In Iraq's Wild West, US shifts to containment: Military seeks new tactics against agile insurgency

Anne Barnard
Boston Globe
October 30, 2005

BAGHDAD -- After 2 1/2 years of fighting, US troops are struggling to tame the vast desert border region they call Iraq's Wild West.

American commanders say they are making progress, but acknowledge that in the sprawling, hard-to-patrol area, pushing guerrilla fighters out of one town often means they show up somewhere else, separating and joining up again like beads of mercury.

To the military officers, the problems in western Iraq illustrate the evolving goals of the US mission: They may never decisively defeat the insurgency or seal off the country's borders. Instead, they think in terms of containing the violence and smuggling at a level that Iraqi forces can someday handle, even if that is years away.

''I don't talk in terms of winning," Marine Colonel Stephen W. Davis, who commands the Marines in western Anbar Province, said in a telephone interview. ''Americans like finality. We like to think in terms of a football game -- identify a problem, analyze a problem, solve a problem, and go on to the next problem. That is not the reality of the Middle East. This is like a neverending rugby game."

Western Iraq is the keystone of the country's insurgency and the Sunni Arab discontent that fuels it. In the border region, the cycle of violence and mistrust between Sunnis and the US military plays out on top of a second crucial struggle as US troops try to stem the tide of arms and fighters through porous borders and along the Euphrates River.

Iraq's borders with Syria and Jordan stretch hundreds of miles through the thinly populated deserts of two of the country's most violent provinces, Anbar and Ninevah. Those regions' large, central cities, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul, have long dominated news accounts of fighting in Iraq.

But in the past six months, many of the fiercest battles have been fought closer to the borders, in the smaller towns clustered near the main crossing points into Syria and surrounded by expanses of dry, undulating, and nearly empty land.

About 5,000 Marines are responsible for an area of 30,000 square miles in western Anbar. There, a string of towns along the Euphrates marks an ancient trade and smuggling route that US and Iraqi officials believe is a key pipeline for arms and fighters stretching from the Syrian border, down the river to Ramadi, and then to Baghdad and the rest of the country.

After US troops crushed and occupied the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in November 2004, military officials say, insurgents fled to the river towns of Husaybah, Karabilah, Ana, Rawa, Haditha, Hit, and Haqlaniyah.

In Ninevah Province, another cluster of towns follows another main road into Syria, and US troops have been fighting bloody battles along that road, centered on the town of Tal Afar, in recent months.

In Anbar, Marines have been launching attacks and sweeps of the Euphrates towns since April, but it has been hard to deal a conclusive blow: Insurgents often flee when troops arrive and return when they leave.

Now, in what Davis calls an evolution of tactics, Marines are working to establish a long-term presence, along with Iraqi forces, in the river towns. Small units are staying in places such as schools and requisitioned houses.

While Marines could fight a pitched battle against thousands of insurgents in Fallujah last year, they now fight on a much more spread-out landscape where fighters melt easily from town to town. They face a political battle, as well, as the fighting spreads resentment among residents caught in the crossfire.

Near the Syrian border, the towns are a jumble of low buildings and large industrial plants idled for lack of maintenance and sabotage. But farther down the river are some of the most beautiful places in Iraq.

Haditha sits at the foot of a hydroelectric dam that holds back a blue lake in a dry reddish landscape that US troops often compare to Lake Powell in the American Southwest. Below it, the towns of Barwana and Haqlaniyah sit among palm groves on either side of a stretch of river that flows clear and blue.

Those towns were relatively peaceful in the first year of the occupation, and foreign reporters could travel there safely. But kidnappings, highway robberies, and attacks on Iraqi forces increased. In a series of skirmishes this spring, insurgents fleeing from Fallujah routed the local army and police along the river.

Now, none of the towns has functioning police forces and the Iraqi army units based there are from other parts of the country, which can fuel resentment among the insular Anbar population.

Northeast and southwest of the river valley stretches desert crisscrossed by gullies and dirt tracks used mainly by Bedouin herders. Seen from a helicopter, the land varies between twisted canyons, flat plains, and low hills, dotted with the occasional tent, pickup truck, and herd of sheep.

US and Iraqi officials say the area provides a last-resort hiding place and travel route for insurgents who are being pushed out by the Marines' recent operations.

''If we can push them to the interior, to those tradition Bedouin areas, then we are well on our way" to containing the insurgency, Davis said.

But there are few instant results, he cautioned. Anbar is one of Iraq's least populous provinces, but the number of US troops killed there -- 698 as of last week, according to a Globe analysis of military figures -- is more than any other province.

Improvised explosive devices, which have caused more than half of all US combat deaths, have become larger and more sophisticated, and some of the deadliest have been used in the river valley. One device in Haditha killed 14 Marines in August in a single armored vehicle.

During operations in Haditha during a two-week period, Davis said, attacks on his forces averaged ''four dozen a day."

Insurgents still wage a powerful intimidation campaign against Iraqis, Davis said, often acting with impunity if US or Iraqi forces are not nearby.

''With 30,000 square miles, you can't be there all the time," he said. ''Nobody owns towns in an insurgent war."

Iraqis used to obeying strongmen as a survival tactic offer little resistance when insurgent come to town, he said.

''You don't need a whole lot of people to roll into a town, beat up people, maybe kill one or two people, and people say, 'OK, we're playing by this guy's rules,' " he said.

Brigadier General Ahmed al-Khafaji, the Iraqi deputy interior minister in charge of border police, said more US and Iraqi troops should be concentrated in the west to further disrupt insurgent movement.

Too many Iraqi soldiers are concentrated in the peaceful Shi'ite Arab south, he said. ''What do we need them in Nasiriyah for? They are just eating and sleeping."

But Khafaji's men lack the basic tools for controlling the borders. His forces man watchtowers spaced about 12 miles apart along the borders, which are not fenced or marked, and are connected only by a rough dirt road. He says he needs surveillance equipment and more roads parallel to the border where patrols could watch for people heading into the country.

Along the border on either side of Husaybah, the main crossing into Syria, there is a 28-mile stretch with no Iraqi border guards, Khafaji said. Marines conducting intense operations there have waved them away, he said.

''They are more afraid for our lives than we are,"' he said. ''We are eager to go there."

A senior US military official based in Anbar, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Iraqi border posts in near Husaybah had been ''annihilated" in recent fighting. The border has been ignored by migrating tribes for generations, he said. ''It's just a line on a map."

Cultural and linguistic barriers also hamper the effort in Anbar, said a US military foreign-area officer -- a specialist in Arab culture and language -- working there. Very few Marines or interpreters can ''sit down and go back and forth on issues from sewage to trying to identify bad guys," he said.

At the Baghdad taxi stand for people heading to the river valley, many residents of the area still blame Marines more than insurgents for their troubles, saying the sweep carried out before parliamentary elections in January and the constitutional vote earlier this month felt like attacks on the towns rather than the guerrillas.

They described grating everyday difficulties: Schools, public buildings, and roads are often closed; Marines break the windows of locked cars to check for bombs; and people must use boats to cross rivers where bridges are closed by Marines or damaged in fighting.

''The Americans are only harassing the people," said Amal Jassem, 46, who traveled to the capital to pick up food rations that have not reached Haditha for months. She said she moved her family to Haditha early in the occupation to escape violence in Baghdad. But now, she said, she's thinking of moving back.

Globe correspondent Sa'ad al-Izzi contributed to this report.
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Citation:
Anne Barnard, "In Iraq's Wild West, US shifts to containment: Military seeks new tactics against agile insurgency", Boston Globe, 30 October 2005. Original URL:
http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2005/10/30/in_iraqs_wild_west_us_shifts_to_containment?mode=PF

Military May Propose an Active-Duty Force for Relief Efforts

Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker
New York Times
11 October 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 - The military's Northern Command is developing a proposal to organize a specially trained and equipped active-duty force that could respond quickly to assist relief efforts in the event of overwhelming natural disasters, like major hurricanes, floods or earthquakes.

The proposal, one of the first results from the military's study of shortcomings in the relief effort after Hurricane Katrina, could resolve significant stumbling blocks to the deployment of active-duty forces into a disaster area on American soil.

President Bush has urged Congress to consider laws allowing a greater role for the active-duty armed forces in disaster relief.

The force under consideration would keep hundreds of soldiers standing by on short notice to assist National Guard soldiers. The new unit could include military communications technicians, logistics specialists, doctors and nurses, engineers and even infantry.

The active-duty forces could rapidly fill the gap if state and local police officers, firefighters and local medical personnel were overwhelmed and unable to serve as the first line of relief, as happened during Hurricane Katrina.

The idea has not yet been presented to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld or to the military's Joint Staff. It was described in an interview by Adm. Timothy J. Keating, the head of the Northern Command, which is in charge of the military's response to threats on American soil.

The force would be designed to move in quickly alongside National Guard forces, with whom it would train, rather than taking over the mission. The virtue of such an active-duty unit is that it could swiftly bring important capabilities to bear in a natural disaster on American soil. With all of the operating rules agreed upon in advance, the command of the mission would remain with the National Guard, answering to state governors, putting off any need to debate whether to federalize the operation.

In the first days after Hurricane Katrina passed and the levees broke in New Orleans, flooding the city, the Democratic governor of Louisiana and White House officials squabbled over whether the federal government should take command of the faltering relief effort.

Active-duty troops may conduct relief operations without the federal government being in charge, but the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits active-duty forces from conducting law enforcement missions on American soil.

Pentagon and military officials say that federal troops could not have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans without breaking the Posse Comitatus law.

That would not be a problem with the standby force as long as it was kept to logistical and relief operations and the mission, in particular law-enforcement duties, remained with the National Guard reporting to the state governors.

The federal, state and local authorities would first agree, in advance, on what kind of event would lead to the sending of active-duty forces into a state. The criteria might include predictions of hurricane severity, the level of damage from an earthquake or casualty figures. Admiral Keating said that could help eliminate politics from the calculation.

"The success or failure of our effort won't depend on the political dealings between the governors and the president," he said. "We'll just get a mission and we'll execute it."

Had such a plan been in place when Hurricane Katrina barreled through the Gulf Coast region, a potent active-duty force could have flowed in faster to join National Guard troops, which already have the legal authority to carry out law enforcement duties under state control.

But, while some in Congress have urged the Bush administration to reconsider the limits of the Posse Comitatus Act, Admiral Keating said he was wary of the military's role in law enforcement.

"I'm not at all convinced that we need to go back and revise Posse Comitatus," he said. "I don't think the American people writ large are anxious to have active-duty forces in a law enforcement role."

It is not yet clear how much such a plan would cost or whether the military could spare the money or the troops at a time when it is stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Admiral Keating said a contingency force would be loosely modeled on existing rapid-response forces like the ready brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., which can deploy anywhere in the world in 18 hours, and others that stand ready to deal with domestic terrorist attacks.

But he said the new force could be drawn as required from existing units that would still train for and carry out their current combat duties. It would not require the military to create and finance a separate domestic defense force, he said.

Although Mr. Rumsfeld has acknowledged the inadequacies of the Hurricane Katrina relief mission and has said the active-duty military has a sweeping array of capabilities that could be brought to bear, he has taken no public stance on the way ahead.

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Citation:
Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker. "Military May Propose an Active-Duty Force for Relief Efforts", New York Times, 11 October 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/11/politics/11military.html?adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&adxnnlx=1129043247-PuTNXXjd/7qkeEzBVwl7Zg&pagewanted=print

Spoils of War

By Lewis H. Lapham.
Harper's Magazine , March 2002.

Perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream, and War is an integral part of God's ordering of the universe. In War, man's noblest virtues come into play: courage and renunciation, fidelity to duty and a readiness for sacrifice that does not stop short of offering up Life itself. Without War the world would become swamped in materialism.

--Gen. Helmuth von Moltke

It's been nearly six months since the destruction of the World Trade Center, and we still haven't come to the end of listening to people say that the world is forever changed. On and off the record, whether privately at dinner or blowing through the trumpets of the media, our leading voices of alarmed opinion (politicians, syndicated columnists, retired generals) agree that America can't go home again and that nothing will ever be the same. Before September 11 the world was one thing; after September 11, the world is something else. Impossible to depict or describe, of course, but the transformation so unprecedented and complete as to require new maps and geopolitical surveys, new sets of emotion and states of mind.

The grave announcements invite an equally grave response, but although I usually can manage a solemn nod or worried frown, I'm never sure that I know what it is that I'm being asked to notice or why I can't find in myself the symptoms of an altered sensibility. Apparently the changes don't apply to the kingdom of day-to-day event. The Enron Corporation dissolves in a bankruptcy almost as spectacular as the collapse of the World Trade Center (a market capitalization of $63 billion reduced in nine months to worthless paper), but nobody pokes around in the rubble for a world-changing paradigm; nor does anybody mention radical theories of aesthetics or startling discoveries in the sciences. No miracles being reported elsewhere in the society, I assume that the important talk about "asymmetric reality" and "multilateral chaos" pertains to "the new kind of war" that President George W. Bush has loosed upon all the world's evil. doers. It is Osama bin Laden who has rearranged the universe, Osama and his network of elusive assassins holding for ransom not only the Eiffel Tower, Mount Rushmore, and Buckingham Palace but also the beating heart of Western civilization. Madness stalks the earth, and except for Vice President Dick Cheney, none of us is safe.

But if that is the awful truth that divides the world of September 10 from the world of September 12, I'm at a loss to know why it deserves the name of news. Unless I'm badly mistaken or cruelly misinformed, madness has been stalking the earth ever since an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on the day in August 1945 that Buckminster Fuller marked on his calendar as "the day that humanity started taking its final exam." I was ten years old in 1945, too young to understand the remark even if I'd known that Fuller had said it; by the time I was twenty I'd read enough of the literature to know that a radioactive Armageddon doesn't extend the option of any good places to hide, and ever since the Cuban missile crisis in October of 1962 I've understood that I belong to an endangered species, never more than thirty minutes away from an appointment with extinction.

To be held hostage to the fear of a nuclear weapon brought into Manhattan on a truck doesn't seem to me much different than being held hostage to the fear of a nuclear weapon delivered to the same address by a Soviet submarine seventy miles east of Nantucket. The late Robert Benchley put the proposition about as plainly as it can be put on an examination paper that he failed to pass at Harvard in 1912. Asked to frame the legal dispute over fishing rights on the Grand Banks from both the American and British point of view, Benchley began his answer by saying that he never understood the American argument, never cared to know where England stood, but that he would like to consider the problem from the points of view of the fish. The statement of purpose introduced a dialogue in which a flounder and a cod take up the question as to whether it is better to be roasted in Liverpool, boiled in Boston, or sauteed in Paris.

In several speeches since September 11, President Bush has insisted that "terrorism is terrorism," its character always and everywhere the same, absolute and indivisible, not subject to extenuating circumstance or further explanation. Presumably he refers to terrorist acts staged by independent theater companies, not to the ones sponsored by nation-states. When wrapped up in the ribbons of patriotic slogan, terrorism becomes a show of diplomatic resolve or a lesson in democracy, the prerogative of governments apportioning its distribution to Cambodian peasants, dissident Soviet intellectuals, Israeli disco dancers, Chechen rebels, Palestinian refugees, Iraqi schoolchildren, Guatemalan coffee trees. Except as a form of terrorism, how else do we describe the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction that for the last fifty years has trapped the civilian populations of the earth in nets similar to the one in which Benchley's fish found themselves discussing the finer points of British and French cuisine? The doctrine evolved during the prolonged Cold War with the Soviet Union, the diplomatists on both sides of the Iron Curtain entrusting the peace and prosperity of mankind (also the light of reason and the rule of law) to what was bluntly recognized at summit conferences as "the balance of terror"--you kill everybody here, and we kill everybody there; together we preserve humanity by threatening to obliterate it. Citizens inclined to think the arrangement somehow disquieting or oppressive remained free to discuss the finer points of difference between the Russian and the American flag.

If I can understand why the managers of the state monopoly regard the privatization of terror as unwarranted poaching of their market, as a prospective consumer presented with variant packagings of the product I find the same instruction on the labels. Fear the unknown, reflect upon the transience of flounders, pay the ransom or the tax bill, pray for deliverance. The message is by no means new. The miraculous births of Fat Man and Little Boy in Los Alamos in 1945 pressed the fire of Heaven into the service of a religion (jury-rigged and hastily revealed) founded on the gospels of extortion. Powers once assigned to God passed into the hands of physicists and the manufacturers of intercontinental ballistic missiles; what had been human became divine, the idols of man's own nuclear invention raised up to stand as both agent and symbol of the Day of Judgment.

Historians still argue about whether the arms race was inevitable; some say that it was not, that if President Harry Truman in 1949 had heeded the advice of some of the wisest and most well-informed men in the country (among them Robert Oppenheimer and James Conant) he wouldn't have ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb, and if that program hadn't gone forward, the Russians might not have felt compelled to build their own towers of hideous strength. The Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War possessed few or none of the assets attributed to it by American intelligence operatives, and Stalin conceivably might have welcomed an excuse to forgo the making of weapons (at a cost that the Communist workers' paradise could ill afford) meant to be seen and not heard.

But if I don't know what was being said in Moscow in 1949, I do know that in Washington the managers of American foreign policy cherished the dream of omnipotence cued to a memorandum that George Kennan in the winter of the preceding year circulated within the State Department:

We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population.
... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and
resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of
relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity
without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have
to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming....

The preferred patterns of relationship presupposed an American realpolitik strong-mindedly turned away from what Kennan regarded as "unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization"; back home in Washington the interested parties (political, military, and economic) bent willingly to the task of replacing the antiquated American republic, modest in ambition and democratic in spirit, with the glory of a nation-state increasingly grand in scale and luxurious in its taste for hegemony. The imperial project flourished under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and over time it achieved the preferred pattern of relationships that Winston Churchill ascribed to the English government in office in 1904, at the moment when Britain reached its zenith as an empire on which the sun never set:

a party of great vested interests, banded together in a formidable
confederation, corruption at home, aggression to cover it up abroad ...
sentiment by the bucketful, patriotism by the imperial pint, the open hand
at the public exchequer, the open door at the public-house, dear food for
the millions, cheap labour for the millionaire.

Fattened on the seed of open-handed military spending (17 trillion since 1950) and grazing in the pastures of easy credit and certain profit, the confederation of vested interests that President Eisenhower once identified as "the military-industrial complex" brought forth an armed colossus the likes of which the world had never seen--weapons of every conceivable caliber and size, 2 million men under arms on five continents and eight seas and oceans, a vast armada of naval vessels, light and heavy aircraft, command vehicles and communications satellites, guidance systems as infallible as the Pope, tracking devices blessed with the judgment of a recording angel.

The rich displays of armament bear comparison to religious statuary. No matter what the specific function of the weapons, as attack submarines or high-altitude gun platforms, they stand as symbols representative of the divinity (absolute, unfathomable, unseen but always present) implicit in the cloud of nuclear unknowing. For as long as I can remember I've heard debriefing officers in Washington say that the end of the world is near at hand, and I've been told to prepare for "the year of maximum danger" in 1954, 1962, 1968, 1974, 1983, and 1991. Possibly because the sounding of the final trumpet has been so often postponed, I no longer take the gentlemen at their word. The Navy lieutenant stands in front of a lovingly illuminated map overlay, pointing with an elongated baton to fleets and regiments and force levels, and I remember that the wealth and worldly power of the medieval Catholic Church depended upon its cornering of the market in terror. The lieutenant taps his pointer lightly on a crescent of aircraft carriers or a delicately shaded square of parachute brigades, and I think of the Jesuit art historian, soft-footed and subtle, who once conducted me on a tour of the Vatican, directing my attention to jeweled boxes and silver altarpieces, to ivory crosses inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli.

Critics of the military establishment tend to divide into two camps, those who object to the cost of its maintenance and those who complain of its incompetence. Neither caucus lacks reasons for its unhappiness, one of them classifying as extravagant waste the $200 billion contract awarded as recently as last October to Lockheed Martin for 3,000 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, the second of them mentioning the loss of the war in Vietnam, the failure to rescue the Shah's Iran or conquer Saddam Hussein's Iraq. True enough and no doubt sad to say, but the critics allied with both the liberal and conservative schools of opinion usually manage to miss the point, failing to appreciate the military establishment's dual nature as successful business enterprise and reformed church. How well or how poorly the combined services perform their combat missions matters less than their capacity to generate cash and to sustain the images of omnipotence. Wars, whether won or lost, and the rumors of war, whether true or false, increase the budget allocations, stimulate the economy, clear the weapons inventory, and add to the stockpile of fear that guarantees a steady demand for security and promotes a decent respect for authority.

The country has been more or less continuously at war for sixty years, and we can't leave home without it. Otherwise we might not remember that we're the good guys or what would be playing at the movies. During the prosperous decade of the 1990s, the American public showed disturbing signs of weakness, too many people forgetting that without war they were apt to get lost in General von Moltke's "swamps of materialism." The breaking down of the Berlin Wall had brought an end to the skirmish with the Russians, the stock market was going nowhere but up, and the louche example being set by President Clinton in the White House (overweight, emotionally indulgent, morally slack) was bad for children and the weapons business. It wasn't that the American people no longer approved the uses of terrorism as a means of astute crisis-management (in romantic Baghdad or picturesque Kosovo) or as a form of light entertainment (as video game, newspaper headline, and Hollywood plot device), but they had gotten into the habit of thinking that it was a product made exclusively for export.

At Washington policy conferences two and three years before the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, at least three of the four experts seated on the dais could be counted upon to say that nothing good would come of the American future unless and until the American people awakened to the fact that the world was a far more dangerous place than was dreamed of in the philosophy of Jerry Seinfeld and the World Wildlife Fund. I haven't spoken to any of the panelists since September 11, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear them say that although the attacks were abominable, a criminal outrage, and certainly a lot more destructive than might reasonably have been expected, sometimes people needed harsh reminders to recall them to the banners of noble virtue under which von Moltke's German army invaded Belgium in 1914 and massacred every man, woman, and child in the city of Dinant.

As for the critics who complain that President Bush has been sending ambiguous signals to the American people, once again I think they miss the point. They see a contradiction in the fact that one day he appears on television to say that we confront a future darkened by scenes of unimaginable horror and then, at the next day's press conference, tells everybody not to worry, to remain calm but stay alert, to keep up the strength of their buying in the nearest retail outlet.

Understood as a religious instead of a secular form of communication, the ritual makes liturgical sense. The President first ascends to the pulpit in the persona of the grim but righteous prophet, setting before the congregation a fiery vision of Hell, and then, in the bright sunlight on the steps of the church, he appears as the amiable vicar bidding his flock a kindly and reassuring farewell. Between the sermon and the benediction, a choir of media voices sings hymns of thanksgiving and anthems of praise, and men in uniform pass the collection plate.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Harper's Magazine Foundation

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Citation: Lewis H. Lapham, "Spoils of War," Harper's Magazine, March 2002.
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Could September 11 have been averted?

