VII. The Lessons Never Learned
- john raymond
- Jul 3
- 3 min read
The War on Terror was not merely a military failure or a policy mistake. It was an epistemic collapse. The greatest strategic mistake of the post-9/11 era was not invading Iraq or failing to capture Bin Laden. It was that America failed to understand the war it was in. Worse, it was taught not to understand it.
9/11 should have transformed American strategic thought. It should have shattered the illusion that state actors, conventional armies, and territorial conquest were the only or even the primary threats. It should have taught us that non-state actors, digital networks, and ideological contagion were just as powerful, and often more dangerous.
It should have made clear that morale, perception, and narrative were battlefield assets, and that a decentralized actor could shape the world with a few box cutters and a plane ticket.
And it should have inoculated us against the threat of Russian assets like Trump.
Instead, we learned nothing.
Or rather, we learned to love the lie.
The Bush administration taught America how to misrecognize its enemies. It trained the public to see war as a matter of bombing visible targets, punishing symbolic nations, and asserting dominance through military theater. Iraq became the stage. “Shock and awe” became the script.
But the real enemy wasn’t Saddam. It wasn’t even Al-Qaeda. The true enemy was epistemic opacity: the deliberate clouding of perception, the suppression of complexity, and the manufacturing of ignorance.
That ignorance was not an accidental byproduct of war. It was a strategy.
To fight an asymmetric enemy, America needed to understand asymmetry. But it couldn’t. Not because it was incapable, but because its leaders were complicit in using similar techniques against their own people. Manufactured fear. Disinformation. Binary moral framing.
These weren’t the enemy’s tools. They were our tools, too. And that made it impossible to honestly explain the nature of the threat, because doing so would reveal the methods of domestic control.
So we were lied to. And when the lie became inconvenient, it was replaced by another. Weapons of mass destruction. Yellowcake. Mobile biolabs. Mission accomplished. Each lie paved the way for the next, until the lie wasn’t just the justification for war. The lie was the war.
The American people were not just misled. They were reprogrammed. Complexity was replaced with slogans. Strategy was replaced with spectacle. A world that demanded moral and strategic clarity was reduced to cartoons. “Towelheads.” “Hajis.” “Axis of Evil.” All meant to erase the specific and the asymmetric in favor of the tribal and the bombable.
And this is why, years later, when Russia launched its own asymmetric war on the United States, America had no defenses. Not because it lacked military might, but because it had spent the better part of two decades dismantling its ability to think clearly. Bush didn’t just fail. He broke the machinery of discernment. And Putin walked right in.
That is why we got Trump. Not just because Russia hacked us. But because we were already primed to be hacked. A culture fed on spectacle. A people trained to mistake volume for truth. A press addicted to false balance. A politics allergic to ambiguity. All of it was fertilizer for the authoritarian weed.
We failed to learn the lessons of 9/11, Iraq, and the War on Terror. We did not see that war had changed. That power had changed. That lies were not just about war, but were themselves weapons of war.
So we lost. Not the war. But the wisdom that could have prevented the next one.
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