Part II: What Kind of War Are We Fighting, and Can We Win It?
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm?id=10959&page=allTo mark the publication of Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (Doubleday), the editors of COMMENTARY addressed the following questions to a group of leading thinkers:
1. Do you accept the term “World War IV,” or the idea behind it, as an apt characterization of the West’s battle with Islamic extremism, and do you, like Norman Podhoretz, see Iraq as a crucial early theater in that conflict?
2. Six years after 9/11, how would you assess our progress? What would you like to see happen next?
3. On the specific issue of the spread of democracy—a linchpin of the Bush Doctrine and a point of acute controversy between foreign-policy realists and neoconservatives—do you agree or disagree with Podhoretz that “democratization represents the best and perhaps even the only way to defeat Islamofascism and the terrorism it uses as its main weapon against us”?
4. Turning to the political climate at home, do you think the Bush Doctrine has a chance of surviving the elections of 2008, and if so in what form?
Andrew C. McCarthy
In his characteristically powerful new book, Norman Podhoretz could not be more right in describing our great struggle against Islamic extremism as World War IV, portraying the stakes involved, and identifying Iraq as a key early theater in the conflict. My disagreements, which are considerably less consequential than our agreements, lie in the area of democracy promotion—both its significance to the Bush Doctrine and its utility as a strategy for victory.
It is profoundly disappointing that, only six years after 9/11, and three decades after the onslaught of militant Islam in its latest iteration, it should still be necessary to discuss whether we are embroiled in an epic battle for the survival of our way of life. Yet that is where we find ourselves, notwithstanding the endurance—indeed, according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate, the resurgence—of an incorrigible enemy.
In several ways, we are better off today than we were six years ago. In the 1990’s, when radical Islam was at war and we were not, the point of the counterterrorism spear (in fact, pretty much its totality) was the criminal-justice system. But prosecutions neutralized only a tiny fraction of the growing enemy: fewer than three dozen convicted over eight years of attacks, and those mostly low-level players. This emboldened the extremists, inviting more attacks. Since President Bush has taken up the challenge and fought the war as a war, we have significantly improved internal security while killing and capturing thousands of jihadists, mainly overseas. It is not an accident that we have not been attacked domestically.
On the other hand, the administration has done a poor job communicating what we are doing and why we must do it—would that it had had Norman Podhoretz on the case full-time. Yes, the President has given several eloquent speeches. Contrary to the case in the first three world wars, however, the nation does not exhibit a vested interest in the outcome. It is as if the burdens of the war have been delegated to the American armed forces and their families while the rest of us blithely go about our lives—an oddity I wish I could better explain after a massive domestic attack and continuous, unabashed promises of a reprise. This national ennui couples dangerously with such revolutionary developments of our age as the rise of international law, the shift in civil-rights emphasis from the common weal to the individual and his privacy, and the suspicion with which we regard executive power.
The result is dangerous vulnerability. The national mood shifts away from war’s sense of urgency, back toward the notion of jihadism as a nuisance to be managed by legal processes and diplomatic engagements. The enemy makes great inroads here at home, where concerns about due process for terrorists generate more angst than does the suffering of terror victims.
Concurrently, al Qaeda is emerging as a stronger network. Immediately after 9/11, with its command-and-control decimated and its hierarchy in flight, the movement become more dependent on widely dispersed cells, which became more autonomous but less capable. Now, however, even as these cells have adapted and become more effective, the network’s leadership has been permitted to reestablish itself in Pakistan and other safe havens. Money (particularly Saudi money) and the Internet have also made the animating ideology more accessible than ever, meaning that cells can emerge without the need of an established jihadist organization to recruit and guide them. And behind it all, Iran grows more capable and menacing—harboring and nurturing al Qaeda, replicating its Hizballah model in Iraq and beyond, and pursuing nuclear weaponry while the West dithers.
This increases the stakes of Iraq—to say nothing of Afghanistan, where NATO’s lack of commitment is a very disturbing development. I have been a supporter of the surge of U.S. forces because it is a necessary step; but it is far from sufficient. Meaningful progress in this war, as Podhoretz has argued, is going to require dealing with Iran. General David Petraeus’s report underscores that unavoidable fact. Some say such talk is war-mongering, but it is actually war-recognition. Iran is at war with us now, just as it and the other components of the jihadist movement were at war with us in the 1990’s. It should not take another 9/11 to come to grips with that reality. That is the cutting edge of the 2008 election: reality, or the return of September 10th America.
I do not question that the rhetoric of democracy promotion has pervaded the President’s articulation of the Bush Doctrine. Nevertheless, the fact that the doctrine has multiple tenets does not mean that each of them is equally important, or that the tenets cohere.
