The Long War

After five years of a declared "war on terrorism," the Bush administration has failed to devise a coherent and comprehensive strategy to deal with political violence. There have been no repetitions of the tragedies of 9/11, but there has been no surcease from terrorism around the world; indeed, violence has metastasized from a single organization located in Afghanistan to a global phenomenon without central leadership and absent sponsorship of a single nation. The "war on terror" has become the ultimate abstraction: global, unending, and amorphous, it is a nontraditional struggle against numerous opponents operating under many different guises and pursuing many conflicting agendas. Nevertheless, President George W. Bush unflinchingly calls it the "decisive ideological struggle of the twenty-first century," pitting his administration against those who use violence to impose a "dark vision of tyranny," as if it were a single conflict with a single objective. He has also cited a questionable "worldwide network" of radicals and has vowed to "defeat the terrorists in Iraq" so they cannot "dictate the future of this century," a dubious proposition in every sense. Speeches over the past year by the president and his cabinet have invoked the preferred Israeli and neoconservative expression Islamo-Fascism to describe the enemy, signaling yet another mistaken turn in the government's ability to conceptualize the terrorism problem. Administration supporters have even attacked critics by citing the danger of "appeasement" of terror states, deliberately drawing a comparison to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. The assertions that terrorists "hate our freedom" and are seeking to stop the "march of democracy" have also been revived, suggesting inaccurately that our enemies seek to attack our fundamental liberties, when it is obvious it is our foreign policies they seek to undermine.

If it is possible to be completely wrong about nearly everything, the Bush White House's view of terrorism and terrorists would certainly qualify. Even accepting that recent administration speeches might be reflective of little more than simplistic political rhetoric, there is an obvious major conceptual disconnect taking place in three primary areas: who the terrorists are, where they come from, and what defines a terrorist group. As those questions are not being addressed, an honest attempt to deal with legitimate grievances felt by the world's more than 1 billion Muslims is hardly likely. Unfortunately, the administration's conceptual framework cannot be dismissed as a misguided irrelevancy, as the words of our leaders will inevitably shape our responses. If one accepts that there is some kind of worldwide conflict going on, the unwillingness or inability to recognize who the enemy is virtually guarantees that any form of management of the problem will remain elusive or even unattainable. It also suggests that any attempts to anticipate and counter large-scale terrorist attacks like those carried out most recently in Spain and Britain will fail.

If terrorism is an international problem, and it is, what should be done to counter the threat? The Bush administration appears to be hobbled by its ideologically driven responses that deny it a clear recognition of who terrorists are and who they are not. After five years of the "war on terrorism," American policy is still disconnected from the root causes of global violence and is centered on responses to acts of violence and preemptive moves against identified purveyors of terrorism. But the policy is not significantly different from the previous model of law-enforcement-based responses that were rejected by the Bush administration when it came into office, belittling the Clinton administration's alleged passivity in the wake of events such as the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the destruction of the USS Cole in 2000. Although it was tangled with political overtones, the Clintonian responses were fairly aggressive, if feckless. A guided missile attack on al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan was launched in an assassination attempt against Osama bin Laden, who was not present. There was also the more doubtful bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum that was allegedly associated with al Qaeda. Although Richard Clarke...