The war on terror: incompetence on an award-winning scale?

by Rami G. Khoury

Three important dynamics taking place before our eyes these days revolve around American government perceptions of the world that also have an impact on the lives of billions of people around the globe. It is urgent to correctly diagnose and appropriately respond to the issues involved, especially in view of the expanding terrorism threats in Europe and the upsurge in violent clashes in Iraq.

The three issues I refer to are the internal American review of how the Bush administration in its early days responded to the threat of terror by Al Qaeda, the American-led global response to terror after Sept. 11, 2001, and this week's American response to Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr and other forms of anti-American defiance or resistance in Iraq.

The common thread that runs through these three issues is how America perceives and engages the rest of the world. America's global perception and engagement were relatively consistent for the half century of the cold war, but became more complex after 1990, when the US emerged as the dominant global power and it could project its power anywhere in the world virtually unchecked.

The first Bush administration unleashed that force in order to reverse the 1990 Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. A decade later, the current George W. Bush administration and its neoconservative ideologists transformed the opportunity of American global power projection into an operative policy. Responding to the attacks of Sept. 11 made this transformation politically possible, both at home in the US and with cooperative governments around the world. But what have been the cost and consequence of this policy?

The debate about how the Bush team viewed the terror threat in 1990 is history, and the potential consequences of clashes in Iraq this week will become clear in the period ahead. At this delicate juncture, therefore, we can gain the most from analysing the third of these dynamics - how the US responded to terror after Sept. 11, and what impact this response has had. The initial assessment does not look very good, given the literal and figurative explosion of terror attacks and plots around the world. The recent successful, and thwarted, attacks against train systems in Europe are especially troublesome, for they indicate the widening range of terrorists' targets, including Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Germany, France and other countries. The threats against civilians around the world - not just in the US - are much greater now than they were three years ago, as the terrorists seem to become more diffused, decentralised and localised, and thus much harder to stop.

Was this inevitable? Could it have been avoided? Or is this precisely what Osama Ben Laden and his kind wanted to achieve? My own sense is that after Sept. 11, the US government wasted a historic opportunity. It could and should have rallied a global coalition to fight injustice and violent extremism, through a multi-pronged strategy that simultaneously addressed the root economic, political and social causes of terror and also used police actions to curtail its practical, criminal expression of bombings. George W. Bush and his ideologues walked right into the trap that Osama Ben Laden set for them, by giving Ben Laden the war he sought to ignite. The global "war against terror" that Bush launched after Sept. 11 is slowly looking more like simply a "global war" between the forces of terror and the forces of anti-terror.

It is important to go back and assess how we reached this point, because more or less the same people - or at least the same sort of mentalities - on both sides now confront each other in a more limited arena in Iraq. They both use the weapons and emotional fuel of anger, bombs, resentment, missiles, fear, helicopter gunships and suicide bombers. It would be catastrophic for all if events in Iraq were allowed to be driven by the same violent extremism that the terrorists bring to the table, or by the immoderate ideology and faulty policy that has seen Washington transform a legitimate war against terror into an indiscriminate and unnecessary global war.

In retrospect, it seems that in responding to Sept. 11, Washington made serious mistakes on the three critical levels of diagnosis, strategy and policy on the ground. First it badly misdiagnosed the nature and causes of terror, and the reasons why ordinary men and women become active terrorists who kill innocent civilians. The terror phenomenon has plagued the world for millennia. In almost every historical case we can carefully unravel the rhetoric and actions of the bombers in order to understand what motivated them and, more importantly, why they stopped being terrorists at one point. This was not done with any seriousness or credibility in the case of Al Qaeda-vintage terrorism.

Second, Washington almost certainly misinterpreted the motivations, operational methods and aims of Al Qaeda and allied groups, and its response was, therefore, probably distorted and not consistently effective. The response may have even increased and stimulated global terror, not thwarted it. Washington's main mistake was to view Al Qaeda through the same prism with which it viewed cold war communists, the only adversary it has known for half a century. Washington identified an enemy that may not exist - a centrally organised, globally operational ideology that sought to undermine and overwhelm the American way of life. The American strategy to fight terror may have been based on a faulty, even fictitious, foundation from day one. This is incompetence on an award-winning scale.

Third, Washington launched a global war against terror that has relied on military and political means that have had mixed results. Many terrorists have been arrested or killed and their networks disrupted, but terrorism has also become a much more active, widespread and dangerous phenomenon. This is almost certainly because the preponderance of military means to fight terror does not work, and often has the opposite effect of inciting ordinary men and women to become terrorists. This may be happening on a global scale, has certainly happened in the Palestinian response to Israel's reliance on military power, and seems to be happening in Iraq in response to the American military force.

The world should not have to pay the price as it watches these mistakes being made over and over by the same mindsets, but in different countries. The legitimate battle against terrorism must be waged in a more intelligent and effective manner. The Bush team has gone to war on the back of a dysfunctional and misguided combination of faulty perceptions, wrong diagnoses, inappropriate strategy and counterproductive tactics. Rarely in world history has such immense power been so poorly used, or has a reservoir of global goodwill to a single country - the United States - been so mercilessly squandered.

This article was originally published in the Wednesday, April 7, 2004 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.