The issue here, moreover, is more complex than “neoconservatives versus realists.” I am a conservative who does not fit in either category. Contrary to the realists, I agree that democracy promotion is in our long-range interest and stability by tyranny is not. But, with due respect to my neoconservative friends, a healthy respect for democracy worthy of the name recognizes that (a) it calls for a cultural transformation that cannot be brought about quickly, (b) it is of dubious value as a counterterrorism tool, and (c) it may be an impossibility in a society committed to maintaining an Islamic identity.
On the last two points, it is noteworthy that jihadist atrocities are commonly planned and carried out inside Western democracies. There are a variety of good reasons to promote democracy abroad, but protection against jihadism is evidently not one of them. Further, the principal root cause of terrorism is Islamic ideology, not a want of the benefits democracy affords; so the premise that democracy would eradicate radicalism is flawed. Finally, we conflate democracy with liberty, but the two are saliently different.
For many Muslims (not just terrorists), rejection of Western democracy is a free choice. In fact, the Islamic conception of freedom, which connotes willful submission to Allah and His law, is critically different from our understanding of the term. We need to understand better the ideology we are dealing with, and to be speaking the same language, before we can realistically assess the prospects of democratization.
In the meantime, as Norman Podhoretz shows, there is a war to be won. We did not start the Marshall Plan in 1943. Assuming for argument’s sake that Muslim countries will eventually democratize (as we understand democracy), that would, at most, suppress this enemy’s resurgence. But first the enemy has to be defeated.
Andrew C. McCarthy is the director of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
David Pryce-Jones
Norman Podhoretz clarifies the crisis in which we now find ourselves by describing it as World War IV. There are affinities to the preceding World War III, otherwise known as the cold war. Once more, it is hard to separate the hatred our enemies feel for us from their envy. The evident inferiority complex is irrational, therefore intractable. Ever since influential Muslims began to maintain that the weaknesses of their societies were not their fault at all but were inflicted upon them by the malevolent West, World War IV has been in preparation. For a time, it was uncertain whether nationalists or Islamists would wage it.
Ayatollah Khomeini settled that issue. Iran is a country of great potential, and his seizure of power there in 1979 has proved as consequential as the Bolshevik coup of 1917. Khomeini transformed Iran into a testing ground for the view that Islamist jihad is a mobilizing principle strong enough to avenge the political and cultural supremacy of the West. He and now his heirs have made it plain that they see themselves engaged in outright war. In a similar spirit, and with comparable rhetoric, too, the Soviet Union used to project capitalism as a bogey incompatible with peaceful coexistence.
The comparison goes further. Communism divided into the Soviet and the Chinese versions, both of which masked nationalist impulses at their core; and Islamism contains Sunni and Shiite versions that also reflect core nationalist differences between Arabs and Persians. Alarmed by the Iranian Shiite revolution, and therefore fired to emulate it, Saudi Arabia, far and away the richest Sunni state, has fostered al Qaeda and the hate-mongering imams and madrassas behind many of the initial aggressions of World War IV. Although these Sunni and Shiite rivals occasionally collaborate—on the Israel front, for instance—they are more usually in competition to see who can do the most damage to the West while at the same time mustering for armed showdown between themselves.
Islamist terror attacks have brought the war home in one country after another. Since 9/11, better intelligence and doses of luck, coupled with the disgust that many if not most Muslims feel for those committing murder in their name, have restricted these outrages. More directly, we have taken the war to the jihadists in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq. We intend to defend ourselves, in other words, and have the means to do so. Although, for some unfathomable reason, the number of front-line jihadist casualties is never exactly specified, it runs into the thousands, with thousands more held in prison in the whole gamut of Muslim countries.
The hope, the ambition, is to construct peaceful nation-states out of the tribal and sectarian groupings whose various allegiances and identities have generated so much past violence, and are capable of generating still more in the present. The struggle for supremacy among tribes and sects is the real cause of the weaknesses that for centuries have bedeviled Muslim society, and created the feelings of humiliation and inferiority vis-à-vis others. The likes of Khomeini and Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden acquire and hold power by accommodating only those of their very own kind, to the exclusion of everyone else. Absolute rule becomes a self-perpetuating process of oppression and tyranny.
During my own travels in the Middle East over many years, I have made a point of asking what political arrangements people would favor. The almost invariable answer is democracy. This is not to ask for bicameralism and the separation of powers, but more modestly for the rule of law, an end to corruption, and some form of accountability, some process of representation able to pay heed and respond to grievances and injustice.
Such an outcome, however imperfect, would confront the exclusivity of tribe and sect, of Sunni and Shiite, and allow differences to be resolved by compromise rather than violence. After World War I, the British tried to restructure Iraq on just such lines, but the experiment was deemed financially too costly. Ignominious in itself, the British withdrawal condemned the entire population to decades of absolute rule, oppression, and tyranny.
