Posted on 06/20/2002 12:07:17 PM PDT by aimlow
WASHINGTON -- 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 prewar clutter, to mobilize the strength of the nation and to see the thing through," said 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," Killebrew said.
Experts said 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," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's national security adviser from 1977 to 1980.
Winning this war, said 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:
-- 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-Qaida terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan wear broken-down boots and carry radios that don't work.
-- 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.
-- 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," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. With the United States itself vulnerable to nuclear attack, "We, especially, should not be talking about first use of nuclear weapons," he said.
-- 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, said 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 have often 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 his 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 must at the same time 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 forum May 29 sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, said that defining precisely who the terrorists are -- for example, as 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," said 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 said.
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 said.
The dark alternative to victory, Killebrew said, "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."
As Napoleon said, "If you are going to take
Vienna, take Vienna." To stop short of
an all out effort is to risk defeat. We should
have learned that in Vietnam. The military
has what it takes to wipe the floor with Iraq,
but are smart enough to see that, between
the red zone and blue zone, America is
unlikely to unite behind what would have
to be done. Does Bush have a mandate
to win the war on terror?
Only if one ignores that the war is against terrorists that cross international boundaries.
This is so obvious that it isn't mentioned- yet many of the criticisms are shown to be groundless when this is considered. Maybe it should be stressed despite it's obviousness- after all when you're dealing with the press you're not dealing with the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Tony
Cheers Tony
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