|
Three important dynamics taking place before our eyes these days
revolve around American government perceptions of the world that
also 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
George W. 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 al-Sadr and other forms of anti-American
defiance or resistance in Iraq.
The
common thread that runs through these three issues is how the United
States perceives and engages the rest of the world. The US'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 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 analyzing 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, decentralized, localized and thus much
harder to stop.
Was
this inevitable? Could it have been avoided? Or is this precisely
what Osama bin 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. US President George
W. Bush and his ideologues walked right into the trap that Osama bin
Laden set for them, by giving bin Laden the war he sought to ignite.
The global "war against terror" that Bush initiated 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 gun-ships
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
organized, 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.
|
