[iwar] [fc:What.exactly.is.the.aim.of.our.war?]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-06-24 08:09:26
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2002 08:09:26 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:What.exactly.is.the.aim.of.our.war?]
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Where is a strategy to win?
What exactly is the aim of our war? 
By David Wood 
June 23, 2002 
<a href="http://www.uniontrib.com/news/uniontrib/sun/opinion/news_mz1e23wood.html">http://www.uniontrib.com/news/uniontrib/sun/opinion/news_mz1e23wood.html>

The U.S. war on terrorism, after an explosive start in Afghanistan last fall, 
has dwindled to a few scattered military missions and dozens of unrelated and 
sometimes conflicting diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement 
initiatives. 
Critics say the Bush administration needs to devise a powerful offensive plan 
to coordinate America's largely untapped energy and resources. Such a 
strategy would sort out goals and set priorities on everything from deploying 
Special Forces teams to coordinating intelligence data to balancing the 
competing needs of security and civil liberties at home. 
"What seems to be lacking in American policy-making at this juncture is not 
the means to fight a war on terrorism, or the public support to do so, but 
the grim determination to sweep away the pre-war clutter, to mobilize the 
strength of the nation and to see the thing through," says Robert Killebrew, 
a retired Army strategist and senior Pentagon consultant. 
"Clearly, we're moving on a lot of fronts. What I don't see yet is the 
offensive strategy we need to win." 
Experts say the strategy must clearly define the enemy. And it must be built 
around a powerful vision of what victory would mean - as well as what defeat 
would entail. 
"Terrorism is a technique, a tactic. You can't wage war on a technique," says 
Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser from 1977 
to 1980. 
Winning this war, saus Killebrew, "is being able to walk on an airplane 
without fear, to enter public buildings without being searched, to welcome 
immigrants to this country." 
As is, much of the action in the war on terrorism seems uncoordinated and 
counterproductive. Consider: 
n Under a budget of $350 billion for national defense, the Pentagon's 
contractors are churning out such breathtakingly expensive weapons as the 
$204 million F-22 stealth fighter, designed during the Cold War for fighting 
vast fleets of high-tech enemy bogeys. Meanwhile, troops hunting real 
al-Qaeda terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan wear broken-down boots 
and carry radios that don't work. 
n The State Department is launching a $75 million effort to lure Muslim 
students to visit the United States, to foster greater understanding and to 
shrink the "swamp" of anti-American resentment from which terrorists might 
draw recruits. A major focus of this effort is to counter allegations that 
the United States is anti-Muslim. 
Yet Attorney General John Ashcroft has announced tough new restrictions on 
visitors from Muslim and Middle Eastern countries, including fingerprinting 
and photographing them at the border. And the United States is still holding 
an unknown number of Muslims in secluded detention, under suspicion of ties 
to terrorist organizations. Both actions have drawn angry protests from Arab 
students. 
n Along with reducing anti-American resentment, a major U.S. goal has been to 
keep nuclear weapons and nuclear material away from terrorists. Part of that 
effort has been to dissuade countries from obtaining or using nuclear weapons 
technology. 
But some U.S. actions send the opposite message, critics say. The Bush 
administration has proposed building a new earth-penetrating nuclear warhead. 
U.S. policy now embraces the idea of nuclear pre-emptive strikes. And, in its 
new treaty with Russia, the United States insisted on storing weapons rather 
than destroying them, as it has urged other nuclear states to do. 
"All these decisions have a huge impact on nuclear stability out there in the 
world," says Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services 
Committee. With the United States itself vulnerable to nuclear attack, he 
adds, "We, especially, should not be talking about first use of nuclear 
weapons." 
n While trying to enlist Islamic governments in the war on terrorism, for 
crucial help in supporting U.S. military and diplomatic initiatives and to 
crack down on terrorists in their own countries, U.S. officials have set as a 
strategic goal the toppling of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, by military 
means if necessary. 
The idea has found little enthusiasm in the Islamic world and could cause 
even more trouble ahead. 
An actual attack on Iraq, says Killebrew, "will enrage our allies and make it 
untenable for any state to be a pro-American Arab state, and that will set 
back our ultimate victory in the war on terrorism for generations." 
White House officials did not return repeated phone calls asking for 
information on strategy or comment on the critics' points. 
To be sure, President Bush and his top lieutenants often have articulated 
broad ideas on how to fight terrorism. 
In the smoky, chaotic hours after Sept. 11's stunning attacks, Bush put into 
motion a simple and direct policy: Terrorists were to be pursued relentlessly 
and given no safe haven; those who harbored or tolerated terrorists were also 
the enemy. Those orders spawned a flurry of diplomatic, intelligence and 
military activity, including the destruction last fall of Afghanistan's 
Taliban government. 
Bush's top national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, sums up the U.S. 
approach this way: "Power matters." 
Speaking April 29 at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International 
Studies in Washington, Rice said the administration intended to use its full 
military, economic and diplomatic muscle to deny terrorists safe haven; to 
prevent them from acquiring nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; and to 
strike before terrorists can attack. 
Such efforts at the same time must advance such American values as 
"democracy, human rights, equal justice, free speech, the rule of law, honest 
government, respect for women and children, and religious tolerance," Rice 
said. "We seek not merely to leave the world safer but to leave it better." 
One key failing of this approach, however, is that it only vaguely defines 
the enemy. 
Brzezinski, at a May 29 forum sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, 
said that defining precisely who the terrorists are - for example, 
disaffected Islamic radicals who share a hatred of American culture - would 
help define how the United States should wage its war. 
That, in turn, would help set a U.S. priority either on attracting Muslim 
students here to study - or keeping them out. 
Simply designating the enemy as "terrorists," says Brent Scowcroft, national 
security adviser to President George H.W. Bush in 1989-92, can get the United 
States mixed up in conflicts on others' terms - like Israeli action against 
Palestinian "terrorists" and Indian raids against Pakistani "terrorists." 
"Whenever anybody has a local conflict, they can say, 'We're fighting your 
fight, United States - terrorism!' And I think we have to be very careful 
about that," Scowcroft says. 
Moreover, some of Bush's rhetoric about the war on terrorism, without being 
more fully explained by a detailed strategy, has had unintended consequences, 
some say. 
Such blunt statements as "You're either with us or against us" have 
encouraged zealots in the tense confrontation between nuclear-armed Pakistan 
and India to "ratchet up the intensity," Brzezinski says. 
The dark alternative to victory, Killebrew says, "is a world where no nation 
is able to enforce its laws; where kidnapping and murder are common; where we 
close our borders to the world and we have to decide what is an acceptable 
level of fear - how many dead Americans each year is tolerable. 
"The American flag won't come down, but it will be a different country. We 
will lose our freedoms a little more every year, along with a constant toll 
of dead Americans." 

Wood writes about national policy issues for Newhouse News Service. 

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