Today’s American intervention is far more serious in scope and implication. Iraqis once more have the choice between a new, politically inclusive model and another relapse into absolute rule, oppression, and tyranny. America’s immediate difficulties only serve to demonstrate beyond doubt that democratization offers the Arab and Muslim world an escape route from its structural weaknesses. Although critics like to denigrate Western pressure to democratize the region as imperialism, it is the way for Muslims and non-Muslims in the end to meet on equal terms.
Nor is this just disinterested altruism. Whatever the outcome in Iraq, the Sunni-Shiite polarity will continue to condition the wider region. In the geostrategic dimension, the United States has created an unexpected three-cornered contest, whereby its armed forces, and therefore its political weight, are in place between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The mutual rivalry of these two countries is a dynamo driving Islamist jihad to spread destruction and death far and wide.
One possibility would be for the West to concede a victory to the Shiites in Iran and Iraq, leaving the Sunnis to make what they could of it. Alternatively, the Sunnis could be expected to be grateful in the event of America’s at last picking up the challenge so regularly and aggressively issued by Iran, and doing whatever has to be done to check the Khomeinist revolution and Iran’s nuclear program. Whichever way one looks at it, the American military presence close to Iran’s borders demonstrates superpower responsibility.
Crucial choices ahead will determine the course of World War IV, and the fate of millions with it. President Bush has put the United States in a position of potential strength as the arbiter of the future order in the Middle East, and it is dismaying that so many people refuse to recognize this. Norman Podhoretz rightly fears yet another possibility: that commentators in the media and opposition personalities have infected public opinion with a thoughtless and unworthy defeatism, and that party politics are assuming priority over the national interest.
If that is indeed the case, the indefinite prolongation of World War IV will have to be accepted, with who knows what damage inflicted by the Islamists on Muslims and non-Muslims alike and the quite unnecessary sacrifice of America’s standing and ultimately its security. More likely, surely, is that whoever is next in the White House will carry on where President Bush left off. Too much is at stake for anything else.
David Pryce-Jones, the British novelist and political analyst, is a senior editor of National Review and the author most recently of Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews.
Claudia Rosett
Yes, we have entered World War IV—and the designation “IV” is telling. Norman Podhoretz correctly identifies this war as the latest round in the long and mutating struggle between totalitarianism and freedom. More broadly, we are entering the second century of a global showdown between systems in which governments answer to their people and systems in which they do not.
In this context, Islamofascism is clearly the most virulent and immediate danger. But the threat hardly ends there. If I have a criticism of Podhoretz’s superb tour and analysis of the hot front in this new world war, it is that he underestimates the damage done to us in this war by some of the major non-Islamic despotisms, which in their own efforts to deflect democracy are only too pleased to strike back-scratching deals with Islamofascist regimes.
Along with such obvious candidates as the totalitarian munitions-merchant North Korea, or our near-neighbor Venezuela, these regimes include the two great powers of Russia and China. Lest that list sound too alarmist, or simply too overwhelming, let me add that I agree with Podhoretz’s warning that we cannot simultaneously tackle every villainous government on earth. But in understanding why we had to topple Saddam early on, and why democracy is the only real answer, I think we must keep in mind that behind Islamofascism is a brew of interests that, however disparate, have this in common: they shun democracy and in various ways tend to support each other in fighting and subverting its spread. Thus do we find China and Russia, our erstwhile allies against Islamo-terrorists, blocking one U.S. attempt after another to shut down or stymie the regimes that produce these killers and their medieval creeds.
In this context, Iraq has been a crucial early theater of World War IV, and not once but twice. To explain why, let us go back to the end of the cold war and exhume a phrase rarely mentioned these days: the New World Order. Whatever follies played out under that label in the 1990’s, there was a basic truth to the idea that as the Soviet empire staggered toward its 1991 collapse, the world was in a greater state of flux than at any time since the end of World War II. For better or worse, much was up for grabs.
And in 1990, one of the first to grab was Saddam Hussein, testing the rules of the nascent order with his invasion of Kuwait. When a UN coalition drove Iraq’s army back out of Kuwait, it was hailed as a victory for a new age of UN-coordinated multilateralism. The terrible mistake, however, was to leave Saddam in power in Baghdad. Not only was Saddam himself a malignant presence, but the message was sent that while there might be penalties to breaking the basic codes of international conduct, the penalties would not be equal to the offense. The rest of the feel-good decade of the 1990’s, in which America tolerated everything from escalating terrorist attacks, to North Korea’s nuclear extortion racket, to Yasir Arafat’s grotesque manipulations of the “peace process,” did not help.