By Gabriel Schoenfeld.
Commentary, December 2001.

HOW DID we fall victim to a second and more terrible Pearl Harbor? At first glance, this seems an unsolvable puzzle.

On the one hand, we had various kinds of warning. The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and the Tokyo nerve-gas attack that same year provided a powerful demonstration of some of the methods terrorists might employ and the destruction they could achieve. It was also abundantly clear, from a decade-long series of lethal attacks on U.S. facilities abroad, and an attempt to knock down the World Trade Center in 1993, that a group or groups of terrorists were making a determined effort to strike at the U.S. That these same terrorists might attempt once again to hit targets in the American homeland was an obvious possibility; indeed, the CIA issued a series of generalized alerts to that effect, the most recent appearing this past August.

On the other hand, a conspiracy came out into the open with ruthless efficiency on September 11 and caught us entirely by surprise. Scores of Arab terrorists, having carefully prepared for years, managed to execute a highly imaginative and precisely synchronized attack on the political, military, and financial nerve centers of the United States. Even though the terrorists did not reach all of their intended targets, they still achieved near total success: thousands of people were burned alive or buried in rubble, major financial and transportation links of the country were paralyzed or destroyed, symbols of our freedom and security were reduced to ashes, and fear of still more death and destruction was made ubiquitous across the land.

Now the attack on the United States has provoked, in response, what President George W. Bush has called "a war against terrorism," the first major military phase of which began on October 7. But far more quietly, and partly behind the scenes, it has also provoked a war of finger-pointing. Some has been directed at the Federal Aviation Administration and other bodies in charge of airport security, where laxity unquestionably ruled the day. Some has been aimed at our immigration authorities, for opening the door to virtually all comers. And far more has been directed at the U.S. intelligence community--primarily the FBI and the CIA--for failing so utterly at a primary responsibility. Among other problems, we are told, the FBI lacked adequate authority to engage in electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, while the CIA, thanks to a series of ill-guided "reforms," has been chronically weak in gathering human intelligence.

But whatever genuine operational failures these postmortems reveal, our real shortcomings run much deeper. Terrorism is a problem the U.S. government has been contending with in an increasingly organized fashion since 1968, when Palestinian terrorists began hijacking aircraft and the modern era of international terrorism was born. In the intervening years, an intricate structure has been built to deal with the extraordinary number of different facets of the problem, ranging from prevention all the way to what is called "consequence management," a euphemism for dealing with the aftermath of a major assault.

All told, some 45 separate governmental units and subunits are responsible for handling the different dimensions of the terrorist threat. This unwieldy structure has the burden of carrying out a policy that mirrors it in complexity. The formal aims of U.S. policy have been set forth in a myriad of official documents, with two "presidential decision directives" promulgated by President Clinton being especially significant codifications. These documents, which have been only partially declassified, declare that the policy of the United States is to "deter, defeat, and respond vigorously" to terrorist attacks against Americans no matter where they take place.

How precisely have these words been put into action? One recent and very impressive guide is Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy by Paul R. Pillar. * Its author served throughout much of the 1990's as the deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, and his book, published not long before September 11, is both authoritative and exceedingly well-informed. I draw upon it freely in what follows.

AS WE learn from Pillar, the U.S. has been fighting terrorism over the years in a variety of ways, ranging from the indirect to the direct, and by means of a variety of instruments, ranging from the peaceful to the violent. To begin at the indirect and peaceful end of things, let us look first at Pillar's summary of attempts by the government to address the "root causes" of terrorism.

In the aftermath of September 11, this subject has become somewhat poisoned, with some on the Left (Susan Sontag most notoriously) citing American actions and alliances to explain--and explain away--the terror attack itself. But since, as Pillar notes, terrorism and terrorist groups "do not arise randomly, and they are not distributed evenly around the globe," U.S. officials have necessarily been impelled to give serious attention to the conditions in which terrorism appears to flourish. Roughly, he discerns two types of such "antecedent" conditions: political repression and economic deprivation.

"Terrorism is a risky, dangerous, and very disagreeable business," Pillar writes; "few people who have a reasonably good life will be inclined to get into" it. It follows that tamping down resentments that might lead to terrorism is an interest of the U.S., in line with our efforts to provide development assistance, promote democracy, and foster peace negotiations in troubled regions of the world like Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

Another indirect aspect of the U.S. counterterrorism program is the effort to shape the intentions of terrorists. Behind our oft-declared principle of not negotiating with hostage-takers is the idea, in Pillar's words, "that not rewarding terrorism will give terrorists less incentive to try it again." Our frequently reiterated determination to punish terrorists or bring them to "justice" is also presumed in at least some cases to exercise a similarly deterrent effect.

More significant than either of these aspects of policy has been erecting physical defenses against attack. This effort began in the late 1960's with aviation-security measures designed to foil hijackings. Over the years, it has extended into other areas, primarily through increasing protection for key federal sites like the White House and Congress and civilian infrastructure like nuclear power plants. In the wake of a string of attacks on U.S. embassies and military bases abroad in the 1990's, the U.S. has spent billions tightening the security of overseas buildings and placing concrete barriers in the way of truck bombers.

On the more active side of things, Pillar shows that the U.S. has also tried to interfere with the ability of terrorist organizations to carry out attacks. An enormous intelligence-gathering apparatus, employing techniques from satellite reconnaissance to electronic interception of communications to the recruitment of informers and the placement of moles, helps us track the movement of terrorists, impose financial controls on their organizations, and, when appropriate, apply force against them and the states that sponsor them.

Financial controls have received heightened attention as the U.S. tries to freeze the funds sustaining Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network. But the approach is not new. As the State Department's annual report on terrorism shows, the U.S. has blocked the assets of dozens of organizations, including the Abu Nidal group based in the Middle East, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and the Aum Shinrikyo in Japan. [dagger] Similarly, U.S. intelligence gathering has bolstered the effort to locate terrorists abroad and arrange for their arrest, rendition, and prosecution in U.S. or foreign courts. Indeed, in any tally of time, energy, and resources devoted to counterterrorism, the objective of "bringing terrorists to justice" would undoubtedly occupy first place.

The best-known example of this approach was our response to the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988, in which 270 passengers died, including 189 Americans. A decade-long effort to bring two Libyan intelligence agents to trial came to a culmination earlier this year with the acquittal of one and the sentencing of the other to life imprisonment (with the possibility of parole after twenty years) by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands. The same prosecutorial machinery has been set in motion following other major attacks against American targets, including the truck bombing of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, which killed nearly 300 people including twelve Americans, and the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, which killed seventeen American sailors.

The legalistic approach has not entirely supplanted more forceful action. Though the subject is by definition wrapped in secrecy, the President has the authority under U.S. law to "use all necessary means, including covert action ... to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy international infrastructure used by international terrorists, including overseas terrorist-training facilities and safe havens." Press reports suggest that there have been at least a few covert operations launched against terrorists in recent years, including one mission that was to have been carried out by Pakistani proxy forces against Osama bin Laden in 1999 but was aborted on account of a coup d'etat in Pakistan.

Finally, open military action has also been part of the U.S. portfolio, but only, prior to our current war on the Taliban and al Qaeda, on three occasions and only in retaliatory fashion. In 1986, after Libyan agents placed a bomb in a Berlin discotheque frequented by American soldiers, the U.S. struck Libya from the air, hitting military sites as well as the compound of Libya's leader, Muammar Qaddafi. In 1993, in response to an attempted assassination plot aimed at former President George Bush, Bill Clinton lobbed 23 cruise missiles at the headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence service in Baghdad. And in 1998, following truck-bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Clinton again fired a fusillade of cruise missiles in an attempt to kill Osama bin Laden at one of his training camps in Afghanistan. Clinton also simultaneously struck a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan believed by the CIA to be producing the nerve agent VX.

THESE, THEN, were the main elements of U.S. counterterrorism policy up until September 11. Roaming over the territory in great detail, along the way Pillar offers his own judgments of which elements were sound, which were unsound, and what was missing.

To begin again at the beginning, Pillar believes that "cutting out roots" can indeed be useful; as a case in point, he cites the U.S. role in fostering the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the PLO. That the Oslo process seems, if anything, to have fueled terrorism, and never more dangerously so than at Oslo's peak under Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, tells heavily against Pillar's judgment here. But it should be noted that in general he does not favor putting "root causes" at the center of U.S. policy, and (in keeping with his habit of qualifying almost everything he writes) he is also careful to acknowledge that terrorism does not necessarily follow from oppression, that terrorist groups have emerged "in some wealthy Muslim societies like Kuwait but not in some poor ones like Niger," and that peace processes can "enflame a minority that opposes a settlement." Besides, even if all root causes were somehow removed, there would "always remain," writes Pillar, "a core of incorrigibles--and these will include the terrorists about whom the United States must worry the most."

Pillar is similarly realistic about efforts to shape the intentions of terrorists. A policy of making no concessions, for example, can help at the margins, and perhaps has served to prevent some hostage-taking incidents. But some terrorist attacks "are conducted without any particular concession in mind; the destruction is more of an end itself." When dealing with this extreme brand of terrorism, "there is no way to influence intentions over the long term."

Physical defenses are also no panacea. Although in some instances they have unquestionably saved lives and complicated the work of those who would attack us--Pillar cites the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, where U.S. casualties were held to a minimum--the limitations of such steps are no less obvious. For one thing, the resources poured into physical defense, however enormous, cannot begin to afford protection to all the facilities requiring it. What is more, such security measures may encourage terrorists to shift from secure to more vulnerable targets. In an open society like ours, there will always be an unlimited number of paths by which determined terrorists can wreak havoc and kill people en masse. Particularly difficult to stop--as the Israeli experience teaches us--are terrorists willing to commit suicide in the course of carrying out their assault. In sum, physical defenses at some times and in some places are reasonable and necessary, but in themselves they are not "a solution."

The collection of intelligence is no less problematic, essential though it is as a first step toward more active efforts. For starters, the major technological tools of U.S. intelligence--satellite reconnaissance and the interception of electronic communications--are better suited to monitoring the maneuvers of a conventional adversary than the activities of small terrorist groups, which do not typically possess assets observable from high altitudes or outer space and whose members can elude electronic detection by arranging to communicate in face-to-face meetings.

As for human-source intelligence, that is especially hard to come by in the realm of terrorism. Even if the Clinton administration had not issued controversial guidelines discouraging the CIA from recruiting "unsavory" characters as sources, successful penetrations of terrorist plots would in all likelihood have remained the exception rather than the rule. The obstacles, writes Pillar, arise from the structure and composition of terrorist groups:

Those who are closest to the center of decision-making in a group (and thus
most likely to be witting of all its operations) are the ones least likely
to betray it and thus most resistant to recruitment as intelligence
sources. Besides this problem of motivation, any attempt to recruit such
individuals also faces a problem of access--of getting to them and
cultivating relationships with them. This is an even greater difficulty
with most religiously oriented terrorists of today than it was with, say,
leftists who moved within bourgeois circles in Europe.... A well-placed
human source is the best possible intelligence asset for counterterrorism,
but for the reasons just given, such sources will be very few--and always
will be.

