President George W Bush has lost the
support of most Americans when it comes to the
economy, the environment and the war in Iraq, but
he continues to enjoy majority support in one key
area: his handling of the "war on terrorism".
Indeed, many analysts believe that Bush won the
2004 election largely because swing voters
concluded that he would do a better job at this
than his Democratic challenger, John Kerry. In
fact, with his overall opinion-poll approval
ratings so low, Bush's purported proficiency
in
fighting terror represents something close to his
last claim to public legitimacy.
But has
he truly been effective in combating terror? As
the "war on terrorism" drags on - with no signs of
victory in sight - there are good reasons to doubt
his competency at this, the most critical of all
his presidential responsibilities.
Consider, for a moment, the president's
view of the "war on terror". While the White House
keeps trying to stretch this term to include
everything from the war in Iraq to the protection
of oil pipelines in Colombia, most Americans
wisely view it in more narrow terms, as a global
struggle against Muslim zealots who seek to punish
the US for its perceived anti-Islamic behavior and
to free the Middle East of Western influence
through desperate acts of violence.
These
zealots - or jihadis as they are often termed -
include the original members of al-Qaeda, along
with other groups that claim allegiance to Osama
bin Laden's dogmas but are not necessarily in
direct contact with his lieutenants. It is in
fighting these adversaries that the public wants
Bush to succeed, and it is in this contest that he
is failing.
Why is this so? Consider the
nature of the US commander-in-chief's primary
responsibilities in wartime. Surely, his
overarching task is to devise (with the help of
senior advisers) a winning strategy to defeat, or
at least pummel, the enemy and to mobilize the
forces and resources needed to successfully
implement this framework.
Choosing the
tactics of battle - the day-by-day management of
combat operations - should not, on the other hand,
fall under the commander-in-chief's
responsibility, but rather be delegated to
professionals recruited for this purpose. Bush has
failed on both counts, embracing a deeply flawed
blueprint for the "war on terror" and then
meddling disastrously in the tactics employed to
carry it out.
Finding terrorism's
center of gravity As all the great masters
of strategy have taught us, devising a winning
strategy requires, first and foremost,
understanding one's opponent and correctly
identifying his strengths and weaknesses. Once
that has been accomplished, it is necessary to
craft a mode of attack that exploits the enemy's
weaknesses and undermines or overpowers his
strengths.
In modern military parlance,
this task is often described as locating and
destroying the enemy's "center of gravity".
For example, in both the 1991 Gulf War and
the 2003 invasion of Iraq, American war planners
correctly identified the Iraqi center of gravity
as the highly centralized, top-down command
structure of the Saddam Hussein regime; once this
structure was crippled early in the fighting, the
Iraqi combat units in the field - however capable
and dedicated - were unable to perform
effectively, and so were easily routed.
In
the current war in Iraq, by contrast, American
commanders have been unable to locate the enemy's
center of gravity, and so have been incapable of
crafting an effective strategy for defeating the
insurgents.
What, then, is the
enemy's center of gravity in the "war on terror"? This
is the critical question that Bush and his
top advisers have been unable to answer
correctly. According to Bush, the terrorists' center
of gravity has been the support and sanctuary
they receive from "rogue" regimes such as the Taliban in
Afghanistan and, supposedly, Saddam in Iraq, as
well as the mullahs in Iran. If these regimes were
all swept away, the White House has long argued,
the terrorists would find themselves weakened,
isolated, and ultimately defeated.
"The
very day of the [September 11] attacks," Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice later recalled, "[Bush]
told us, his advisers, that the United States
faced a new kind of war and that the strategy of
our government would be to take the fight to the
terrorists. That night, he announced to the world
that the United States would make no distinction
between the terrorists and the states that harbor
them." From this basic proposition, all else has
followed: the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq
and the current planning for a possible war in
Iran.
The overthrow of the Taliban did
eliminate an important sanctuary and training base
for al-Qaeda. But were "rogue" regimes ever truly
the center of gravity for the terrorist threat?