Rectifying that early, signal mistake over Saddam was a profoundly important reason for the current President Bush to choose Iraq as an early front in America’s response to September 11. So was the need to stop the brazen rejuvenation of an unrepentant, expansionist, terror-based Baghdad regime that by 2003 had spent years making a complete mockery of UN sanctions; cheating, corrupting, and rearming its way back into business with or without weapons of mass destruction.
The overthrow of Saddam, the toppling of the Taliban, the declaration of the Bush Doctrine—all these early, aggressive actions by America brought progress on a number of fronts. Libya gave up its nuclear program, Lebanon tried to shake the murderous occupation by Syria. Elsewhere in the Middle East, democratic dissent began bubbling up. And, as of this writing, America for more than six years has escaped any major terrorist assault, something I attribute not solely to our home-front measures but to the Bush Doctrine of preemption and democratization—which has helped keep our enemies preoccupied abroad.
If Bush could give us one parting gift, beyond his determination to stay the course in Iraq, it should be greatly to ease that course by bombing enough of Iran’s nuclear-related infrastructure to persuade not only the mullahs but their Islamofascist neighbors, clients, and rivals that America has no interest in losing its wars. Given the climate in Washington, that seems unlikely. With the Left now ascendant in our domestic debates and howling for denial in our time, Bush himself has retreated on some fronts from the Bush Doctrine—negotiating with terror sponsors and deferring a reckoning with Iran.
Another folly has been our return, post-Saddam, to the corrupt councils of the UN. This institution more often than not comes between America and our would-be allies among the subjugated people of the world, not all of whom look forward to a life of jihad and repression. The UN, by dignifying dictators and attending upon their “votes,” deals one blow after another to those among their captive subjects who aspire to remove them. The gross disservice done to Iranian dissidents by the annual UN-hosted celebrity appearance of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York is one example. The UN’s Orwellian “Human Rights Council” is another.
But if it looks as if America is now in the process of scrapping the Bush Doctrine altogether, I think the next President will not in practice find that so easy. We are in a world war that America cannot avoid. The challenges, if unmet, will continue to grow. The next big attack will come. Primed by the liberty and law of our own democratic system, Americans did much to create today’s world of high technology, instant messages, and global markets. The benefits are vast, including the spread in many quarters of greater wealth, health, and freedom. But along this network, poisonous ideologies and their foot soldiers can also hitch, or hijack, a high-speed ride. We are not fighting for democracy in foreign lands out of altruism—in any event, a treacherous guide. We are fighting to gain strategically vital ground against enemies who must put out the light of the great American experiment of democracy if they are to prevail in their dreams of power and plunder under cover of a new dark age.
That contest, not some whimsical U.S. mission of global good will, is why the Bush Doctrine has it so very right in putting democratization front and center as our natural cause and best hope. For most of us, despite the shock of September 11, the full character of the threat against us has yet to be felt in our daily lives. When it is, this country will go to war to win.
Claudia Rosett is a journalist in residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Amir Taheri
I have no problem describing the current struggle as World War IV. With varying degrees of intensity, this war is being fought in 22 countries across the globe—from Indonesia and Thailand to the Sudan and Algeria. Many other countries, among them almost all the 57 nations with a Muslim majority and several Western nations as well, are targets of occasional terrorist operations that the jihadists describe as ghazva (holy raids).
The fact that the conflict affects so many nations is not the only reason why we should agree with Norman Podhoretz in considering this a world war. Another and more important reason is that the conflict is not about such mundane things as borders, territory, or access to markets and resources. It is about the future of mankind as a whole. Here we have the clash of two visions of the world’s future. One vision is that of a pluralistic global system based on the shared values of human rights, democracy, free enterprise, and international law. The other vision is inspired by a radical and rigid re-interpretation of Islam as the “Final Truth” dictated by God, abrogating all other faiths and creeds.
The war, then, has clear ideological fronts. But its military fronts are not so clearly drawn, and this has caused some confusion. In this war, many Muslims, perhaps even a majority, are fighting against Islamism, whereas many in the West, including some late avatars of Stalinism and fascism, are objective allies of the Islamists. In other words, this is not a war between the West and the rest but between democracy, which has many supporters in non-democratic societies, and the latest challenger to democracy that is Islamofascism. At times, indeed, the war is an internal one, being fought within the same societies, and even within the same families, both in the Muslim world and in the Western democracies. Moreover, just as there were many kinds of Communism and fascism in World Wars II and III, so there are many different kinds of Islamofascism today. But all have one thing in common: their determination to reshape the world in accordance with their totalitarian vision.
There is no doubt that Iraq is one of the key battlefields in World War IV—perhaps even the key one in this early phase of the global conflict. The reason is that, in Iraq, virtually all versions of Islamofascism, from Salafism to Khomeinism and including al-Qaeda-type terrorism, are present on the battlefield against a coalition of democracies led by the United States and backed by a coalition of Iraqis who reject the Islamofascist vision.