Compounding the problems in gathering intelligence are the difficulties in analyzing it. The challenge goes beyond the hurdle of working through reams of documents in obscure languages like Dari or Pashtu. The greater challenge is to find small grains of wheat in a mountain of chaff. The "sheer magnitude of what there is to cover" includes, in Pillar's words,

not only the whole lineup of existing terrorist groups but also terrorists
who have not yet formed a group ... and groups that have not yet gotten
into terrorism.... [And] what about the plethora of other extreme religious
cults around the world, many of which could represent future terrorist
threats? There are not the resources to cover them all, and culling the
ones that are most likely to pose such a threat is an awesome analytical
task.

From these inherent difficulties, Pillar is impelled to conclude that there "will never be tactical warning of most attempted terrorist attacks, or even most major attempted attacks against U.S. targets."

BLEAK AS all this sounds, Pillar is no less straightforward in enumerating the limitations on active measures. Thus, sanctions and financial controls are not likely to amount to much more than a pinprick, even if they were far more stringent than what we had in place before September 11. Unlike in narcotics smuggling, or money laundering, the salient characteristic of terrorism, writes Pillar, is that it is "cheap." (The first attempt to topple the World Trade Center is estimated to have cost only $400 in total; the second, $500,000 at most.) The small sums involved would make the movement of money difficult to track even if it took place in this country, but most of it does not, and is subject only to the unwatchful eyes of governments rarely eager to cooperate with U.S. authorities. In the end, says Pillar, financial controls are primarily of "symbolic" significance.

Next, the criminal-justice approach, vaunted by several successive American administrations as a clear demonstration of our resolve. On the plus side, putting terrorists on trial does serve to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to the rule of law, and has succeeded in putting a number of dangerous terrorists behind bars. The mere prospect of being apprehended may also deter some, or at least interfere with their operational freedom. But the advantages have to be weighed against the serious disadvantages, of which Pillar enumerates several.

For one thing, the American criminal-justice machine is set in motion only when American citizens are victimized. But "the impact of international terrorism on U.S. interests cannot simply be measured in dead American bodies"; there are incidents abroad in which no Americans are killed but in which failure to intervene robs us of potentially valuable intelligence and also makes us appear callous, indifferent to the terrorism that afflicts our friends and allies but not ourselves.

For another thing, the criminal-justice approach tends to apprehend only the "working-level" operative while permitting the powers behind terrorism--heads of organizations and leaders of sponsoring regimes--to remain at large. This not only leaves the worst perpetrators unpunished but has the additional practical pitfall of giving the public, and perhaps the U.S. government itself, "a misleading sense of closure."

Among our various tools, covert action is, in Pillar's view, the most "effective possibility." He conceives of it not as thriller-style raids by shadowy special forces but as a "painstaking cell-by-cell, terrorist-by-terrorist" campaign, inherently "small-scale," with the U.S. playing a quiet, "behind-the scene" role (providing "encouragement, prodding, information, advice, ... and perhaps monetary or logistical support") while the main work is done by the countries where the terrorists are operating or hiding. Among other advantages of this method of procedure, the "U.S. hand can stay hidden, and the risk of reprisals is minimal."

Though conceding that some groups are so violent and recalcitrant that they "should be exterminated, not engaged," Pillar concludes that assassination of terrorist leaders, currently forbidden by a 1976 executive order, is on the whole a detrimental practice. Not only would it be perceived "as a stooping by the United States ... to the level of the terrorists," but "it would completely undercut the principle that terrorism is a matter of methods, not just of targets or purposes." It would also "shake the confidence of many Americans in the relevant government institutions, resurrecting old suspicions about what the CIA and other U.S. intelligence and security services were doing."

Finally, the open use of military force. This, in Pillar's judgment, is another mixed bag. Retaliatory strikes of the kind we have carried out on three occasions may have some merit, but there is little evidence that they stop terrorists from striking again. Qaddafi, for example, "did not get out of the terrorism business" but continued to hit American targets, using the Japanese Red Army as a surrogate and also directly ordering his agents to place a bomb aboard Pan Am 103. The U.S. attacks against Saddam Hussein in 1993 and bin Laden in 1998 similarly seemed to exercise no deterrent effect. Indeed, far from working to deter, such strikes in Pillar's view can "serve some of the political and organizational purposes of terrorist leaders," increasing publicity for their cause, bolstering their "sense of importance," and reinforcing the message "that the United States is an evil enemy that knows only the language of force." At best, retaliatory strikes can help sustain the spirit of a public demoralized by terrorism, and help mobilize allies by impressing on them our own seriousness. But in the last analysis, writes Pillar, such strikes "will always be primarily message-sending exercises, rather than a physically significant crippling of terrorist capabilities." As for preemptive as opposed to retaliatory strikes, Pillar says little about them other than to note that they would lack "the justification of being a response to a terrorist attack" and for this and other reasons would be "unwise."

PILLAR'S SURVEY, written while on sabbatical from the CIA, is cheerless indeed: none of our major tools promises to work very well, and the United States is bound to remain perpetually vulnerable to surprise attack. But Pillar himself does not appear especially perturbed by the state of affairs he sketches.

True, in some respects the dangers posed by terrorism have been getting worse. The casualty rate rose over the 1990's even as the number of incidents declined, and across the same period the U.S. itself became more of a target, a development reflecting the "increased global reach of terrorists" and the "demonstration" provided by the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and then by Timothy McVeigh that "low-tech methods could cause mass casualties even in the heart of America." But Pillar also notes a more encouraging side of the picture: among Americans, the toll that terrorism has exacted over the past two decades--some 856 killed, including 190 from domestic terrorism--is "tiny" when measured against annual highway deaths or major U.S. wars, and does not even match the death rate from bathtub drownings or lightning strikes.

What such comparisons show, writes Pillar, is that terrorism "tends to have greater psychological impact relative to the physical harm it causes than do other lethal activities." But the public focus on the failures of counterterrorism obscures the victories the U.S. has achieved--among them a dramatic cut in the "frequency of international terrorist incidents worldwide" since the mid-1980's and the rapidity with which a number of major terrorist incidents, including the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, were solved and the perpetrators apprehended, tried, and imprisoned. All told, Pillar concludes, the U.S. track record against terrorism over the past decades has been "remarkable."

As I mentioned early on, Pillar's book was published before September 11. In the wake of September 11, of course, a number of his conclusions and observations--at one point he hails the "drastic reduction in skyjackings" over the past 25 years as a "major success story" of U.S. counterterrorism--seem not just wide of the mark but almost risible. But to pick at Pillar for not having foreseen the future is unfair. Much of what other government officials had to say about terrorism before September 11 is far less wise and clear-eyed than anything in this book.

Just this past July, for example, one of Pillar's colleagues, a former CIA and State Department counterterrorism specialist named Larry C. Johnson, took to the op-ed page of the New York Times to dismiss the idea "that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States," that it is "becoming more widespread and lethal," or that "extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism." Such "fantasies," Johnson wrote, have been generated by "pundits who repeat myths" and "bureaucracies in the military and in intelligence agencies that are desperate to find an enemy to justify budget growth."

Even after September 11 (but before the U.S. began its counterassault on the Taliban and al Qaeda in October), Philip C. Wilcox, Jr., who served in the State Department as ambassador at large for counterterrorism under Madeleine Albright, was insisting in the pages of the New York Review of Books that "armed force" is "usually an ineffective and often counterproductive weapon against terror." What is needed instead, he wrote, is "a concerted international effort, with carefully calculated pressures and incentives--and cooperation from Pakistan, which is essential--to persuade bin Laden's hosts to hand him over for trial"; in other words, diplomacy of the very same kind practiced to no effect by the Clinton administration. As for military action, this has several pronounced disadvantages, wrote Wilcox. For one thing, it "may alienate governments, especially in the Islamic world, whose cooperation we need." For another, it "might kill innocents." It could even "violate international laws, including treaties against terrorism that the U.S. had worked hard to strengthen."

If we turn from the executive branch to another arm of government, mention must be made of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, widely regarded, before he retired last year, as the intellectual giant of the U.S. Senate. Having completed a slow journey from a 1970's neoconservative hawk to a 1990's neoliberal dove, the senator from New York spent much of the last decade campaigning to cut the CIA's budget, and indeed introduced a bill to abolish the agency altogether and turn over its intelligence-gathering functions to the State Department, where the likes of Larry C. Johnson and Philip C. Wilcox, Jr. were running the show. Among the provisions of Moynihan's bill, one in particular stands out. It concerns the entry of aliens into the U.S. and might aptly be labeled the Free Admission for Terrorists clause:

Within two years of the effective date of this Act the United States
Government shall delete from any Lookout List the name of any alien and all
information pertaining to such alien placed on such list because of any
past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such
beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United
States.

There is nothing remotely resembling such terminal astigmatism in Pillar's Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy. Not only is it consistently cogent and sharply reasoned, but at every step of the way Pillar explores the weakness of his own arguments, offering necessary caveats, pointing out areas of uncertainty, and delineating the risks and costs of the policies he himself favors. This is, in sum, a specimen of official thinking at its best. If Pillar's analysis is flawed--and it is deeply flawed--that is because his entire framework for thinking about his subject is misconceived.

TO PILLAR, the metaphor of a "`war' against terrorism" is not an apt one, for from that metaphor "it is a small step to conclude"--mistakenly--"that in this war there is no substitute for victory." Instead, counterterrorism should more properly be likened to "the effort by public-health authorities to control communicable diseases" or the effort to improve "highway safety," where regulators "can reduce deaths and injuries somewhat" by taking action on a variety of fronts but without any false idea of "defeating" the problem. Above all, we must be prepared to compromise. Although some terrorists are "monstrous vermin to be locked up or stamped out," there will be occasions, Pillar writes, "when the greatest contribution the United States can make to counterterrorism will be to swallow hard and ... to shake hands that carry stains of old blood, possibly including American blood." In short, less emphasis on "absolute solutions" and more willingness to seek "accommodation."

Pillar's strategy was demolished on September 11; but even before then, its deficiencies were glaring. To think of terrorism as a public-health or traffic-safety problem, with whatever qualifications, is profoundly to misread it as a political and moral phenomenon. Yes, infectious disease and defective automobile tires do cause death, but they do not do so by deliberate human agency. To lose or blur the distinction between such radically disparate things is to deprive us of the clarity necessary to combat it. In particular, by ruling out preemptive strikes, we allowed terrorists to wage war against us at the time and place of their choosing, while we could never hit them, or the states harboring them, first. In other words, the catastrophe of September 11 was not a matter of inadequate airline security or porous border controls or even insufficient watchfulness by the CIA and the FBI, though all of these conditions and more undoubtedly obtained. Rather, what brought us low was a passive strategy, executed passively.

As the 1990's wore on, the government was well aware that Osama bin Laden was targeting the United States for attack. Here, for example, is the relevant entry in the State Department's 2000 annual report on terrorism, listing al Qaeda's activities over the previous decade, but not yet including the attack on the USS Cole:

* Plotted to carry out terrorist operations against U.S. and Israeli tourists visiting Jordan for millennial celebrations. (Jordanian authorities thwarted the planned attacks and put 28 suspects on trial.)

* Conducted the bombings in August 1998 of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dares Salaam, Tanzania, that killed at least 301 persons and injured more than 5,000 others.

* Claims to have shot down U.S. helicopters and killed U.S. servicemen in Somalia in 1993 and to have conducted three bombings that targeted U.S. troops in Aden, Yemen, in December 1992.

