From The New Yorker, 8/8/05 issue:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050808ta_talk_packer
You had to be a careful reader of the inside pages of the Times last
week to notice that America is no longer fighting the global war on
terrorism.
The Administration has replaced, or revised, or expanded the G.W.O.T.
with a new phrase:
"a global struggle against violent extremism."
The war is now a struggle.
The terrorist enemy is now the violent extremist enemy.
The focus has shifted from a tactic to an ideology.
In a major new strategy document quoted in U.S. News & World Report,
the Pentagon is even more specific (and more accurate), venturing onto
delicate ground by calling the threat "Islamist extremism" and
"extremist Sunni and Shia movements that exploit Islam for political
ends."
In June, a Marine lieutenant general, Wallace Gregson, floated the new
thinking in a speech:
"This is no more a war on terrorism than the Second World War was a
war on submarines," he said.
"The decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who
are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is
necessary to insurgent operations around the world."
On July 12th, Donald Rumsfeld used the new language in a press
conference, repeating the word "extremist" or variations of it eleven
times.
On July 23rd, two top White House officials followed up with an Op-Ed
in the Times:
"At its root, the struggle is an ideological contest, a war of ideas
that engages all of us, public servant and private citizen, regardless
of nationality."
The President’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, once said of war planning
for Iraq, "You don’t introduce new products in August," but the
rebranding of the war formerly known as G.W.O.T. has all the earmarks
of a full-blown summer marketing campaign.
What’s going on here?
Something serious, in fact--almost unprecedented.
The Administration is admitting that its strategy since September 11th
has failed, without really admitting it.
The single-minded emphasis on hunting down terrorists has failed
("Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing
people," Gregson said).
The use of military force as the country’s primary and, at times, only
response has failed, and has stretched the Army and the Marines to the
breaking point.
Unilateralism has failed.
"It’s not a military project alone, and the United States cannot do it
by itself alone," Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for
Policy and a leading advocate of going it alone with military force,
said on his way out the Pentagon door and into private life (good
luck, fellas!).
The overwhelmingly American character of the war has failed, isolating
moderate Muslims--who, in the end, are the only hope for political
change—or driving them closer to the radicals.
Loading the entire burden of the war onto the backs of American
soldiers, while telling the rest of the citizenry to go about its
business, has failed, even as public relations:
in a recent Gallup poll, only thirty-four per cent of Americans said
that we are winning the war on terrorism.
The phrase has outlived its enormous political usefulness.
These recognitions are late in coming.
Arguments for a broader, deeper, more nuanced strategy appeared in the
report of the 9/11 Commission, a year ago.
They were the basis for a sixteen-billion-dollar national-security
bill that was introduced by Senate Democrats in January, and is
currently going nowhere.
At the Pentagon, they date back to October of 2003, to a memorandum in
which Rumsfeld candidly asked, "Are we capturing, killing or deterring
and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the
radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
Almost two years later, in the summer of Sharm al-Sheikh, Netanya,
London, and Baghdad (where 7/7 is an average day), the answer is no.
Jihadis are crossing the borders into Iraq, for example, far faster
than they can be killed or kill themselves.
A recent study by an Israeli researcher shows that they are
predominantly young Saudis, inflamed by footage of the fighting in
Iraq and by incendiary sermons from their imams.
Do they hate us for who we are, or for what we do?
That turns out to be the wrong question.
Most of the new jihadis had no connection to terrorism before the Iraq
war; the American occupation has filled them with fantasies of violent
death.
But they come largely from a region in Saudi Arabia where the most
extreme Islamist ideology was already flourishing, directed against
Shiite Muslims as well as against "crusaders and Jews."
They have the sympathy of millions of fellow-travellers.
The war in Iraq is the trigger, not the reason, for their
self-annihilation.
A better question is the one suggested by Lieutenant General Gregson:
what can be done to persuade the millions of Muslims on whose support
the jihadis depend to abandon their ideology?
In the wake of the London bombings and the daily massacres of Iraqis,
gaps are opening in the ranks of radical Islam.
Even certain jihadi Web sites have posted heated arguments over the
morality of killing innocents; none other than the spiritual mentor of
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has attacked his own disciple for giving jihad a
bad name in Iraq.
But radical Islam is not a problem that Muslims can sort out alone.
The grand gamble of the architects of the Iraq war was that a
democratic state in the heart of the Middle East would change the
political dynamic throughout the region.
Right now, the best we can salvage is an Iraq that doesn’t descend
into communal violence on a large scale.
It seems likely that the Administration will begin to withdraw
American forces from Iraq early next year, well ahead of the midterm
elections in November—regardless of the realities.
Only yesterday, Iraq was the central front in the war on terrorism;
perhaps the Pentagon’s new terminology is the linguistic version of an
exit strategy.
But no one should imagine that an American departure will end suicide
bombings in Iraq, or anywhere else.
Just as the jihadis in Afghanistan did not retire after expelling the
Soviets fifteen years ago, the withdrawal of another superpower will
not be enough for this generation of insurgents, either.
In Iraq, America has run up against the limits of war in an
ideological contest.
The Administration is right to reconsider its strategy, starting with
the language.
Will anything else follow?
The global struggle against violent extremism would inspire more
confidence if, for example, the Administration hadn’t failed to
include funding for democracy programs in Iraq beyond the next round
of elections there; or if Karen Hughes, the President’s choice as
Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, hadn’t left the job
empty for five months while waiting for her son to graduate from high
school; or if the White House weren’t resisting attempts by Congress
to regulate the treatment of prisoners; or if Karl Rove would stop
using 9/11 to raise money and smear Democrats.
No one really knows how American influence can be used to disinfect
Islamist politics of violent ideas.
This is the first problem.
The second is that the Bush team has shown such bad faith, arrogance,
and incompetence since September 11th that it seems unlikely to figure
it out.
__________________________________________________________
The gang of criminals in Washington have placed us all in mortal
danger, ladies and gentlemen.
Harry
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