[iwar] [fc:Images.of.Past.Wars.May.Not.Fit.Present.Foe]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-16 12:34:53
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Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 12:34:53 -0700 (PDT)
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Images of Past Wars May Not Fit Present Foe
Bush Meets With Security Team To Map Options

By Barton Gellman and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 16, 2001; Page A03

As President Bush gathered his war cabinet at Camp David yesterday, his
self-imposed mission was to bring meaning to some of the grandest
threats and promises by an American president in modern times.  If this
is war, what will it look like?

Repeatedly since Tuesday, Bush's public diplomacy has invoked the moral
crusade of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt's "warm courage of
national unity." He has skipped past subsequent generations whose
experience of war was more complex and less satisfying.  Bush's promise
yesterday of "victory against terrorism," and his prediction Friday that
the conflict "will end in a way, and in an hour, of our choosing,"
suggest a presumption that there can be such an end by force of arms. 

Modern precedent -- from Algeria to Ireland -- promises less.  It also
promises higher costs than most Americans have yet imagined, according
to a broad range of authorities, civilian and uniformed, who study and
practice war. 

Retired Army Col.  Robert Killebrew, a strategic planner, said the
United States may be embarking on "an endless war of attrition against a
faceless enemy -- think of a global Viet Cong."

Such analogies are limited.  This conflict is not only unlike any faced
before by the United States, but also quite different from its closest
correlates elsewhere.  In Vietnam -- as well as Northern Ireland and
Israel -- the enemy was less diffuse in its identity and more specific
in its aims of political control.  The present foe, unlike Hezbollah or
the Viet Cong, is not based where it fights or across a contiguous
border.  And it does not aspire to territorial conquest, which means
that the suffering it inflicts on American morale and prestige is an end
in itself. 

Bush and his advisers came to office conceiving themselves, in public
and private, as more tough-minded than the Democrats they replaced. 
Defense Secretary Donald H.  Rumsfeld is said by associates to enjoy his
description by Henry Kissinger, years ago, as the most ruthless man he
knew. 

But terrorism is what military planners call an asymmetrical threat, and
ruthlessness is among the striking asymmetries.  Osama bin Laden, the
fugitive Saudi millionaire fingered by the administration as its prime
suspect in Tuesday's attacks, and his allies are entirely unrestrained
in their targets and methods.  More important, because their goals are
symbolic and psychological, they are likely to respond to U.S. 
escalation with efforts at still more spectacular strikes.  Destruction
of twin skyscrapers was a gut-rending loss, but greater traumas are
potentially within a terrorist's means. 

"Think of anthrax spores, Super Bowl massacres, celebrity assassinations
on live TV," said Cmdr.  Ward Carroll, who teaches at the U.S.  Naval
Academy.  "The eventualities are almost beyond contemplation, but the
nation must contemplate them -- because only when we do are we ready to
launch the first Tomahawk Land Attack Missile or Joint Direct Attack
Munition in this war."

Some advisers suggest the president is prepared to relax traditional
U.S.  restraints on the killing of innocents -- "collateral damage," in
military parlance.  If so, he runs additional risks to his own
objectives. 

Enemies like bin Laden depend on fanning flames of resentment against a
smug superpower.  Col.  Daniel Kaufman, academic dean at West Point,
warned against "indiscriminate killing -- the Russian model in Chechnya,
where you take out a thousand for every one of your actual targets you
hit." Speaking Friday, he said, "I was telling the cadets today, for
every one of these characters you kill, you don't want to create 10
more, or even two."

Rumsfeld again made clear this week his loathing for leaks of any kind,
and there is no reliable information on what he and the president plan. 
Several experienced outsiders anticipate a two-phased response,
beginning with an assault -- as early as the next few days -- against
bin Laden's known support centers in Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere. 
Retired Marine Lt.  Gen.  Paul Van Riper likened such a strike to World
War II's "Doolittle Raid," the modest but morale-boosting bombardment of
Tokyo in April 1942, four months after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor. 

"The near term will help unleash the terrible anger and outrage
Americans unilaterally feel," predicted another expert on military
planning, retired Army Col.  James McDonough.  "It will be swift, total,
bloody, and compelling."

Then, and far more important, Bush administration officials describe
their determination to prosecute a sustained campaign.  Military
insiders say there is talk of hitting multiple targets in several
nations repeatedly and in a variety of ways, using everything from
Special Forces "direct action" teams to airstrikes and even to
large-scale ground attacks. 

Defining the enemy is a crucial and -- in contrast to the world wars
that Bush invokes -- uncertain enterprise.  The president and some of
his counselors have hinted that they have in mind a capacious cast.  The
perpetrators of Tuesday's massacres apparently belonged to no state, but
Bush took the occasion of Tuesday's first formal address to declare "no
distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those
who harbor them." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, overruled by
Bush's father as he pressed during the Persian Gulf War in 1991 for U.S. 
ground troops to take control of Baghdad, announced a policy of "ending
states who sponsor terrorism."

Regime change, even as an objective in itself, has a mixed record. 
Ongoing efforts in Iraq and Cuba are widely seen to have entrenched the
rulers the United States sought to unseat.  Installation of the Shah of
Iran brought a far more hostile enemy than the one he replaced.  The
greatest claim for the success of government-toppling is the demise of
the Soviet Union, and there the extent of American authorship remains
under debate. 

