DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The next president and the 'war on terror
By Andrew J Bacevich
A week ago, I had a long conversation with a four-star US military officer who,
until his recent retirement, had played a central role in directing the global
war on terror. I asked him: what exactly is the strategy that guides the George
W Bush administration's conduct of this war?
His dismaying, if not exactly surprising, answer: there is none.
Bush will bequeath to his successor the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone.
To defense contractors, lobbyists, think-tankers, ambitious military officers,
the hosts of Sunday morning talk shows, and the Douglas Feith-like creatures
who maneuver to become players in the ultimate power game, the "war on terror"
is a boon, an enterprise redolent with opportunity and promising to
extend decades into the future.
Yet, to a considerable extent, that very enterprise has become a fiction, a
gimmicky phrase employed to lend an appearance of cohesion to a panoply of
activities that, in reality, are contradictory, counterproductive, or at the
very least beside the point. In this sense, the global war on terror relates to
terrorism precisely as the war on drugs relates to drug abuse and dependence:
declaring a state of permanent "war" sustains the pretense of actually dealing
with a serious problem, even as policymakers pay lip-service to the problem's
actual sources. The war on drugs is a very expensive fraud. So, too, is the
"war on terror".
Anyone intent on identifying some unifying idea that explains US actions,
military and otherwise, across the Greater Middle East is in for a
disappointment. During World War II, president Franklin D Roosevelt laid down
"Germany first" and then "unconditional surrender" as core principles. Early in
the Cold War, the Harry S Truman administration devised the concept of
containment, which for decades thereafter provided a conceptual framework to
which policymakers adhered. Yet seven years into its "war on terror", the Bush
administration is without a compass, wandering in the arid wilderness. To the
extent that any inkling of a strategy once existed - the preposterous
neo-conservative vision of employing American power to "transform" the Islamic
world - events have long since demolished the assumptions on which it was
based.
Rather than one single war, the United States is presently engaged in several.
Ranking first in importance is the war for Bush's legacy, better known as Iraq.
The president himself will never back away from his insistence that here lies
the "central front" of the conflict he initiated after 9/11. Hunkered down in
their bunker, Bush and his few remaining supporters would have us believe that
the "surge" has, at long last, brought victory in sight and with it some
prospect of redeeming this otherwise misbegotten and mismanaged endeavor. If
the president can leave office spouting assurances that light is finally
visible somewhere at the far end of a very long, very dark Mesopotamian tunnel,
he will claim at least partial vindication. And if actual developments
subsequent to January 20 don't turn out well, he can always blame the outcome
on his successor.
Next comes the "orphan war". This is Afghanistan, a conflict now in its eighth
year with no signs of ending anytime soon. Given the attention lavished on
Iraq, developments in Afghanistan have until recently attracted only
intermittent notice. Lately, however, US officials have awakened to the fact
that things are going poorly, both politically and militarily. Al-Qaeda
persists. The Taliban is reasserting itself. Expectations that the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) might ride to the rescue have proven
illusory. Apart from enabling Afghanistan to reclaim its status as the world's
number one producer of opium, US efforts to pacify that nation and nudge it
toward modernity have produced little.
The Pentagon calls its intervention in Afghanistan Operation Enduring Freedom.
The emphasis was supposed to be on the noun. Unfortunately, the adjective
conveys the campaign's defining characteristic: "enduring" as in endless.
Barring a radical re-definition of purpose, this is an enterprise which
promises to continue, consuming lives and treasure, for a long, long time.
In neighboring Pakistan, meanwhile, there is the war-hidden-in-plain-sight.
Reports of US military action in Pakistan have now become everyday fare. Air
strikes, typically launched from missile-carrying drones, are commonplace, and
US ground forces have also conducted at least one cross-border raid from inside
Afghanistan. Although the White House doesn't call this a war, it is - a
gradually escalating war of attrition in which we are killing both terrorists
and noncombatants. Unfortunately, we are killing too few of the former to make
a difference and more than enough of the latter to facilitate the recruitment
of new terrorists to replace those we eliminate.
Finally - skipping past the wars-in-waiting, which are Syria and Iran - there
is Condoleezza Rice's war. This clash, which does not directly involve US
forces, may actually be the most important of all. The war that the US
secretary of state has made her own is the ongoing conflict between Israel and
the Palestinians. Having for years dismissed the insistence of Muslims, Arabs
and non-Arabs alike, that the plight of the Palestinians constitutes a problem
of paramount importance, Rice now embraces that view. With the fervor of a
convert, she has vowed to broker an end to that conflict prior to leaving
office in January 2009.
Given that Rice brings little - perhaps nothing - to the effort in the way of
fresh ideas, her prospects of making good as a peacemaker appear slight. Yet,
as with Bush and Iraq, so too with Rice and the Palestinian problem: she has a
lot riding on the effort. If she flops, history will remember her as America's
least effective secretary of state since Cordell Hull spent World War II being
ignored, bypassed, and humiliated by Franklin Roosevelt. She will depart Foggy
Bottom having accomplished nothing.
There's nothing inherently wrong in fighting simultaneously on several fronts,
as long as actions on front A are compatible with those on front B, and
together contribute to overall success. Unfortunately, that is not the case
with the "war on terror". We have instead an illustration of what Winston
Churchill once referred to as a pudding without a theme: a war devoid of
strategic purpose.
This absence of cohesion - by now a hallmark of the Bush administration - is
both a disaster and an opportunity. It is a disaster in the sense that we have,
over the past seven years, expended enormous resources, while gaining precious
little in return.
Bush's supporters beg to differ, of course. They credit the president with
having averted a recurrence of 9/11, doubtless a commendable achievement but
one primarily attributable to the fact that the United States no longer
neglects airport security. To argue that, say, the invasion and occupation of
Iraq have prevented terrorist attacks against the United States is the
equivalent of contending that Israel's occupation of the West Bank since in
1967 has prevented terrorist attacks against the state of Israel.
Yet the existing strategic vacuum is also an opportunity. When it comes to
national security at least, the agenda of the next administration all but sets
itself. There is no need to waste time arguing about which issues demand
priority action.
First-order questions are begging for attention. How should we gauge the
threat? What are the principles that should inform our response? What forms of
power are most relevant to implementing that response? Are the means at hand
adequate to the task? If not, how should national priorities be adjusted to
provide the means required? Given the challenges ahead, how should the
government organize itself? Who - both agencies and individuals - will lead?
To each and every one of these questions, the Bush administration devised
answers that turned out to be dead wrong. The next administration needs to do
better. The place to begin is with the candid recognition that the "war on
terror" has effectively ceased to exist. When it comes to national security
strategy, we need to start over from scratch.
Andrew J Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at
Boston University. His bestselling new book is
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (The American
Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).
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