The events of the past few years unequivocally
demonstrate that such has not been the case, then
or now. (In fact, we know that there were no links
between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda.) The Taliban
and the Hussein regime are, of course, long gone,
but al-Qaeda continues to mount assaults on
Western interests around the world and new
manifestations of jihadism continue to erupt all
the time.
"Al-Qaeda has clearly shown
itself to be nimble, flexible and adaptive,"
observed terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of the
RAND Corporation in Current History magazine.
"Because of the group's remarkable durability, the
loss of Afghanistan does not appear to have
affected al-Qaeda's ability to mount terrorist
attacks to the extent that the United States
hoped."
Afghanistan did provide bin Laden with
training facilities, supply dumps and the like,
"but these camps and bases ... are mostly irrelevant
to the prosecution of an international terrorist
campaign - as events since [September 11] have
repeatedly demonstrated".
Far
from impeding al-Qaeda and its offshoots, the
overthrow of the Taliban and, especially, the Hussein
regime has been a boon to their efforts. War and
chaos in the Middle East, with US forces serving
as an occupying power, have proved to be the ideal
conditions in which to nurture a multinational
jihadi movement aimed at punishing the West.
As noted in a recent Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) report, would-be jihadis from all
over the world are flocking to Iraq to bloody the
Americans and acquire critical combat skills that
can later be applied in their own countries.
According to a summary of a CIA report in the New
York Times, the agency has concluded that "Iraq
may prove to be an even more effective training
ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was
in al-Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as
a real-world laboratory" for militants to improve
their skills in urban combat.
It follows
from this that the longer US troops remain
in Iraq, the greater will be the potential
advantage to international terrorism. Indeed,
senior CIA officials have reportedly told
congressional leaders that the war in Iraq is
"likely to produce a dangerous legacy, by
dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign
combatants more adept and better organized than
they were before the conflict".
This
prediction has been confirmed in recent months by
terror attacks in Jordan and Afghanistan that bear
the distinctive trademark of Iraqi-style combat,
including the use of both suicide bombers in urban
areas and improvised roadside explosive devices,
or IEDs.
For example, the deadly
bombings in Amman on November 9 have been described
by American intelligence officials as representing
an effort by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of
the self-styled al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, to apply
combat techniques perfected in Iraq to other
countries led by pro-American regimes.
Likewise, in Afghanistan, US officials
have told reporters that "militants are
increasingly taking a page from the insurgent
playbook in Iraq and using more roadside bombs and
suicide attacks".
European officials are
particularly worried by this phenomenon, fearing
the return to Europe of Islamic militants who have
slipped off to Iraq for first-hand combat
experience. "We consider these people dangerous
because those who go will come back once their
mission is accomplished," said a senior French
intelligence officer in late 2004. "Then they can
use the knowledge gained there in France, Europe
or the United States. It's the same as those who
went to Afghanistan or Chechnya."
Botching the 'war on terror'
Clearly, Bush's identification of rogue
regimes as the center of gravity of the terrorist
enemy has proved faulty; nor, in light of this
failure, has he been able to correctly identify
the true center. As suggested by most serious
scholars of Islamic extremism, the real crux of
the jihadis' strength lies in their ability to
articulate and propagate a message of radical
struggle that inspires and activates thousands of
disaffected young Muslims around the world.
As summarized by Hoffman of RAND, al-Qaeda
has evolved into "an amorphous movement tenuously
held together by a loosely networked constituency
rather than a monolithic, international
organization with an identifiable command and
control apparatus ... It has become a vast
enterprise - an international movement or
franchise operation with like-minded local
representatives, loosely connected to a central
ideological or motivational base but advancing its
goals independently."
Obviously, defeating
this "movement" requires a very different strategy
than the one now employed by the US. Instead of
military assaults on rogue states, it requires a
capacity to identify and apprehend the often
self-appointed "local representatives" of
al-Qaeda, to disable the movement's propaganda
apparatus, and, most of all, to discredit its
prime messages.