Rarer still are happy examples of regime change as an instrument of some
other goal -- in this case, undermining independent actors who hide in
the unfriendly state.  Washington fought a long covert campaign
throughout the Cold War to change governments in Greece, Guatemala,
Chile and the Philippines, but few today see those as central to the
struggle against communism.  Bin Laden, heir to the Saudi construction
fortune of his Yemeni-born father, is well financed and proficient in
the guerrilla skills he honed in the struggle against Russian
intervention in Afghanistan.  He would be disadvantaged to lose what
protection he has in Afghanistan, but few experts are prepared to say he
would be finished. 

Since 1998, in any case, the United States has used most means at its
disposal to undermine Afghanistan's Taliban regime.  The Taliban, which
reiterated defiance on Friday, has fewer valuable physical targets than
most other regimes on the planet, since Afghanistan was largely
destroyed during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation.  And experts said they
find it hard to believe that Bush would attempt a ground occupation
after Russia failed at one for a decade. 

The broader question for Bush and his lieutenants is what it will take
to compel other states to act for the United States. 

Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist, said the Bush
administration appears to regard this conflict as the defining feature
of the present international environment. 

"Like the Cold War, this is a realigning war, by which I mean that the
United States is dividing the world into us versus them," he said. 

Pakistan, long a Taliban sponsor, pledged cooperation and use of its
airspace on Friday.  But other governments have resisted U.S.  pressure
to crack down on Islamic radicals, not for reasons of political
preference but for fear of their political lives. 

In the Middle East, several governments of vital importance to American
interests have spent years in wobbly balance between modernity and
Islamic tradition, pragmatism and the romantic absolutism of Arab street
politics.  There may be a backlash in popular opinion against the
radicals because of Tuesday's attacks, but their spectacular potency
also appeals to some Arabs for whom weakness is the greatest
humiliation. 

Former U.N.  ambassador Richard C.  Holbrooke said Bush will "try to
make clear to the Arabs that all the moderate governments could fall if
they don't try to end this thing." Other experts fear that if the Bush
administration does too much to disturb the careful straddling of
governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Persian Gulf, those
governments could be replaced by regimes of unremitting hostility to the
United States.  The regional environment could be far worse than it is,
not only for terrorism, but also for control of critical oil resources,
forward military bases and sea transport links. 

Partly for that reason, there are already differences of emphasis
becoming evident among the president's advisers, a phenomenon that
policymaking veterans described as inevitable and healthy.  Secretary of
State Colin L.  Powell, by practice more nuanced than some of his peers,
said Washington is "not threatening" other nations, even those "serving
as a haven" for America's foes.  He described cooperation against those
enemies as "a new benchmark," but not the new benchmark, of U.S. 
foreign relations. 

It is, he said Friday, "a new way of measuring the relationship and what
we can do together" -- one that "will certainly affect," but not
necessarily define "the relationship we're going to have with them."
Powell also took care to distinguish the present twilight conflict from
the soldiering in which he spent his early career.  "The enemy is, very
often, right here in our own country," he said.  "And so .  .  .  it
isn't always blunt force military" that will do the fighting. 

Bush, less interested at first than his predecessors in multilateral
cooperation, has now turned in earnest to coalition-building.  But as
Egyptian Ambassador Nabil Fahmy warned Friday in a meeting with Powell,
terrorism is not like the Persian Gulf War as an occasion for common
cause. 

A nearer precedent came in 1996, when President Bill Clinton prevailed
on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to host a global summit against
terror at the Red Sea port of Sharm el-Sheikh.  The summit came as a
fruitless effort to prevent the fall of Israeli Prime Minister Shimon
Peres and the destruction of an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue begun three
years earlier in Oslo. 

The summit recruited an impressive coalition of 29 governments,
including 13 in the Arab world, all vowing to prevent terrorists from
using their countries to recruit, procure arms and raise money.  But the
concrete accomplishments since have been modest, and the signatories
have since reverted to their previous conflicts. 

Some Bush advisers are inclined by history to favor a ground war to oust
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.  Retired Army Col.  Andrew Bacevich,
professor of international relations at Boston University, expects them
to advocate just that should evidence emerge of his involvement in
Tuesday's attacks.  No other regional power, even Iran, is seen to be as
hostile or as much implicated in direct efforts to attack American
citizens. 

There has been less public speculation about how the enemy in this war
will choose to respond.  Every war has two sides, and the U.S.  public
needs to expect reprisals, warned James Bodner, a former Pentagon
official.  "Future attacks against us will be planned, and some may
occur," Bodner said. 

As in no other American conflict, civilians are on the front line. 
That's especially worrisome because the public infrastructure of the
United States -- especially its airports and border controls -- wasn't
designed with a long military campaign in mind.  "The safest place to be
in this kind of warfare may be in uniform," noted retired Army Col. 
Johnny Brooks. 

"The costs are going to be huge in both dollars and lives," said Van
Riper, the retired Marine general.  But "what is the alternative -- to
live in fear of the people who did this for the rest of our lives?"

Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer, put it more simply. 
Whether to enter the war is no longer a question.  "We're in this one,"
he said. 

� 2001 The Washington Post Company

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