A rchive Date
[ 05-04-2006 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=040506C
"War," What is it Good For?
By Gregory Scoblete: 05 Apr 2006
America is at war. - George W. Bush, National Security Strategy, 2006.
President Bush's use of the word "war" to describe the attacks of September 11th and America's response has always been problematic. A wide range of critics, including conservatives, complained early on that the formulation was unduly vague and misapplied. Wars are waged against nation states and armies, they argued, not techniques and inchoate ideological movements.
Some scholars, such as Francis Fukuyama, see the President's use of martial rhetoric as his original sin, responsible for a series of misjudgments culminating in an unnecessary invasion of Iraq. Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed in a speech last week at the liberal Center for American Progress that Bush's militaristic description was a "fundamentally misleading definition of reality," a "Manichean polarization" that has contributed to the "emergence of a fear-driven nation, a self-isolating nation."
Let's ignore for a moment the nauseating irony that it was Brzezinski perhaps more than any other U.S. policy maker who played the most direct role in fomenting international jihadism (to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan) and who, in 1998, naively dismissed the phenomenon as so many "stirred up Muslims" -- was Bush's characterization of 9/11 and the threat from radical Islam "fundamentally misleading?"
It's a question fraught with more than mere semantic problems. Our present approach of treating terrorism as a war informs a host of issues -- the legal status of detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, interrogation policy, the scope of executive authority to order "warrantless wiretaps" -- that are still contentious and unresolved five years since the 9/11 attacks. Any change in how the U.S frames the threat has serious implications for a host of current and future policies. If Brzezinski's speech and Fukuyama's "After Neoconservatism" are any indication, another groundswell is building against the President's preferred formulation.
Give it a Name
On February 26, 1993 a bomb detonated in an underground parking garage of Tower One of the World Trade Center. Six people died and over 1,000 were injured. The following day, in his weekly radio address President Clinton (who had been in office for a little over a month) devoted three paragraphs to the attacks, promising that the full brunt of "federal law enforcement" would be brought to bear on the "investigation." Several pro-forma condolences later, he was discussing "economic security."
To Ramzi Yousef the then-President's remarks must have been curious, if not downright absurd. His goal was not to carve out a hole in a parking garage, but to topple Tower One into Tower Two, leveling both. In a single stroke this "criminal" would have killed roughly 35,000 people working in the buildings and likely thousands of visitors and nearby spectators. In the minds of Yousef and his accomplices, they were not committing a mere crime, they were launching a military strike against an enemy nation.
Throughout the 1990s the United States, its personnel, allies and interests were subjected to a string of military attacks - some successful, others not. Our reaction to those assaults is illuminating. Since the Clinton administration refused to frame the threat of terrorism in military terms but rather as a criminal matter, there were self-imposed restraints on America's response. We now know, thanks to former C.I.A. official (and vociferous Bush critic) Michael Scheuer, that those limits almost certainly cost American lives.
Writing in the Atlantic Monthly under the pseudonym "Anonymous" Scheuer noted that the "CIA's Bin Laden unit repeatedly and formally requested assistance from the U.S. military to help plan operations against Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. We needed and asked for special operations officers. After pressing for eighteen months, we were sent two non-special operations individuals who had experience only on Iran. The Bin Laden unit received no support from senior Agency officials vis-à-vis the U.S. military."
And later:
"The CIA officers working Bin Laden at Headquarters and in the field gave the U.S. government about ten chances to capture Bin Laden or kill him with military means. In all instances, the decision was made that the 'intelligence was not good enough.' This assertion cannot be debated publicly without compromising sources and methods. What can be said, however, is that in all these cases there was more concern expressed by senior bureaucrats and policymakers about how international opinion would react to a U.S. action than there was concern about what might happen to Americans if they failed to act. Indeed, on one occasion these senior leaders decided it was more important to avoid hitting a structure near Bin Laden's location with shrapnel, than it was to protect Americans."
Former Clinton Administration officials, Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin recount in their book, The Age of Sacred Terror, that a submarine patrolling the Persian Gulf was twice put on notice to ready a cruise missile assault against bin Laden. The missiles were readied to the point were the gyroscopes were oscillating in final preparation for launch, but in both cases the launches were scuttled. Those gyroscopes were a fitting metaphor for the U.S. response to Islamic terrorism: we spun our wheels indecisively, more worried about the nebulous concept of "hearts and minds" than about safeguarding American lives.