* Linked to the following plans that were not carried out:

* to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his visit to Manila in late 1994,

* simultaneous bombings of the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Manila and
other Asian capitals in late 1994,

* the midair bombing of a dozen U.S. trans-Pacific flights in 1995,

* and to kill President Clinton during a visit to the Philippines in early
1995.

For years, the U.S. government was also aware that Afghanistan and a number of other countries were harboring bin Laden and his associates. It was aware that in some of these countries, terrorist training camps were graduating more than 2,000 men a year, all schooled in the arts of subterfuge and mayhem, all steeped in hatred of the West and preeminently hatred of America. It was aware that bin Laden was attempting to acquire chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons of mass destruction and had built facilities for their production in Afghanistan. And it was aware that bin Laden was himself only a part of a larger picture that included dozens of other affiliated terrorist organizations and more than a half-dozen states giving them succor.

AS THE problem posed by bin Laden grew steadily more acute over the course of the decade, how did we respond? "The tendency to overreact to shocking events, and to fall into complacency in their absence," writes Pillar, "is natural and inevitable." Here, however, was a case where the U.S. fell into complacency in the presence of shocking events. We did, it is true, launch at least one covert operation and one overt military operation against bin Laden. As is obvious, they failed.

The covert operation never got off the ground, and for a no less obvious reason: to rely on the Pakistani intelligence service to carry it out, when Pakistan was a main prop of the Taliban, was to doom it from the start. As for the overt operation, the retaliatory strike on bin Laden launched by Bill Clinton on August 20, 1998 was designed above all to eliminate any risk to the U.S. Thus Clinton opted only to fire a salvo of cruise missiles from a great distance and did not deploy troops on the ground. Next to the politically costly possibility of suffering American casualties, successfully hitting the target was a secondary consideration--and we missed the target. After bin Laden escaped unscathed, there was no follow-up action whatsoever.

At the time, Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, making the best of a mini-operation gone awry, told reporters that the strike had actually achieved its goal: "It is very likely something would have happened had we not done this." In the wake of September 11, asked to comment on the Clinton administration's failure to put bin Laden out of business, Albright said only that "I think we accomplished quite a lot." More honest has been Nancy Soderberg, a former senior aide in Clinton's National Security Council: "In hindsight, it wasn't enough, and anyone involved in policy would have to admit that." *

The U.S. under Clinton and both Bushes "accomplished quite a lot" of other things, too. In gaining the passage of a UN resolution imposing yet more sanctions against the Taliban last year, the U.S., the State Department proudly announced, had secured a "major victory" against terrorism. The opening in New York of the trial of bin Laden operatives accused of bombing the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania was, according to the State Department, still another "major victory." When Qaddafi decided to permit the extradition of his intelligence agents to stand trial in the Netherlands, this was, in the words of a ranking Clinton diplomat, "a real achievement" for U.S. policy. And when the guilty verdict was handed up this past January, the reaction of the Bush administration was the same: a "momentous decision," in the words of a State Department spokesman.

AT THE same time that we were compiling paper victories against our deadliest adversaries, we also declared that we were systematically choking them off. It would be more accurate to say that we were laying bare our own throats.

Consider the financial and immigration controls in place before September 11. "[A]ny contribution to a foreign terrorist organization," the State Department declared in 1997, "regardless of the intended purpose," was henceforth "prohibited." But the same document announcing this blanket proscription went on to explain that because some terrorist groups had been operating "charitable activities such as clinics or schools," Americans could still donate to them if their "contribution is limited to medicine or religious materials." Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group responsible for dozens of suicide bombings within Israel, was specifically singled out as an organization that could be aided in this way, but it was not the only eligible one. Up through September 11 and for a time beyond, it remained perfectly legal to make donations of medications to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, including Cipro--a helpful tool for safely working with anthrax. And one could also contribute texts-"religious materials"--calling for holy war against the United States.

Immigration controls: in theory, members of foreign terrorist organizations were subject to various limitations on their freedom of movement, at least as far as entrance to and residence in the U.S. were concerned. Actual practice was something else. Al Qaeda was officially labeled a terrorist group only in 1999 (a date that in itself speaks volumes about bureaucratic sloth), but as we now know, followers of bin Laden had little difficulty remaining here legally even after they were ostensibly banned.

"Four to five al Qaeda groups have operated in the United States for the last several years," the Washington Post reported on September 23, 2001. These groups, it continued, "are under intensive government surveillance. The FBI has not made any arrests because the group members entered the country legally in recent years and have not been involved in illegal activities since they arrived, the officials said." A few days later, on September 27, a New York Times article helpfully explained the rules governing the issuance of visas to terrorists: "According to the State Department manual for consular officers, participating in the planning or execution of terrorist acts would bar a foreigner from getting a visa, but `mere membership' in a recognized terrorist group would not automatically disqualify a person from entering the United States. Nor would `advocacy of terrorism.'" There was no need, it turns out, for passage of Moynihan's Free Admission for Terrorists provision; it had effectively been the law of the land all along.

Even worse, what the Washington Post and the New York Times have reported is but the tip of an iceberg. Last year, at the behest of Congress, the National Commission on Terrorism, a body of leading experts, issued findings that were duly praised as hitting hard at our complacency. But the report itself, which begins by declaring that "American strategies and policies are basically on the right track," repeatedly illustrates the very attitude it purportedly condemns. Thus, the commission called attention to the "thousands" of students from the countries identified by the State Department as sponsors of terrorism who have been permitted to enter the U.S. to study. But the presence of such students, the report goes on to say, "is not objectionable in itself"; not only do the "vast majority" have "no adverse impact on U.S. national security," but they actually strengthen us by "contribut[ing] to America's diversity." As for the small minority who might in fact be terrorists, the report raises only a very mild alarm about the lack of any functioning system that might tell authorities what they are studying, or whether one of them has suddenly switched his major from, say, business administration to microbiology (with a specialization in anthrax spores), or whether they even remain enrolled in school.

Another startling indicator of lassitude comes from the heart of counterterrorism itself. According to the commission, the guidelines governing the recruitment of "unsavory" sources, introduced by the Clinton administration in 1995, had created a climate within the CIA that was "overly risk-averse" and that contributed "to a marked decline in agency morale unparalleled since the 1970's." That is bad enough; but the morale problem had sources beyond the restrictive guidelines. Again according to the commission, some CIA officers and FBI special agents were being "sued individually" by terrorist suspects for actions taken in the course of their officially sanctioned duties. Instead of representing them in such suits, the government was letting the agents fend for themselves; those who chose to stay on the job were being forced to purchase personal-liability insurance to cover their legal bills.

Did the commission call for an end to this preposterous state of affairs, whereby accused terrorists have been able to turn the tables on their pursuers and bring them to court? Not at all. It asked only that the government provide "full reimbursement of the costs of personal-liability insurance."

ONE CAN easily go on, but the point is clear. Foreign terrorists were waging war on the United States, and the United States was determined, above all, not to wage war back. Instead, we satisfied ourselves with palliatives: compiling lists of terrorist organizations and the states that sponsored them; capturing and extraditing underlings while letting the planners roam free; imposing sanctions replete with exceptions and loopholes; even, on occasion, closing our eyes entirely to the nature of the perils confronting us. It seems very long ago indeed but it was only last year that Madeleine Albright took to the podium of the State Department to announce that countries on the terrorism list would no longer be known as "rogue states." Henceforth, she declared, they were to be called "states of concern." When an ostrich sees one of its natural predators, it rushes to bury its head in the sand. Here was a great power doing the same.

For our refusal to face down adversaries who were openly bleeding us, and for our unwillingness to take even minimal risks in providing for our self-defense, we have now paid a heavy price. In numbers unknown, terrorists have infiltrated our society and struck a powerful blow. More blows are almost certain to follow. And now at last, to paraphrase Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in a not altogether different context, the pitiless crowbar of events has pried open our eyes, and we are attempting to fight back.

But are we too late? More to the point, have we truly changed our ways, or will we soon be back on the road to "accommodation," shaking hands with "moderate" members of the Taliban and cementing a phony alliance with the terrorist-sponsoring states of the Middle East? How many more of us will die before we steel ourselves to do what is necessary in order to secure the victory that many besides Paul Pillar assure us can never come?

* Brookings Institution, 272 pp., $26.95.

[dagger] By law, the State Department must annually compile a list of states that sponsor terrorism; those placed on it are subject to sanctions that bar them from purchasing various items from us--primarily military gear, trucks, aircraft, and some types of dual-use technology. As of last year, seven states fell on the list: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, and Sudan. Though al Qaeda has long been active on its soil, Afghanistan was not included. Instead, through a chain of bureaucratic misfirings, it was given the far milder classification of "not cooperating fully with U.S. anti-terrorism efforts."

* In a series of post-September 11 interviews, Albright has also been contending that the Clinton administration would have lacked popular support for any action against bin Laden more vigorous than what it undertook, and that only with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did public opinion awaken fully to the terrorism menace. "This has been such a horrible event," says Albright, "that it has mobilized people in a way that [the destruction of] two embassies and the Cole didn't."

But this line of reasoning only serves to remind us once again of how heavily the Clinton administration relied on reading opinion polls in formulating vital national-security plans. What is more, even if public opinion had been as pacific as Albright suggests, could not the American people have been aroused to the danger with proper leadership? A long series of polls cited by Pillar show extremely high levels of support throughout the 1990's for a forceful counterterrorism policy; in one representative survey, 79 percent of the public, and 75 percent of "opinion leaders," agreed that "combating international terrorism should be a `very important' goal of the United States."

What these numbers indicate is that not public opinion but the President's preoccupation with the Lewinsky affair throughout 1998--the crucial year when our embassies in Africa were blown up--foreclosed the possibility of a more militant course. As it was, and as Pillar reminds us, even the President's limited retaliatory strike against bin Laden in that year was widely seen at home and abroad as part of a "Wag the Dog scenario" whereby the White House concocted a "a phony war to divert attention from a presidential sex scandal." Even if Clinton's motives in firing cruise missiles at bin Laden were pure (I would give him the benefit of the doubt on that score), we are all now, three years later, beginning to see the real price of his year-long distraction from his duties and his dissipation of presidential authority.

GABRIEL SCHOENFIELD is the senior editor of COMMENTARY.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 American Jewish Committee

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Citation: Gabriel Schoenfeld, "Could September 11 have been averted?" Commentary Magazine, December 2001.
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Counterterrorism before September 11: Gabriel Schoenfeld & critics

Commentary, February 2002.

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN:

During the Reagan administration I was awarded the Seal Medallion of the Central Intelligence Agency. This is among its highest honors and was given, I assume, for eight years' service on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the last four as vice chairman with Barry Goldwater as chairman.

This has mattered to me, and hence I was deeply troubled by Gabriel Schoenfeld's lead article ["Could September 11 Have Been Averted?"] in the December issue, which charges me with having introduced legislation that included what "might aptly be labeled the Free Admission for Terrorists clause."

The bill (never passed) was designed to put an end to the "lookout lists" for persons with "unacceptable opinions." These were a legacy of the McCarthy era, which no longer served our interests in any way. However, Section 203 of the bill provided that "an alien whose entry or proposed activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have a serious adverse foreign-policy consequences [sic] for the United States is excludable." The bill went further to state, "Nothing in this title requires the admission ... of any alien believed to be a national-security threat to the United States" [emphasis added].

Mr. Schoenfeld defames me. As a friend of COMMENTARY, I am desolate.

The Woodrow Wilson Center Washington, D.C.