In my opinion, the larger war started in 1979 when Islamofascists seized power in Tehran. But there is no doubt that the 9/11 attacks against the United States led to a more urgent awareness. Today, six years after 9/11, the cause of the democracies and their Muslim allies has not done too badly at all.
Thus, Afghanistan and Iraq have been liberated and set on their respective paths to democratization. Lebanon has expelled the Syrian army of occupation. Algeria, Egypt, and Turkey have effectively defeated their respective terrorist enemies. Yemen has crushed both Sunni and Shiite terrorist groups that tried to create mini-“emirates” on its territory. The Islamofascists have also suffered defeat in Kashmir, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Chechnya. In Iran, civil society has started to organize resistance to the Khomeinist regime, especially with the blossoming of an independent trade-union movement.
In addition, a number of Arab states have inaugurated constitutional reforms and free elections, both at national and municipal levels, in some cases for the first time in their history. Certain democratic ideas, like popular consent as the key source of legitimacy, have similarly been introduced, and are beginning to strike roots in societies that hitherto shunned the global trend toward democratization.
In this connection, Norman Podhoretz is surely right in asserting that “democratization represents the best and perhaps even the only way to defeat Islamofascism and the terrorism it uses as its main weapon against us.”
Critics of the Bush Doctrine assert that democracy cannot be imposed by force. I agree. But as far as I am aware, Bush never suggested otherwise. In fact, he said: “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.” Nevertheless, there are times and places where force can and must be used in order to remove impediments to democracy. Both the Taliban and the Baathists had to be uprooted by force before Afghanistan and Iraq could have a chance to consider democratization as an option.
I have no doubt that the Bush Doctrine will survive as a key element of American national security even if the Republicans lose the White House next year. As long as there are places on earth where terrorists can regroup, train, and prepare attacks, the U.S., and indeed all democracies, will be threatened. By taking action in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. showed that it had not been cowed by the terrorist attacks and was prepared to fight in distant places and against deadly enemies.
Still, during the past six years, two key battlegrounds have not received the attention they merit. The first is the battleground of public opinion in Western democracies. There, under the banner of anti-Americanism, a broad coalition of Left and Right, in de-facto alliance with the Islamofascists, preaches a gospel of defeat and surrender. This anti-American coalition, which is, in fact, the enemy of democracy, must be taken on and defeated. Some time soon, the U.S. will also have to find ways and means of re-mobilizing its allies, especially in Europe, for the inevitable confrontation with the Khomeinist regime in Tehran.
The second battleground is that of public opinion in Muslim countries. Here, American public diplomacy has been nonexistent or even counterproductive. In some Muslim countries, U.S. diplomacy has even harmed the nascent democratic forces by emphasizing Washington’s support for authoritarian regimes in the name of realpolitik.
Democracy can and must win the current world war, just as it won all three previous ones.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor of Khayan, Iran’s largest daily newspaper, from 1972 to 1979 and is a frequent contributor to publications in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States.
Ruth Wedgwood
In a sense it is true that “everything changed” on September 11—certainly in our understanding of where things were headed. Before the appearance of al Qaeda on these shores, only an army or an earthquake could kill 20,000 to 50,000 people in a morning. Had 9/11 not been primary day in New York, with many people going first to vote and thus being late for work, the lives lost in that single morning could easily have numbered in the tens of thousands. And that is what al Qaeda wanted.
This escalation in the methods of terror—linking eschatology and mass violence—means that other groups may aspire to at least the same degree of intimidation and wreckage. Violence has been reconceived, to focus on targets with a central place in a society’s self-understanding. The destruction of an Irish pub on the Derry Road has been replaced by the collapse of a major landmark. Al Qaeda advertised this weird aesthetic of obliteration in its earlier 1993 plot in New York, interrupted by the police, that sought to blow up the United Nations, the George Washington bridge, and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in one grand chaotic gesture. The same nihilism also yielded the al-Qaeda bombing of Iraq’s Golden Mosque of Samarra in February 2006, which not only destroyed a sacred shrine but ransacked a tentative accord between Sunni and Shiite factions, and severely impeded the search for a new balance of power in Iraq.