On a grand scale, this
requires positioning the US with progressive
forces in the Middle East, withdrawing from Iraq
and ending US support for repressive, regressive
regimes like those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. On a
purely tactical level, it means developing
harmonious relations with professional
intelligence officials in other countries and
developing a communications strategy aimed at
delegitimizing the jihadis' violent appeals within
the Islamic world - an effort that can only be
successful if it enjoys the assistance of moderate
Muslims willing to cooperate with the US.
The need for a strategy of this sort has
been voiced by at least some terrorism experts in
the US and by many officials in Europe. But even
those American experts who have advocated such an
approach have been repeatedly stymied by the
president's unswerving commitment to his own,
demonstrably failed approach. No divergence from
the official White House blueprint has been
permitted. To make matters worse, Bush and his top
advisers have insisted on micro-managing the "war
on terror", choosing tactics that amplify the
damage caused by their defective strategy.
The greatest damage has been caused by
decisions made by top administration officials,
including the president, Vice President Dick
Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
regarding the methods used to apprehend, confine,
and extract information from terrorist suspects
and those associated with them.
Most
significantly, this includes decisions to permit
the abduction of suspects on the territory of
friendly nations, to use Europe as a stopover
point for the transport or "rendition" of suspects
to Asian and Middle Eastern countries where
torture is routinely employed to extract
confessions, to allow US interrogators to use
methods that by any reasonable definition
constitute torture, and to tolerate the
mistreatment of Muslim prisoners in US custody
(whether at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay or in
secret CIA-run prisons in Afghanistan, Europe and
elsewhere).
Separately and together, these
decisions have severely alienated the very
governments and religious figures whose assistance
is desperately needed to mount an effective
campaign against al-Qaeda and its offshoots.
To give just one example of the problems
this has caused the US: On December 24, an Italian
judge issued arrest warrants for 22 purported CIA
operatives who abducted an Egyptian cleric in
Milan in 2003 and "rendered" him to Egypt, where
he was subsequently tortured by Egyptian security
officers. This case has caused a major uproar in
Italy, forcing even Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi, normally a reliable White House ally,
to distance himself from US policies - hardly the
way to hold on to, no less gain, allies in the
"war on terror".
Equally
worrisome is the growing anti-Americanism
espoused by supposedly "mainstream" Islamic clerics
in Europe. Prompted by what they view as
an unrelenting US campaign against the Islamic world
- the abuses uncovered at Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo and elsewhere providing but the most
recent confirmations of this outlook - these clerics
are promulgating a militant message
that, European intelligence officers contend, is inspiring young
Muslim men to volunteer for combat in Iraq or to
form their own, home-grown al-Qaeda-type organizations.
It was a group of this sort, experts
believe, that staged the bombings in the London Underground last
July 7 that killed 52 people.
It is
impossible to exaggerate the damage caused by the
US president's improvident decisions. Yes,
these tactics are immoral. Yes, they violate US
norms and values. Yes, they are in many respects
illegal. All this, by itself, is enough to warrant
condemnation by Congress and the public. But it is
the lethal effect of these decisions on America's
capacity for success in the "war on terror" that
most concerns us here.
By employing tactics
that only serve to heighten the destructive
consequences of a failing strategy, Bush
has in essence guaranteed America's failure.
In the final analysis, the president's incompetent
management of the "war on terror" has helped the
jihadis take better advantage of their strengths
while exploiting America's weaknesses. This does
not bode well for the future of global peace and
stability.
For too long, the American
public has accepted the myth of presidential
effectiveness in the "war on terror". But as the
practical implications of Bush's incompetence
become ever more apparent - lamentably, through
the continued spread and potency of radical
jihadism - this last, crucial prop of the
president's support could soon fall away. As 2005
was the year in which Bush's fatal incompetence in
domestic affairs was revealed to all through the
tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, 2006 could
prove to be the year in which his failed
leadership in the "war on terror" finally comes
back to haunt him.
Michael T
Klare is the professor of peace and world
security studies at Hampshire College and the
author, most recently, of Blood and Oil: The
Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing
Dependence on Imported Petroleum (Owl Books) as
well as Resource Wars, The New Landscape of
Global Conflict.