It was only until the awful morning of September 11th, 2001 that America's perception of the threat was fundamentally transformed. Terrorists intent on battlefield-scale casualties and destruction could not rationally be described -- let alone treated -- as criminals. They were warriors. The argument that prevailed in the 1990s -- that calling terrorists "soldiers" unnecessarily dignified them and their cause -- had been turned on its head. The only people fooled by this semantic demotion were us.
If it was clear that the prevailing law enforcement paradigm was vastly inadequate to the task at hand did it necessarily imply that the U.S. was at war? I don't believe so, if for no other reason that when you look at where the long-term solution for defeating and discrediting radical Islam lies, it's in the political, not military, arena. I think the president was correct to invoke martial rhetoric early, to summon the nation to the requisite seriousness demanded by the attacks, but the description itself is ultimately flawed. Wars are resolved by battlefield defeats against nation states. No one, not even the president ("there will be no Battleship Missouri, no Appomattox"), thinks that radical Islam will ultimately be defeated on the battlefield. Instead, the solution to defusing radical Islam is largely political, as the president's second inaugural address expressly acknowledges.
Writing in the Boston Globe, Jonathan Morgenstein and Eric Vickland, argue persuasively that the threat of radical Islam better resembles an insurgency: "Insurgents hide, wait, and strike on their own timetables. They wear no uniforms and they utilize tactics of deception, ambush, and terror. The insurgents strike weaknesses and dictate the terms of the fight."
Combating insurgencies combines hard-power, such as the recent Hellfire missile attack in Pakistan with efforts to drain public support from the insurgents' cause. While the authors criticize the president's attention to the latter, they do acknowledge the necessity of the former.
Radical Islam-as-global-insurgency may be the most apt metaphor, but it is not without draw-backs. According to Morgenstein and Vickland, insurgents depend on local populations for cover, support and recruits but with the Internet, al Qaeda and its radical off-shoots do not need sympathetic villages and communities to shelter them. Militant Web sites provide a virtual community of global sympathizers that are impossible to co-opt with public works projects or similar "hearts and minds" campaigns. Insurgencies, moreover, are fought for discrete, territorial objectives. While certain radical Islamic groups do piggy-back on such grievances (like Hamas), al Qaeda serves as an umbrella, uniting these disparate goals under the banner of a global jihad to reclaim, and eventually expand, Islam's territorial inheritance. To craft political concessions that would peel support away from al Qaeda would trigger a cascade of political change completely unacceptable to the U.S., Russia, China, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Spain, to name a few.
The global nature of the radical Islamic insurgency also lowers the moral inhibition to using catastrophic weaponry. Hamas, for instance, would be unlikely to deploy a nuclear weapon against Israel and irradiate territory it wishes to re-inhabit, yet al Qaeda has a professed desire to acquire WMD. It's important to recall that bin Laden's "innovation" in terrorism was the concept that attacking the U.S. ("the far enemy") in the U.S. would help Muslims reclaim the Middle East. It would not make sense for al Qaeda to unleash anthrax against Saudi Arabia and kill a population it professes to liberate, but it is perfectly acceptable -- desired even -- for al Qaeda to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals for maximum casualties.
There is also the issue of U.S. domestic terrorism laws and civil liberties. We have laws of war, and we have laws of peace, but where does an open-ended global insurgency figure into our legal calculus? Is there a finely tuned legal straddle between the two that can simultaneously accommodate the urgency of WMD terrorism yet acknowledge that we are not, properly speaking, at war?
Finally, and perhaps fundamentally, is the question of whether the "insurgency" framework can sustain the will and attention of a democratic populace. While inappropriate, the war metaphor is at least a check against the bureaucratic timidity that elevated the physical integrity of adjacent buildings over military action against America's enemies. Refashioning the war as an insurgency carries the very real -- and very dangerous -- possibility that unpopular but militarily successful strikes such as those carried out in Pakistan late last year - would be over-ridden by nervous politicians. In a battle for hearts and minds, can the U.S. retain the necessary will (absent in the 1990s) to launch military strikes against key terrorist targets where there is a certainty of civilian deaths and uncertainty about the intelligence?
As we grope toward a workable definition, it's interesting to note how this debate mirrors the argument over whether the U.S. is an "empire" in any meaningful sense of that word. Perhaps our difficultly in framing both America's global role and the threats she faces are two sides of the same conceptual coin; evidence that we are living in times with no historical analogue and that attempts to find one obscure more than they clarify. Events rush forward, our language limps behind.
Gregory Scoblete is a senior editor at TWICE Magazine He writes regularly about technology and politics at www.gscobe.blogspot.com.
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