America and its next President, regardless of party, will thus continue to face extreme difficulty in preserving the safety of our citizens and assisting Islam to regain its bearings. The political parlor game of should-we-or-should-we-not-have-intervened-in-Iraq-in-2003 should not distract from this verity. Even within the four corners of the “Iraq question”—and, with the ferocious intermeddling of Syria, Iran, and al Qaeda, Iraq does not have four corners—no critic of administration policy has stopped to wonder whether the intervention against Saddam might have gone better if we had acted in 1998, when Saddam first kicked out the American inspectors. In the event, we undertook to fight a war after allowing our opponent five years to prepare. Saddam used the time to sequester billions of dollars, truck his equipage to Syria, and empty his prisons, preparing his turn-key resistance during the slow diplomatic burn that preceded the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
And what if we had delayed intervention, past 2003? What then? In the face of French and Russian pressure, the lifting of Security Council sanctions and the opening of a new spigot of money for weapons purchases were all but ordained. And with the progress of Iran’s nuclear program, would not Saddam inevitably have reconstituted his WMD portfolio to fight a second Iran-Iraq war?
We have been sorely challenged in adapting our methods of land warfare against the hydra-headed insurgency in Iraq. The fight has been costly and rugged. It is startling how often in our polite society, with its publishers and professors, we lose sight of the reasons why American soldiers on the ground think the mission is important. There is equally little sense, in our post-ROTC world, of the solemn virtues of selflessness and courage that soldiers live by. Writers who have railed at our passivity in Rwanda might celebrate the braver course we have sustained in Iraq, trying to protect innocent lives from death by car bomb.
The mélange of threats coming from the Muslim world and the demimonde of weapons proliferation will call for different skills and capacities in government. Within the intelligence community, a new generation of linguists must be trained to decrypt conversations conducted in Pashtun, Arabic, Farsi, and Korean, as well as in computer code. Intelligence collection can be stymied when the unit size for lethal combat is limited to al-Qaeda squads of three or four. Analyzing the loose chains of linkage, in phone numbers, leases, and itineraries, is not the conventional way to identify who is a “soldier,” and penetration is far more difficult in this unconventional war.
In addition, there is the problem of states that provide sanctuary. We will face real dilemmas when foreign governments cannot thwart the misuse of their territory by al Qaeda. But international law has been usefully changed by Security Council resolution 1373, and the UN’s imperative demand that states must prevent the use of their soil as training platforms for insurgents.
In a June 2001 essay in the Washington Post’s “Outlook” section, I paid tribute to a federal prosecutor in Manhattan for winning criminal convictions after the bombing attacks on our embassies in East Africa. Truck bombs prepared by al Qaeda had toppled the buildings in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 220 and wounding more than 4,000. Many of the victims were Muslim. Acknowledging a brilliantly-conducted trial, my essay also warned that criminal charges were not enough. Behind every conviction lay an intelligence failure, and our inability to dismantle the infrastructure that generated these attacks meant that more attacks would follow.
I was approached by several veterans of the intelligence community who reported that, to their similar alarm, there was no sharing of information between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, and hence no integrated picture of al Qaeda. I relayed their account to the senior staff of an intelligence committee on Capitol Hill. The problem was real and serious. But as my interlocutors predicted, nothing would be done about it in the extant political climate.
9/11 changed all that, too, though not soon enough. The national-security doctrine propounded by the Bush administration now holds that it is not adequate to punish mass-casualty bombers after they have attacked. Rather, the duty of any President is to protect his fellow citizens, and other innocent life, before the harm is done. The means should be proportionate, and we should speak in the language of law. But the “responsibility to protect”—a foreign-policy ideal celebrated in both liberal and conservative circles—is not discharged by convicting the suicide bomber who survives a failed attack. The pooling of information and the denial of overseas sanctuary are practical necessities if we are to thwart a terrorist organization that operates in cyberspace before it mounts terrestrial and aerial attacks.
The new mode of catastrophic terrorism can be countered only by dismantling al Qaeda’s leadership, funding, and ideology. Catalyzing the necessary institutional changes in American government, and mustering the courage to act when a moment of opportunity presents itself, are the burdens that belong to any responsible President.
Ruth Wedgwood is a member of the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security and Law, and serves on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. The views expressed here are her own.
James Q. Wilson
I think we are and should be in a war against Islamofascist terrorism; whether we call it World War IV is, to me, immaterial. It is a war, and perhaps one of the longest and most difficult we will have ever fought.
The Bush Doctrine that defines this war may outlive the 2008 presidential elections, depending on public opinion. If the public believes, as I think it does, that we cannot fight this war on the defensive and that we must take the struggle, where appropriate and where it can make a difference, to rogue or failed nations that support terrorism, then the next President, whichever party he or she belongs to, will, perhaps after making politically suitable but largely rhetorical bows toward “the need for change,” will continue the fight.
Whether this will be done effectively is another matter. As Norman Podhoretz points out in his book, scarcely any President for the last 30 years has responded to the long list of terrorist attacks to which this country has been subjected with anything more than a few cruise missiles fired into empty buildings. But the next terrorist attack (and I believe another one is very likely) will generate a demand for action that will be impossible to resist except among the agitated ranks led by George Soros and Michael Moore.