PAUL R. PILLAR:

While I am flattered by the attention that Gabriel Schoenfeld gives to my book Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy and the favorable contrasts he makes with other supposed purveyors of "official thinking" on counterterrorism, some of what he extracts from the book misrepresents its message. A reader of Mr. Schoenfeld's article would be excused for mistakenly thinking that I espouse a viewpoint that is smugly content with past successes against terrorism, and coldly clinical in looking at terrorist attacks as no different from other causes of death.

A major theme of the book is that Americans have too often slid into complacency during periods in which terrorism has been out of the headlines, and that it is a mistake to believe that the passage of time without a major terrorist incident indicates the problem has lessened. It is all the more a mistake during an era in which, as the book discusses, international terrorism has become increasingly threatening in several respects: more anti-American, more lethal, and with a wider geographic reach, including the United States. That I considered counterterrorist policy, even before September 11, to be an appropriate subject for a book-length analysis--with numerous recommendations for making the policy better--speaks to my belief that previous success is not enough.

Another theme is that the significance of terrorism cannot be measured simply by comparing the number of casualties with other sources of death and injury (as some who downplayed terrorism before September 11 liked to do). One reason it cannot is that, as Mr. Schoenfeld correctly states, the slaughter of innocents for a political purpose is simply not morally and emotionally equivalent to other reasons our citizens die. Another reason is that terrorism has numerous indirect costs, including the costs of trying to protect against it.

It was in discussing those costs that I mentioned aviation security and the previous paucity of hijackings--a mention that was not, as Mr. Schoenfeld's context-less quotations might lead one to believe, a judgment about the adequacy of that security. Instead, it was an illustration of the point that even in the absence of terrorist attacks, we have spent major resources to try to prevent such attacks, and such expenditures must be counted among the indirect costs of terrorism. As I wrote on the same page from which Mr. Schoenfeld drew the quotes in question, "the very fact that so many resources are consumed--however necessary or unnecessary, effective or ineffective, any particular countermeasure may be--is itself a reason for the subject to command policy attention."

Mr. Schoenfeld expresses dislike for a couple of my analogies but does not mention or refute the points they are used to make. Counterterrorism is like many other issues of public policy, including highway safety, in that we must attack the problem by using every available tool, each of which has something to contribute but no one of which is sufficient by itself. In short, there is no silver bullet. Does Mr. Schoenfeld disagree? If so, what is his silver bullet?

Counterterrorism is also like public-health efforts against communicable diseases, not because deaths from disease are morally or psychologically equivalent to deaths from terrorism, which they are not, but instead in the sense that each subject involves a constantly changing array of threats. As one disease or terrorist group is vanquished, another emerges. Our current terrorist foes do not represent an end to the evolution and transformation of international terrorism.

I wish that a strong commitment to "victory" over terrorism, and actions that express that commitment forcefully, would eliminate the problem, as Mr. Schoenfeld suggests. But wishing it does not make it true, and believing it can have two unfortunate effects. One is a tendency to lash out with acts that show how strong our commitment is but may be ineffective, or even counterproductive, in saving lives from future terrorism (for example, military strikes that are made against targets not as suitable as those in Afghanistan and that may jeopardize the behind-the-scenes cooperation with foreign partners that is critical to dismantling terrorist infrastructures).

The other effect is to undermine the kind of public support that is most needed in fighting terrorism: sustained, long-term support, given without expectation that the need for it will end any time soon. The delusion that we can "win" a war against terrorism in general is an invitation to the nation, once it has achieved a victory of sorts over al Qaeda or whoever is the other foe of the moment, to slip back to the inattention that has too often characterized American attitudes toward terrorism.

Washington, D.C.

DAVID G. EPSTEIN:

I am in overall agreement with Gabriel Schoenfeld's reflections on terrorism. But the very last sentence of his essay, referring to a "victory" over terrorism, distresses me. I take it to mean that we should strive to replicate what we accomplished in World War II, and I do not see that as realistic or useful.

I spent thirteen years as chief of the training division in the Office of Anti-Terrorism Assistance at the Department of State. We worked with the security and police forces of over 60 countries that were experiencing some aspect of a terrorist threat, including Israel, Jordan, Greece, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Argentina, Ecuador, and Pakistan. Our problems began with the questionable competence of the official gun-bearers of some of these governments. Also not beyond doubt was their willingness and/or ability to get serious about countering bombings and assassinations. In some nations, the security services resorted to methods that our government found extremely difficult or impossible to support. In others, there was no possibility of reaching a political compromise or of negotiations with dissident elements, short of a willingness to destroy the national coherence of the state. Turkey and Spain, which still face secessionist movements, are but two examples. Israel is a third, for obviously different reasons. In Egypt, Jordan, and again Turkey, forces intent on halting the Westernization of public and private life are by no means averse to violence.

As the major force behind Westernization in the world, or as an indispensable supporter of existing governments, the United States has become an enemy to many groups, some of which engage in terrorism. We cannot, and will not, send expeditionary forces to deal with each of these threats. In many cases, the indigenous police and military forces will remain unable to do the job themselves. What then?

The answer is that we need to climb down from that typical American conceit which propels us to believe that all military problems are solvable before Christmas. President Bush has certainly not encouraged us to believe that the struggle will be quick and easy. We must steel ourselves to the reality that we have no hope of total victory, nor do we have any choice except to continue the war.

San Diego, California

L. PAUL BREMER, III:

Gabriel Schoenfeld is right that the September 11 attacks represented a calamitous failure of intelligence and law enforcement, immigration and border control, and aviation security. As he notes, these failures grew out of a counterterrorist policy that had become progressively more risk-averse at precisely the time that dangers were increasing.

Our enemies learned from the Gulf war that America cannot be effectively attacked using conventional forces. So groups or states that hate us are tempted to use unconventional tactics. Terrorism is the quintessential form of unconventional warfare. This is why developing an effective counterterrorist strategy is fundamental to American national-security policy. Yet during the 1990's, the American government ignored the repeated warnings of analysts and terrorists themselves about "the changing threat of international terrorism." That is the title of the report to the President issued in June 2000 by the National Commission on Terrorism that I chaired. The report warned of the possibility of mass-casualty attacks on American soil, and we particularly singled out the threat of bioterror.

The proper goal of a counterterrorist strategy is to prevent attacks. To do this, you need to know about them ahead of time. Only a spy can tell you that, and therefore the key to success is good human intelligence. The single most important recommendation of our commission was to repeal the Clinton-imposed rules restricting the CIA's recruitment of terrorist spies. Regrettably, nothing was done about this issue until months after September 11. Astonishingly, the CIA was still defending these old rules as late as November.

Mr. Schoenfeld asserts that it is a mistake to consider terrorism largely a law-enforcement issue rather than a national-security issue. The commission agreed, and pointed to the meager results of the government's decade-long pursuit of the Pan Am 103 terrorists. And when the U.S. does resort to military action, it must be decisive, not the kind of pinprick responses that characterized the Clinton years. Lobbing a few cruise missiles revealed our weakness, not our resolve.

Could the September attacks have been avoided? Perhaps, if:

* the U.S. government had had better and more aggressive intelligence and law enforcement;

* we had established better controls over our borders;

* we had moved earlier to shut down the terrorist bases in Afghanistan; and

* our leaders had paid more attention to the real dangers of mass-casualty terrorism inside the United States.

All of these steps were recommended by the National Commission on Terrorism. Not a single one was acted on before September 11.

Washington, D.C.

Gabriel Schoenfeld

Daniel Patrick Moynihan levels a very serious accusation, which I shall answer in due course. But I want to begin by thanking Paul R. Pillar for his letter and for the opportunity it affords to explore our differences more fully. I certainly did not mean to suggest--nor do I believe I did suggest--that Mr. Pillar was "smugly content" with past successes or "coldly clinical" about deaths from terrorist violence. Although I have my disagreements with him, and with his book, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, written while on sabbatical from the Counterterrorism Center of the CIA, I gave the book itself rather high marks.

It is true that I dislike Mr. Pillar's preferred metaphors for the campaign against terrorism, despite the qualifications he attaches to them. But my real quarrel with him is about the one "metaphor" he firmly opposes: namely, that of a war on terrorism. " If counterterrorism is conceived as a war," Mr. Pillar writes in his book,

it is a small step to conclude that in this war there is no substitute for
victory and thus no room for compromise. The nature of terrorism and of how
American public attention to it has evolved in recent years have made the
topic prone to this simplistic pattern of thought. Americans ... have had
more reason to think of terrorism simply as an evil to be eradicated,
rather than a more complex phenomenon with sides that may need to be
reckoned with differently.

My own "simplistic pattern of thought" tells me that terrorism is inescapably an "evil to be eradicated." Indeed, in a world with weapons of mass destruction, the events of September 11 would seem to make its eradication an imperative for our survival. To me, the key question at this juncture is not whether but how best to accomplish that goal.

In his book, Mr. Pillar looks through the counterterrorism toolkit and shows that, as he writes in his letter, each of the tools "has something to contribute but no one ... is sufficient by itself." If we are to have any hope of containing terrorism, he concludes, all the instruments must be used together. He also wonders what I would do differently and better. What is my "silver bullet"?

I do not have one. But the U.S. military does have a variety of silver bullets, including B-52 bombers, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Green Berets, Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles, Navy SEALs, and so forth and so on. And this brings me to the subject on which I expressed my sharpest disagreement with Mr. Pillar, but about which he is now silent. I am referring to the use of armed force to strike preemptively against terrorists and the countries that harbor them, a policy option that in his book he unconditionally rules out as both "unlikely and unwise."

The long and the short of it is that before September 11, Mr. Pillar opposed not only the metaphor of a war against terrorism but the very idea of waging such a war. Yet it was our failure to embark on such a war, despite our certain knowledge that a half-dozen or more states were giving safe haven to terrorists, and despite an escalating series of attacks on our country by some of those selfsame terrorists, that brought us to catastrophe.

Can we defeat our adversaries in such a war? Both Mr. Pillar and David G. Epstein express serious doubts. Obviously, if one defines victory as eliminating all terrorism once and forever, they are correct. But I would settle for a more modest conception: we can declare a major (if not a final) victory when the U.S. government no longer has reason to compile lists of states that sponsor and give sanctuary to terrorists.

That day will arrive only if, as President Bush has urged, we "direct every resource at our command--every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of warm to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network." In calling the idea of winning a war against terrorism a "delusion," Mr. Pillar, now a high-ranking official at the National Intelligence Council, seems to be at variance with his boss on this central point.

Needless to say, I agree with Mr. Pillar that declarations of victory come with a danger: after winning one or another significant battle, we might indeed "slip back to the inattention that has too often characterized American attitudes toward terrorism." This danger must be resisted; but it is hardly a reason not to fight and crush those who would destroy us.

Turning now to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, I thank him for expressing agreement with me on so many points (some of which I did not even make), but I regret that he does not respond to or even acknowledge the criticisms I leveled at the national commission that he chaired. Among other things, its report began with a declaration that "U.S. counterterrorism strategy is on the right track"--which is, to say the least, rather at odds with Ambassador Bremer's present statement that our counterterrorism policy was a "calamitous failure."

FINALLY, DID I misrepresent or distort the contents of the bill introduced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan? His particular charge is that, in pointing to a provision that I labeled a "Free Admission for Terrorists" clause, I failed to call attention to exceptions to that clause contained in the bill itself. Those exceptions, writes Senator Moynihan, would have granted the Secretary of State full discretion to keep out an undesirable alien if he had "reasonable ground" to fear "adverse foreign-policy consequences" or if he concluded that the alien posed a "national-security threat" to the United States.

