Our War's Mistaken Premise
Published in the Washington Post; Sunday, September 14, 2003; Page B07
The president is changing tactics. Forget weapons of mass destruction, the
war in Iraq is about terrorism; time to go back to the United Nations to get
some help with the military occupation and with paying the $87 billion
reckoning for staying in Afghanistan and Iraq that is now being acknowledged.
But he has reaffirmed his strategic vision: It is America's strategy of
preventive war against rogue states, the very concept that has been the source
of America's inability so far to defeat terrorism or establish anything
resembling democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq.
That is the powerful lesson that can be drawn from the carnage at U.N.
headquarters in Baghdad, from the emerging insurrectionary alliance between
Baathists and radical Muslim groups, the reemergence of the Taliban and its
politics of assassination in Afghanistan, and the renewed rise of sectarian
militia forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
To fully understand America's failure, we have to back up to 9/11.
Preventive war, the novel national-security doctrine announced after 9/11,
exempted the United States from the obligation to justify war on grounds of
self-defense or imminent threat. It promulgated a new right "to act
against emerging threats before they are fully formed," to "act
preemptively" against states that harbor or support terrorism. It is this
strategic doctrine, and not tactics or policies on the ground in Iraq and
Afghanistan, that is now failing so catastrophically.
The war on terrorism remains the Bush administration's ultimate
rationale. The administration continues to insist that "in Iraq, we took
another essential step in the war on terror" (Vice President Cheney), that
"military and rehabilitation efforts now under way in Iraq are an
essential part of the war on terror" (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz), that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a "terror regime" and
that the ongoing war there today must be understood as part of the war on
terror (President Bush).
Yet terrorism is flourishing -- not just in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kenya and
Indonesia but in Afghanistan, where the Taliban were supposedly defeated, and
in Iraq, where, prior to the war, there was no sponsored international
terrorism at all.
The harrowing truth is that preventive attacks on "rogue states"
and "those who sponsor or harbor terrorism" fail because they are
premised on a fatal misunderstanding of what terrorism is and how it operates.
In operational terms, terrorists are not cancers on the body of a weakened
nation-state that die when the state dies. Rather, they are migrating parasites
that temporarily occupy hosts (rogue states, weak governments, even transparent
democracies). When a given host is destroyed or rendered immune to such
parasites, they opportunistically move on to another host -- ever ready to
reoccupy the earlier host if it is revived as a "friendly" regime.
With their Taliban host eliminated, al Qaeda cadres moved on -- to the Afghan
hinterland, to Pakistan, to Morocco, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, the
Philippines, maybe back to Hamburg and to those places identified early on as
harboring the terrorists of 9/11, Florida and New Jersey, and now back to
Baghdad and Kabul.
Terrorists are not states, they use states. As Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld himself said after 9/11, in words he has apparently forgotten,
"the people who do this don't lose, don't have high-value targets.
They have networks and fanaticism." Because they are "stateless
martyrs," as happy to die as to kill, terrorists cannot be defeated
through preventive military victories over countries that may share their
agendas or harbor their agents. They have neither an address to which
complaints and troops can be sent nor conventional "interests" that
can be negotiated or penalized. Al Qaeda is in effect a malevolent NGO.
Terrorists are, in the president's words, "enemies of the civilized
world." But what makes the world civilized is its adherence to the rule of
law, its insistence that it will not attack adversaries, however evil, unless
first attacked by them, its reliance on multilateral cooperation and
international courts rather than unilateral military force and the right of the
strongest.
The president's policies meet fear with fear, trying to "shock and
awe" adversaries into submission. But fear is terrorism's medium, not
ours. Democracies that respect the rule of law cannot win wars unilaterally and
in defiance of international law -- not when the enemy has no policy but chaos,
no end but annihilation (including its own).
Harry Truman once said that all war prevents is peace. Preventive war has
neither created peace nor preempted terrorism. The intelligence and police
cooperation that the Bush administration has quietly been engaged in has, to
the contrary, had more success. But it is directed at terrorists, not rogue
states, and it has succeeded through the very cooperation and multilateralism
that unilateral preventive war undermines.
Pursuing preventive war at a growing cost in American lives and money
against regimes the Bush administration doesn't like or countries that
brutalize their own people may appeal to American virtue, but it undermines
American security.
The only proper way the United States can honor both its national interests
and those who have died in this war and its aftermath is to abandon its failed
preventive war doctrine and rejoin the world it has tried in vain to pacify
through unilateral preemptive force.
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