Apart from whether we will fight, the key issue is how we will know whether we have won. We have made dramatic gains in Afghanistan and Iraq, though much more needs to be done. And happily the American military has adopted a better strategy for doing it, one that we learned from the Marine Corps in Vietnam but that the Army managed to forget until General David Petraeus and his colleagues produced a masterful Army-Marines counterinsurgency field manual that is now being applied in Iraq.
Ideally, democracy is our goal because, with perhaps only a few exceptions, democracies do not invade one another and they leave their people free to improve their lives. But democracy comes slowly and painfully even to countries well suited to receive it.
Of the two dozen or so predominantly Muslim nations in the world, only six can reasonably be called democratic, and acquiring that status required a long time and the overcoming of many reverses. According to Freedom House, Indonesia, Mali, and Senegal are free, and Afghanistan, Morocco, and Turkey are “partly free.” These accomplishments took many years. Indonesia, although it became independent in 1949, was not a competitive democracy until 2003, and in the interim had to endure decades of one-party elections. Mali had an endless series of coups between its independence in 1960 and the establishment not long ago of a civilian government that has held generally free and honest elections. Senegal became independent at about the same time and managed to avoid military coups, but it also had to endure two decades of one-party rule. Today, however, it has a multiparty competition for votes.
Among the partly free Muslim countries, Afghanistan is well known to us since we brought the first hint of political freedom to that country. It is still struggling to end corruption, win the allegiance of independent tribal leaders to a central government, and empower local communities. Morocco has a powerful hereditary king, but the incumbent has helped create a popularly elected legislature and sponsored a reconciliation commission that has publicly criticized past civil-rights abuses and set forth recommendations for preventing them in the future. Turkey has been a secular state since the early 1920’s, but several decades passed before it held genuinely competitive elections. The Turkish army has periodically intervened to protect the country’s secular status, but today a moderate Muslim party is in power and has elected a Muslim president, albeit one who has promised to keep church and state separate.
Obviously the United States cannot be in Iraq for the 40 or 50 years it has taken other Muslim nations, several of which lack Iraq’s ardent Sunni-Shiite rivalry, to become reasonably or wholly democratic. How long, then, do we stay? My answer: until Iraq has displayed the ability to maintain order with a police force that respects fundamental rights and an army that is committed to civilian rule. No doubt we will leave before Iraq enjoys democratic rule of the kind practiced in Canada, Great Britain, or the United States; but we must remain there until a reasonable observer can say that the nation is on a course leading to popular government.
As Max Boot has pointed out in the September COMMENTARY (“How Not to Get Out of Iraq”), no one has devised a “Plan B” that has any reasonable chance of success. It is logistically impossible to leave immediately; the country cannot be divided into religiously coherent states; and Americans must remain in significant numbers to keep Iraqi security forces intact and improving just as NATO forces have been kept in Bosnia for over a decade. We cannot “guard the borders” without running concentration camps for seized infiltrators. Although we may be tempted to back a decent authoritarian (Boot calls this “Saddam Lite”), there is no one available who might play that role and has sufficient force to compel obedience.
The last thing we should do is to announce, as many members of Congress have done, “goals” that the current Iraqi government must meet in order to keep us there. When Congress recently instructed the Government Accountability Office to inform us whether Iraq had formed a constitutional-review committee, enacted a law on de-Baathification, or decided to create a High Electoral Commission, it was not “measuring progress,” it was looking for excuses for us to leave.
In a co-authored September 10 essay in the Wall Street Journal, Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman made the central issue quite clear. The choice we face in Iraq is not between the current government and a perfect one, but “between a young, imperfect, struggling democracy . . . and the fanatical, al-Qaeda suicide bombers and Iranian-sponsored terrorists who are trying to destroy it.” Though there are good reasons to worry that elections will from time to time bring to power undemocratic regimes, there is no reason to believe that Muslims are incapable of democratic government.
In refuting this notion, Podhoretz quotes Bernard Lewis: to think that the Islamic people are incapable of civilized government “shows ignorance of the Arab past, contempt for the Arab present, and unconcern for the Arab future.” And, I would add, a profound ignorance of what has happened in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation.
James Q. Wilson is the Ronald Reagan professor of public policy at Pepperdine University.
R. James Woolsey
I agree that “World War IV” is an accurate characterization of our war against Islamist totalitarianism. But although what the term denotes is sound—a lengthy world-wide struggle against a totalitarian enemy that is analogous to, especially, World War II and the cold war (World War III)—its connotation creates a problem. Hearing “world war,” most people will think of D-Day, Iwo Jima, Stalingrad, etc. and thus quickly conclude that the speaker advocates principally large-scale military operations.