I did indeed fail to mention those provisions--but not because I was unaware of them, and not because I was straining to present Senator Moynihan and his legislation in an unfavorable light, let alone a defamatory one. Rather, I declined to mention them because they are devoid of meaning and, in fact, self-nullifying. For the exceptions themselves contain exceptions that would effectively eliminate all of the government's discretion.

To help readers judge for themselves, here in their entirety are the relevant passages of Senator Moynihan's bill. Section 202 is the provision I cited in my article. Section 203 (i) and Section 204 are what he complains I omitted. Section 203 (ii) and the last few words of Section 204, both italicized here, are the two exceptions to the exception that he himself omits in his letter.

SECTION 202. Within two years of the effective date of this Act the United States Government shall delete from any Lookout List the name of any alien and all information pertaining to such alien placed on such list because of any past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States.

SECTION 203. Subsection (c) of United States Code, title 8, section 1182 is amended to read --

(i) IN GENERAL--An alien whose entry or proposed activities in the United
States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have a
serious adverse foreign-policy consequences [sic] for the United States is
excludable.

(ii) EXCEPTION--An alien shall not be excludable or subject to restrictions
or conditions on entry into the United States under clause (i) because of
the alien's past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or
associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful
within the United States.

SECTION 204. Nothing in this title requires the admission of or the deletion of any information pertaining to any alien believed to be a national-security threat to the United States or whose name was placed on any Lookout List for a reason other than their past, current, or anticipated beliefs, statements, or associations.

Taken in sum, what would these provisions have meant had they been enacted into law? Consider a hypothetical case, that of a Saudi Arabian citizen who had applied for a visa to enroll in a flight-training school in Florida and who was known to have stated publicly that he revered Osama bin Laden and all his works--but who had done nothing else to attract the attention of the U.S. government.

Because it is incontrovertibly lawful in this country to say that one reveres Osama bin Laden, if our hypothetical gentleman's name had been on a lookout list, the U.S. government, under this bill, would have been compelled to remove it, to expunge all information about him from it, and to admit him into the United States.

The exception to the exception, as outlined in Section 203 (ii), makes it plain that even the Secretary of State would have had no basis for barring entry to such a person, for he would have been forbidden to consider this gentleman's "past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States." The last eleven words of Section 204 repeat this same restriction on the government's discretionary authority.

In sum, I presented Senator Moynihan's legislation fairly and fully. More, I believe my criticism of this clause in his bill was entirely legitimate, and I am dumbfounded that he persists in calling lookout lists based upon "unacceptable opinions" a relic of the McCarthy era that "no longer served our interests in any way." Such lookout lists are a critical national-security tool, one that, as I see it, needs to be enhanced, not abolished.

Some opinions are unacceptable, and it is foolhardy if not outright suicidal to welcome those--men like Mohammed Atta and Zacarias Moussaoui who propound them. The idea that what is lawful in our free and open society should be a benchmark for admitting strangers into our midst is both dangerous and absurd. Why Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a man with so many distinguished accomplishments to his name (and someone whose performance at the United Nations, some two-and-a-half decades ago, I admired enough to drop out of college to volunteer in his first campaign for the U.S. Senate), would be contesting this point even now, only months after our country suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in history, is to me a source of profound consternation and dismay.

COPYRIGHT 2002 American Jewish Committee

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Citation: Commentary Magazine, "Counterterrorism before September 11: Gabriel Schoenfeld & critics," February 2002.
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The perils of (and for) an imperial America

By Charles William Maynes.
Foreign Policy , Summer 1998, Iss. 111.

In their public discourse, Americans have come to the point where it is hard to find a foreignpolicy address by any prominent figure in either party that does not make constant reference to the United States as the indispensable nation, the sole superpower, the uniquely responsible state, or the lone conscience of the world. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, editors at the conservative Weekly Standard, have unabashedly called upon the United State to take the lead in establishing a "benevolent global hegemony"though how benevolent it would be is unclear since they propose to attain it through a massive increase in U.S. defence spending. Likewise, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his new book, The Grand Chessboard, speaks openly of America's allies and friends as "vassals and tributaries." He urges, only slightly tounge-incheek, an imperial geostrategy designed "to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries plaint and protected , and to keep the barbarians from coming together." In the pages of this very magazine, to keep trid Rothkopf, a former senior member of the Clinton administration, expressed this mood of national sele-satisfaction in a form that would be embarrassing to put into print, were is not so ardently felt: "Americans should not deny the fact that of all the nations in the world, theirs is the most just and the best model for the future." (See "In Praise of Cultural Imperialism?" in FOREIGN POLICY 107.)

The taproot of this growing geopolitical delirium, of course, is the extraordinary range of America's current position internationally. Probably not since classic Rome or ancient China has a single power so towered over its known rivals in the international system: Today, only the U.S. military retains the ability to reach into any region in the world within mere hours. The U.S. economy has become the envy of the world. Others continue to copy our political system, hiring our media handlers and campaign strategists to work in countries whose languages and cultures they barely understand. Finally, the "soft" power of U.S. culture reigns supreme internationally. For what it is worth, few foreign pop stars can rival America's Madonna or Michael Jackson, and American cinema smothers all foreign competitors.

Another characteristic of U.S. power deserves mention: The price America exacts from its "vassals" is more tolerable than the one previous imperial powers extracted from their subjects. The United States imposes extraordinarily light military burdens on its allies. Britain and France made their colonies fight for the motherland in World Wars I and II, and the colonies provided many of the soldiers that policed their empires. In the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf Wars, America permitted its Japanese and European allies to watch largely as bystanders, while American troops did most of the fighting. In a post-Cold War world, the United States remains willing to pick up a totally disproportionate share of the expense of maintaining the common defense for the indefinite future. By some estimates, the costs for NATO expansion could run as high as $125 billion by 2012, prompting European commentators, such as former German defense planner Walther Stuetzle, to declare that the United States must be prepared to "pick up the tab." What other imperial power would have remained silent while its allies made it clear by statements and actions that they would not pay a single extra penny for a common alliance objective such as NATO expansion?

Former imperial powers also made sure their colonies served the economic interests of the metropole, which maintained a monopoly in key industries and enforced schemes of imperial preference to favor the home economy. In contrast, America's imperial strategy has evolved over the years into that of importer and financier of last resort. The United States has without much debate assumed the role of world economic stabilizer, often adversely affecting its own interests. America's political tradition of constitutional democracy, much more secure after the civil rights movement, also makes it difficult for Washington to follow a harsh imperial policy, even if it were so inclined. With their belief in the "white man's burden" or "la mission civilatrice," the European powers-and America for that matter in the conquest of the Philippineswere able to display, when necessary, extraordinary cruelty in the pursuit of stability. Now, in its recent imperial wars, America has been concemed about press reports of a few civilian casualties.

Ironically, of all the burdens the United States now imposes on its foreign subjects and vassals, Madonna may be the heaviest. Few foreigners accept the American position that market forces alone should dictate cultural patterns-that if the citizens want to buy it, the priests and professors should retire to their monasteries and libraries and let it happen. Many foreigners secretly sympathize with the French or Russian or Israeli position that they have the duty to protect their admittedly great cultures, even if doing so occasionally violates some of the finer points of free trade or speech. Indeed, one wonders whether American officials would cling so ardently to their own position regarding international free trade in cultural goods if it turned out that market forces were in fact overwhelming the United States with, say, the culture of the Middle East or Latin America. The number of Spanish-speaking immigrants arriving in the country, and their desire to hold on to their culture and language, represent a clear market test, yet Americans become very disturbed when these new entrants insist on maintaining their use of Spanish. The "English only" movement or the race to install V-chips in home television sets to control what minors may view each suggests that many Americans harbor some of the same concerns about preserving their culture as the French and others.

The cultural issue apart, American hegemony is benign by historical standards. Therefore, it is fair to ask, as Kagan has in several earlier articles: Why not entrench that hegemony for the betterment of all humankind? After all, one can acknowledge that one's own country is not always as principled, consistent, benign, or wise as the national self-image persistently requires that its leaders regularly affirm, yet still reach the conclusion that while American hegemony may not be the best of all possible worlds, it may be the best of all likely worlds. In other words, American hegemony may be better than any alternative hegemonic arrangement, and, historically, hegemony has proved preferable to chaos.

THE CASE AGAINST U.S. HEGEMONY

What then is the case against Kagan's call for American hegemony? It can be summed up in the following manner: domestic costs, impact on the American character, international backlash, and lost opportunities.

Domestic Costs

Many like Kagan who support a policy of world hegemony often assert that the domestic cost of such a policy is bearable. They point out that the percentage of GNP devoted to American defense, around 3 percent, is the lowest it has been since Pearl Harbor, and the country is now much richer. True, the United States still spends more for defense than all the other major powers combined, but it is hard to argue that it would be unable to continue carrying this burden or even to increase it.

What proponents of this school of thought fail to point out is that the defense spending to which we are now committed is not terribly relevant to the policy of global hegemony that they wish to pursue. In an unintended manner, this point emerged during the last presidential campaign. Senator Robert Dole, the Republican nominee, publicly complained that his old unit, the lOth Mountain Division, had carried the brunt of America's post-Cold War peacekeeping responsibilities in places such as Haiti and Bosnia, and its men and women had gone months without rest or home leave.

He was, of course, right in his complaint. But the Clinton administration could not do much to reduce the burden placed on the lOth Mountain Division, for the United States has very few other units available for peacekeeping duty. If America is to strive to be the world's hegemon, in other words, not only will the U.S. defense effort have to be radically restructured, but the costs incurred will mount exponentially unless we are willing to cut existing sections of our military, a point on which the new hegemonists are largely silent. The U.S. commitment in Bosnia provides a glimpse into the future. The burden of U.S. involvement, initially estimated at $1.5 billion, surpassed $7 billion in April 1998 and will continue to grow for years to come.

Before the manipulation of budget estimates started in connection with the effort to gain Senate ratification of NATO expansion, even the most conservative estimates suggested that American taxpayers would be compelled to contribute $25 billion to $35 billion per year over the next 10 to li; years to pay for NATO expansion. The true costs may well be much higher. And NATO expansion is just one of the expensive building blocks required to pursue a policy of hegemony.

There is no clear geographical limit to the obligations that a quest for hegemony would impose. The American desire to remain the dominant security power in Europe drove Washington, against its will, to establish, much like the Austrians or the Turks at the beginning of this century, an imperial protectorate over the former Yugoslavia. Now, as officials spot disorder in other important parts of the globe, there is official talk of using NATO troops in northern or central Africa, if necessary. Corridor chatter has even begun among some specialists about the need to send troops to the Caspian area to secure the oil there. Where will the interventionist impulse end? How can it end for a power seeking global hegemony?

The costs of hegemony will not just be military. Modem-day advocates of hegemony have lost sight of one of the crucial characteristics of the golden age of American diplomacy: From 1945 to 1965, America's dominant image rested more on the perception of its role as the world's Good Samaritan than as the world's policeman. Nearly 60 years ago, Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, issued one of the most famous calls for American dominance internationally. He understood that a quest for world leadership requires more than a large army. In his famous essay "The American Century," Luce urged his fellow citizens to spend at least 10 percent of every defense dollar in a humanitarian effort to feed the world. He recognized that to dominate, America must be seen not only as stronger but better. The United States needs to do its share internationally in the nonmilitary field and now, as the sad state of the foreign affairs budget demonstrates, it frankly does not. But is the country willing to pick up the nonmilitary costs of a quest for global hegemony?

With their neglect of this issue, today's new hegemonists are almost a parody of the Kaiser and his court at the beginning of this century. Like their German cousins, the new hegemonists are fascinated by military might, intoxicated by the extra margin of power America enjoys, and anxious to exploit this moment to dominate others. They want to reverse almost completely the direction American foreign policy has taken for most of the period following World War II. America's goal has always been to lift others up. Now, it will be to keep them down. In Kagan's own words, American power should be deployed to control or prevent the "rise of militant anti-American Muslim fundamentalism in North Africa and the Middle East, a rearmed Germany in a chaotic Europe, a revitalized Russia, a rearmed Japan in a scramble for power with China in a volatile East Asia."

His choice of words is instructive. America's goal would be not simply to protect this country and its citizens from actions that militant Islam might direct against American interests but to prevent the very rise of militant Islam. We would not only stand up to Russia were it to become hostile to U.S. interests but would try to prevent the very revival of the Russian people and state. And we would attempt to control the spread of "chaos" in the international system. All these tasks would require the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of other states to a degree not seen since the immediate postwar period, when the United States and the Soviet Union stationed their vast land armies on the soil of former enemy territories.

One of the most bitter lessons of the Cold War was that when American and Soviet soldiers sought to impose a political order on populations (or at least resolute parts of them) that resisted such effortsnamely in Afghanistan, Korea, and Vietnam-casualties began to mount. If the United States attempts a policy of global hegemony, Kagan and other proponents cannot claim it will incur low costs by citing the size of the current defense budget or referring only to the dollars spent. The character of that budget will have to change, and the price will be not only in dollars spent but in bloodshed. Is the country prepared for that, particularly when those asked to die will be told it is in the name of hegemony, not national defense? Will Americans be comfortable with an image of their country as the power always brandishing the clenched fist and seldom extending the helping hand?

Impact on the American Character

A quest for hegemony would have a corrosive effect on the country's internal relations. The United States could carry out such a quest only by using the volunteer army, which fills its ranks predominately with people who come from a segment of America that is less internationally minded than those who wish to use the U.S. military for geopolitical purposes. Former secretary of labor Robert Reich, among others, has pointed out that America is developing into two societies-not so much black versus white but cosmopolitan versus national, or between those who have directly, even extravagantly, reaped the benefits in recent years from the new globalized economy and those who have paid its price in terms of military service, endangered jobs, and repressed wages. The former may represent between 15 to 25 percent of the population. Its representatives travel widely, speak foreign languages (or at least can afford to hire a translator), and feel as at home in Rome or Tokyo as they do in New York. Almost none of their sons and daughters serve in the U.S. military. Facing them are the vast majority of citizens who will no doubt be asked to pay the price of their country's policy of hegemony.

Can America embark on a quest for global primacy with those responsible for pursuing this course paying almost no price for its execution? Will American democracy permit a situation like that of ancient Rome, where the rich sit in the stands to watch the valiant exertions of those less fortunate below?

In the early days of the post-Cold War period, it was not at all uncommon to hear foreign-policy practitioners refer to the American military in terms that suggested they were modern Hessians, available for deployment to any corner of the globe that policymakers wished to pacify or control. Ironically, prominent among the new interventionists were a number of humanitarian-aid officials-who are normally not enthusiastic about military deployments abroad-arguing that since the U.S. army consisted of volunteers who had accepted the king's shilling and, after all, had little to do in a post-Cold War world, they should be ready to serve in humanitarian missions, even if these were not related to core American security concerns.

The ease of victory in the Gulf War contributed to this new enthusiasm for the use of military force. If Iraq, with one of the most powerful armies in the world, could be so easily subdued, how could there be much danger or pain in deploying U.S. troops into the growing number of ethnic or religious conflicts emerging around the world? After the disaster in Somalia, one heard less of such talk. But empires need to have either Hessians or a populace anxious to march off to war. Fortunately, America has neither. Not to understand this fundamental point risks causing a major political explosion domestically at some unexpected moment in the future. Of course, the argument that the United States should not seek global hegemony does not mean America should not work with others to develop a shared response to some of the new challenges on the international agenda . . but that is a different subject and article.

International Backlash

Suppose, despite all of these obstacles, a quest for world hegemony could succeed. We still should not want it. As Henry Adams warned in his autobiography, the effect of power on all men is "the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies." Already the surplus of power that America enjoys is beginning to metastasize into an arrogance toward others that is bound to backfire. Since 1993, the United States has imposed new unilateral economic sanctions, or threatened legislation that would allow it do so, 60 times on 35 countries that represent over 40 percent of the world's population.

Increasingly, in its relations even with friends, the United States, as a result of the interplay between administration and Congress, has begun to command more and listen less. It demands to have its way in one international forum after another. It imperiously imposes trade sanctions that violate international understandings; presumptuously demands national legal protection for its citizens, diplomats, and soldiers who are subject to criminal prosecution, while insisting other states forego that right; and unilaterally dictates its view on UN reforms or the selection of a new secretary general.

To date, the United States has been able to get away with these tactics. Nevertheless, the patience of others is shortening. The difficulty the United States had in rounding up support, even from its allies, in the recent confrontation with Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was an early sign of the growing pique of others with America's new preemptive arrogance. So was the manner in which the entire membership of the European Union immediately rallied behind the French in the controversy over a possible French, Malaysian, and Russian joint investment in the Iranian oil industry that would violate America's unilaterally announced sanctions policy against Iran. In March 1998, while reflecting on President Bill Clinton's visit to South Africa, President Nelson Mandela strongly rejected a trade agreement with the United States that would limit transactions with any third country, declaring that "we resist any attempt by any country to impose conditions on our freedom of trade."

Lost Opportunities

Perhaps the biggest price Americans would pay in pursuing world hegemony is the cost in lost opportunities. Even those who propose such a policy of hegemony acknowledge that it cannot succeed over the longer run. As Kagan himself has written, we cannot "forget the truism that all great powers must some day fall." One day, in other words, some country or group of countries will successfully challenge American primacy.
A Sanctioned World

There is an alternative. We could use this unique post-Cold War moment to try to hammer out a new relationship among the great powers. Today, the most inadequately examined issue in American politics is precisely whether or not post-Cold War conditions offer us a chance to change the rules of the international game.

Certainly, there is no hope of changing the rules of the game if we ourselves pursue a policy of world hegemony. Such a policy, whether formally announced or increasingly evident, will drive others to resist our control, at first unsuccessfully but ultimately with effect. A policy of world hegemony, in other words, will guarantee that in time America will become outnumbered and overpowered. If that happens, we will once and for all have lost the present opportunity to attempt to change the rules of the game among the great powers.

Why should we believe there could be an opportunity to alter these rules? There are at least three reasons:

War no longer pays for the great powers. For most of history, wars have paid. The victor ended up with more land and people. Over time, almost all of the latter accepted the sway of the new occupier. That is how most of the great nations of the world were built. With the rise of modern nationalism, however, it has become more and more difficult to absorb conquered territories without ethnic cleansing. Successful recent examples of seizing territory include the Russian, Polish, and Czech border changes after World War II, which involved brutal exchanges of populations. Unsuccessful examples of seizing territory include those in which the indigenous populations have remained, such as Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Indonesia's occupation of East Timor, and India's incorporation of Kashmir. Moreover, although ethnic cleansing does still take place today in a number of locations worldwide, those carrying out such practices are not the great powers but countries still in the process of nation-building along nineteenthcentury lines. For most of the great states, in other words, war is not an option for power or wealth seeking. War is reserved for defense.

Instead of seeking international power and influence through external expansion, most established powers now seek both through internal development. Postwar Germany and Japan have confirmed that these are more reliable paths to greater international prominence than the ones pursued since 1945 by Britain and France, both of which have relied on military power to hold their place in the international system only to see it decline.

The behavior of great states in the international system that have lost traditional forms of power in recent decades has been remarkably responsible. Postwar Germany and Japan, as well as post-Cold War Russia, have all accepted being shorn of territories with notably few repercussions. A principal reason was the treatment of the first two by their rivals and the hope of the third that the rest of the world would not exploit its weaknesses so as to exclude Russia from the European system, but would instead take aggressive steps to incorporate it. In this regard, a policy of hegemony sends exactly the wrong message, particularly if one of our purposes is to prevent Russia from ever "reviving" in a way that threatens us.

Regrettably, as we approach the millennium, we are almost at the point of no return in our post-Cold War policy. We are moving along a path that will forsake the chance of a lifetime to try to craft a different kind of international system. Like France at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain in the middle, and Germany at the end, the United States does much to influence international behavior by the model it sets. It is still not too late to make a real effort to write a new page in history. If we pass up this opportunity, history will judge us very harshly indeed.

WANT TO KNOW MORE?

In their article "Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy" (Interational Security, Winter 1996-97), Barry Posen of MIT and Andrew Ross of the U.S. Naval War College analyze the principal theoretical trends that have emerged in response to America's "unipolar" moment. In particular, the authors examine the practical policy implications of neo-isolationism, selective engagement, cooperative security, and U.S. hegemony. By making use of historical case studies, Josef Joffe, editorial page editor of the Suddeutsche Zeitung, suggests that post-Cold War America could learn a lesson or two from imperial Germany. In his article "Bismarck or Britain?" (International Security, Spring 1995), Joffe argues that the United States should update and improve the Bismarckian model of great-power relations by pursuing alliances that inexorably link the welfare of others with America's and that discourage foreign nations from coalescing into rival power blocs.

In "Less is More" (National Interest, Spring 1996), Christopher Layne of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government relies on East Asia as a case study to argue that the United States should pursue a "minimalist grand strategy" that depends upon "global and regional power balances to contain newly emerging powers." Because of America's "relative immunity" from external threats, Layne endorses a "buck-passing" strategy that encourages regional U.S. allies to take the lead in dealing with East Asian security issues. In his book Isolationism Reconfigured (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), the late Eric Nordlinger of Brown University argues that America's military supremacy offers a unique opportunity to cut defense spending, end security alliances, and address problems primarily through multinational institutions.

Previous articles in FOREIGN POLICY that have addressed the issue of American primacy in the international system include: Albert Coll's "America as the Grand Facilitator" (Summer 1992), Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz's "American Hegemony: Without an Enemy" (Fall 1993), and Charles William Maynes"Bottom-Up Foreign Policy" (Fall 1996).

For a specific case study of the spiraling costs and potential pitfalls of American hegemony, readers should consult NATO Enlargement: Illusions and Reality, edited by Ted Galen Carpenter and Barbara Conry (Washington: CATO Institute,1998). Richard Haass, director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, warns of the potential pitfalls of unilateral American sanctions, in his article "Sanctioning Madness" (Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997).

Several recent public-opinion surveys illustrate the widening gap in attitudes between the general public and foreign-policy practitioners, particularly with regard to America's perceived duties and obligations as a world leader: American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1995, edited by John Rielly (Chicago: Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 1995), America's Place in the World II (Washington: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, October 1997), and The Foreign Policy Gap, by Steven Kull, I.M. Destler, and Clay Ramsay (College Park: Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, October 1997).

CHARLES WILLIAM MAYNES is president of the Eurasia Foundation.

Copyright Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Summer 1998

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Citation: Charles Williams Maynes, "The perils of (and for) an imperial America," Foreign Policy, Summer 1998.
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