Expanding War, Contracting Meaning: The Next President and the Global
War on Terror
http://www.truthout.org/103008U
A week ago, I had a long conversation with a four-star U.S. military
officer who, until his recent retirement, had played a central role
in
directing the global war on terror. I asked him: what exactly is the
strategy that guides the Bush administration's conduct of this war?
His dismaying, if not exactly surprising, answer: there is none.
President Bush will bequeath to his successor the ultimate self-
licking ice cream cone. To defense contractors, lobbyists, think-
tankers, ambitious military officers, the hosts of Sunday morning
talk
shows, and the Douglas Feith-like creatures who maneuver to become
players in the ultimate power game, the Global War on Terror is a
boon, an enterprise redolent with opportunity and promising to extend
decades into the future.
Yet, to a considerable extent, that very enterprise has become a
fiction, a gimmicky phrase employed to lend an appearance of cohesion
to a panoply of activities that, in reality, are contradictory,
counterproductive, or at the very least beside the point. In this
sense, the global war on terror relates to terrorism precisely as the
war on drugs relates to drug abuse and dependence: declaring a state
of permanent "war" sustains the pretense of actually dealing with a
serious problem, even as policymakers pay lip-service to the
problem's
actual sources. The war on drugs is a very expensive fraud. So, too,
is the Global War on Terror.
Anyone intent on identifying some unifying idea that explains
U.S.
actions, military and otherwise, across the Greater Middle East is in
for a disappointment. During World War II, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt laid down "Germany first" and then "unconditional
surrender"
as core principles. Early in the Cold War, the Truman administration
devised the concept of containment, which for decades thereafter
provided a conceptual framework to which policymakers adhered. Yet
seven years into its Global War on Terror, the Bush administration is
without a compass, wandering in the arid wilderness. To the extent
that any inkling of a strategy once existed - the preposterous
neoconservative vision of employing American power to "transform" the
Islamic world - events have long since demolished the assumptions on
which it was based.
Rather than one single war, the United States is presently
engaged
in several.
Ranking first in importance is the war for Bush's legacy, better
known as Iraq. The President himself will never back away from his
insistence that here lies the "central front" of the conflict he
initiated after 9/11. Hunkered down in their bunker, Bush and his few
remaining supporters would have us believe that the "surge" has, at
long last, brought victory in sight and with it some prospect of
redeeming this otherwise misbegotten and mismanaged endeavor. If the
President can leave office spouting assurances that light is finally
visible somewhere at the far end of a very long, very dark
Mesopotamian tunnel, he will claim at least partial vindication. And
if actual developments subsequent to January 20 don't turn out well,
he can always blame the outcome on his successor.
Next comes the orphan war. This is Afghanistan, a conflict now in
its eighth year with no signs of ending anytime soon. Given the
attention lavished on Iraq, developments in Afghanistan have until
recently attracted only intermittent notice. Lately, however, U.S.
officials have awakened to the fact that things are going poorly,
both
politically and militarily. Al Qaeda persists. The Taliban is
reasserting itself. Expectations that NATO might ride to the rescue
have proven illusory. Apart from enabling Afghanistan to reclaim its
status as the world's number one producer of opium, U.S. efforts to
pacify that nation and nudge it toward modernity have produced
little.
The Pentagon calls its intervention in Afghanistan Operation
Enduring Freedom. The emphasis was supposed to be on the noun.
Unfortunately, the adjective conveys the campaign's defining
characteristic: enduring as in endless. Barring a radical re-
definition of purpose, this is an enterprise which promises to
continue, consuming lives and treasure, for a long, long time.
In neighboring Pakistan, meanwhile, there is the war-hidden-in-
plain-sight. Reports of U.S. military action in Pakistan have now
become everyday fare. Air strikes, typically launched from missile-
carrying drones, are commonplace, and U.S. ground forces have also
conducted at least one cross-border raid from inside Afghanistan.
Although the White House doesn't call this a war, it is - a gradually
escalating war of attrition in which we are killing both terrorists
and noncombatants. Unfortunately, we are killing too few of the
former
to make a difference and more than enough of the latter to facilitate
the recruitment of new terrorists to replace those we eliminate.
Finally - skipping past the wars-in-waiting, which are Syria and
Iran - there is Condi's war. This clash, which does not directly
involve U.S. forces, may actually be the most important of all. The
war that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made her own is the
ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Having for
years
dismissed the insistence of Muslims, Arabs and non-Arabs alike, that
the plight of the Palestinians constitutes a problem of paramount
importance, Rice now embraces that view. With the fervor of a
convert,
she has vowed to broker an end to that conflict prior to leaving
office in January 2009.
Given that Rice brings little - perhaps nothing - to the effort
in
the way of fresh ideas, her prospects of making good as a peacemaker
appear slight. Yet, as with Bush and Iraq, so too with Rice and the
Palestinian problem: she has a lot riding on the effort. If she
flops,
history will remember her as America's least effective secretary of
state since Cordell Hull spent World War II being ignored, bypassed,
and humiliated by Franklin Roosevelt. She will depart Foggy Bottom
having accomplished nothing.
There's nothing inherently wrong in fighting simultaneously on
several fronts, as long as actions on front A are compatible with
those on front B, and together contribute to overall success.
Unfortunately, that is not the case with the Global War on Terror. We
have instead an illustration of what Winston Churchill once referred
to as a pudding without a theme: a war devoid of strategic purpose.
This absence of cohesion - by now a hallmark of the Bush
administration - is both a disaster and an opportunity. It is a
disaster in the sense that we have, over the past seven years,
expended enormous resources, while gaining precious little in return.
Bush's supporters beg to differ, of course. They credit the
president with having averted a recurrence of 9/11, doubtless a
commendable achievement but one primarily attributable to the fact
that the United States no longer neglects airport security. To argue
that, say, the invasion and occupation of Iraq have prevented
terrorist attacks against the United States is the equivalent of
contending that Israel's occupation of the West Bank since in 1967
has
prevented terrorist attacks against the state of Israel.
Yet the existing strategic vacuum is also an opportunity. When it
comes to national security at least, the agenda of the next
administration all but sets itself. There is no need to waste time
arguing about which issues demand priority action.
First-order questions are begging for attention. How should we
gauge the threat? What are the principles that should inform our
response? What forms of power are most relevant to implementing that
response? Are the means at hand adequate to the task? If not, how
should national priorities be adjusted to provide the means required?
Given the challenges ahead, how should the government organize
itself?
Who - both agencies and individuals - will lead?
To each and every one of these questions, the Bush administration
devised answers that turned out to be dead wrong. The next
administration needs to do better. The place to begin is with the
candid recognition that the Global War on Terror has effectively
ceased to exist. When it comes to national security strategy, we need
to start over from scratch.
-------
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