When I begin a conversation by calling the current struggle World War IV, I find that until the second glass of wine I am generally not successful in persuading a friend that I really do not want to invade all our enemies—especially since, like Norman Podhoretz, I supported the invasion of Iraq. So I lean toward “The Long War of the 21st Century,” which, yes, has its own connotation problems. In any case, his point—that we confront a sweeping, ideologically rooted, worldwide, determined enemy whom it will take years to defeat—is the crux of the matter.
Iraq threatens our success in this long World War IV. It is vital for us to prevail there, else we will leave a vacuum for both Sunni and Shiite Islamists to fill. But the current fighting there is, in my view, not an “early theater” in the overall war. We in the U.S. have been at war with the Middle East’s Islamist totalitarians for nearly three decades —at least since our embassy hostages were seized in Tehran in 1979. It is just that, until quite recently, only our enemies have been fighting. We should look at the Sunni and Shiite totalitarians together, since they cooperate with one another (and with secular totalitarians like Iraqi and Syrian Baathists) far more than our press, our diplomats, and our intelligence analysts have generally wanted to admit. These pundits and government officials have served us exactly as well as their grandfathers in the same professions who confidently told the world in the 1930’s that Nazis and Communists would never cooperate.
Beginning with the Carter administration’s dithering, we have done our best for a long time to convince the Islamist totalitarians that we are the “weak horse” that bin Laden rightly says will be disdained by all. In Lebanon, our embassy and our Marine barracks were blown up—and we left. Americans were thereafter kidnapped, tortured, and killed in the 1980’s—and we looked to law enforcement and tried to trade arms for hostages. In 1991 we had a half-million troops in Iraq and encouraged the Kurds and Shiites to rebel—and we then stood aside and watched them be massacred. There was an attempt to murder former President Bush in 1993—and we fired two dozen cruise missiles into an empty Iraqi intelligence headquarters at night, dealing decisively with Iraqi cleaning women and night watchmen. Our helicopters were shot down in Somalia in 1993—and we left. Our World Trade Center was bombed in 1993—and we ignored the fact that one of the leading perpetrators took refuge in Iraq. Our East African embassies, our military barracks in Saudi Arabia, and an American warship were all bombed in the 1990’s—and we fired a few more cruise missiles ineffectually into the sands of Sudan and Afghanistan.
Now we have at least noticed that we are at war, and in Afghanistan and Iraq have begun to fight back. But in the latter case, until nearly four years into the war, we repeated the same ineffective search-and-destroy tactics used by General William Westmoreland for almost exactly the same stretch of years in Vietnam. General David Petraeus has finally been allowed to fight (clear-hold-protect) like General Creighton Abrams and the Marines. It is crucial that he be allowed to succeed. If he does, much else will go well in the overall war. If he does not, the consequences could be disastrous.
As for our progress: the President made a huge mistake after 9/11 by telling us to “shop” instead of rallying us to a long struggle. One rallying point could have been to move us away from oil’s dominance (96 percent) of the world’s transportation market. The Saudi billionaires who fund al Qaeda, the Wahhabi imams who inspire suicide bombers to go to Iraq, the Iranian mullahs who pay for the explosive devices to kill our troops in Iraq—all get their resources from oil. We are late and are only now beginning to support real technologies—unlike such pipe dreams as hydrogen fuel cells for the family car—that can help this transition.
Our broadcasting to the Middle East has been inept and ineffective. The nation that invented Radio Free Europe forgot for years why it was so successful.
In this connection, although I agree with the Bush Doctrine’s emphasis on democratization, balloting may not come first. Instead, in many societies, one should often begin (following John Rawls and Amartya Sen) by building on existing “institutions of public reason” such as the Loya Jirga in Afghanistan. History and ownership of institutions matter. In Iraq, for example, we should have given back to the Iraqis their own 1925 constitution instead of drafting one for them, especially since in doing so we set up a copy of Weimar Germany’s historically disastrous structure of proportional representation and party lists—an electoral system that encourages factions instead of a more stable system based on single-member constituencies that encourage two parties to compete for the center.
But it is certainly true that democracies very rarely fight one another. Since 1945, when there were about 20 democracies, Freedom House indicates that nearly 100 have been added. (Of these, admittedly, some 30 have serious problems like substantial corruption.) Those who said Japan and Germany could never be democracies have been proved wrong, as have those in years past who said the same thing of Asians, of Catholics, and of others. Mongolia, for example, is a well-functioning democracy.
However difficult the transition, giving up on any nation or people by assuming that because of their culture they will ultimately prefer tyranny to freedom is both dangerous and racist. Many of those who sign on to this assumption call themselves “realists”; they are the exact opposite.
R. James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is co-chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger.