruitment, propaganda. We were vulnerable in ways conventional wars had not revealed. The hope—at least among some strategists—was that we would learn from this. That we would come to understand:
The power of small actors to destabilize empires.
The shift from territorial conquest to ideological disruption.
The new role of open societies as targets because of their openness.
The increasing use of perception, fear, and narrative as tools of battle.
Instead, we learned almost nothing. We did not become asymmetric thinkers. We did not even learn to ask the right questions. Instead, we were taught obedience. Fear. Vengeance. We were given a cartoon vision of war: good versus evil, us versus them, democracy versus terror. And into that cartoon we poured our money, our hopes, and the lives of our soldiers.
Why? Because education was never the goal. Consent was. The Bush administration’s strategic mission was to generate consent for actions that could not stand up to scrutiny. They used asymmetric methods not just against foreign enemies, but against the American public. They used the tools of the enemy—disinformation, emotional manipulation, fear—to justify their own wars.
False intelligence, manufactured threats, repetition of lies, and a co-opted press apparatus all served to keep Americans not informed, but confused. Not prepared, but obedient. Not empowered, but compliant.
Stupidity by Design
Let us be clear: the American people didn't have remain stupid. But strategic ignorance was induced. Not only through lies, but through repetition, simplification, and fear.
The Bush administration cultivated this ignorance in highly intentional ways:
False binaries: framing everything as a battle between good and evil.
Symbolism over clarity: duct tape alerts, flag pins, color-coded threats.
Weaponized patriotism: dissent was treason, skepticism was disloyalty.
All of these were asymmetric methods—just like the ones al-Qaeda used, only inverted and internalized. Bush didn’t want to explain asymmetric war to the public, because he was using it on the public.
Even his rhetoric was asymmetric. The use of religion, the moral absolutism, the “Axis of Evil” construction—all these created artificial “sides” that mirrored conventional conflict, despite fighting unconventional enemies. In doing so, Bush obscured reality. (And this is to say nothing of the racism shorthand he and other employed.)
And from that obscurity, a more dangerous future emerged.
From Bush to Putin to Trump
Putin was watching. He watched how easily American minds could be captured. How quickly a democracy could be manipulated with the tools of asymmetric war. He learned that Western populations are vulnerable not through their borders—but through their misplaced trust. He learned that you don’t need to defeat an army to win a country. You just have to make it stop thinking.
Trump didn’t just inherit that lesson. He expanded it further. Everything Bush used—Trump, with Putin's help, did better. Slogans. Narratives. Simplifications. Attacks on dissent. Demonization of critics. False enemies. Weaponized information.
But Trump had something even more powerful than Bush: a public already trained not to think. A press already softened by decades of “access” journalism. An elite that had come to value stability over scrutiny. An electorate primed to believe in cartoons.
Why the Course Begins Here
This is where we must begin—because you cannot understand Trump, or Putin, or asymmetric warfare if you still believe the War on Terror was about education. It wasn’t. It was about manipulation. It was about control. It was about warping the American mind.
And the tools that did it were not foreign. They were homegrown.
That is why this course does not start with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Or China’s cyber-theater. Or Trump’s second campaign. It begins here: with the war that made us stupid. The war that rewired how we think about enemies. The war that replaced questions with fear, and learning with obedience.
If we are to be strategists in this world, we must begin by unlearning the lies of that one.
Next up: Section II: The Lamppost Problem — Fighting Where You Can, Not Where You Should.
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