[iwar] [fc:A.Growing.List.Of.Foes.Now.Suddenly.Friends]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-05 06:21:28


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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:A.Growing.List.Of.Foes.Now.Suddenly.Friends]
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[FC - With friends like these, who needs enemies? - original source long
forgotten...]

New York Times
October 5, 2001
News Analysis
A Growing List Of Foes Now Suddenly Friends
By Serge Schmemann

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 4 - The terror attacks of Sept. 11 forced an immediate
and radical shift in American relations with the rest of the world. What had
been a drifting search for a foreign policy by a new Republican
administration suddenly acquired a hard, overarching purpose, in which
friends and foes were coldly redefined according to whether they were with
the United States or against it.

The realignments have been staggering. A few short weeks ago, Washington
viewed Central Asia, if it viewed the region at all, as a nest of nasty
despots; Russia was a nagging has-been doing bad things in Chechnya, and the
United Nations was a bloated organization whose conference on racism had to
be boycotted. The Mideast was a quagmire, but the real threats were in Asia
- the rogues in North Korea and the increasingly assertive rulers in China.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is on his way to Uzbekistan, now
critical to any punch into Afghanistan; Russia is at the front of the
cheering section for an assault on Islamic zealots, and the United Nations
is echoing to unceasing declarations of support for America. Some of these
declarations come from governments like Sudan or Syria that figure
prominently on the State Department's list of countries that harbor
terrorists.

Accusations of isolationism from frustrated allies have evaporated as the
Bush administration probes every corner of the globe for allies, dangling
the promise of tangible benefits, diplomatic or financial, for those who
rally to the cause. Pakistan - a country that has seen a democratic
government overthrown, has supported the Taliban in Afghanistan and has
tested nuclear weapons - is at the front of the line.

At times, it feels as if the cold war is back, only with a new and very
different enemy. But response to a clear and present danger is not yet a
foreign policy.

What the United States and much of the rest of the world has proclaimed as a
war on terrorism is really, for now, at least, a hunt for Osama bin Laden
and his associates.

Nobody yet knows how long that will take, or what will take shape after the
smoke of the first strikes settles. Even if Mr. bin Laden is eliminated, his
network will take years to eradicate, with the constant danger of new
attacks from his enraged comrades.

All the experts agree on for now is that Sept. 11 marked a tectonic shift.
But the real debate and the real sorting out of friends and foes are likely
to begin in earnest only after the first passions have quieted.

The very definition of the enemy is certain to become fuzzier with time. In
its absolutist theology, Al Qaeda managed to alienate or frighten virtually
every government in the Middle East and beyond, except for the Taliban who
gave it refuge. Its reactionary vision of a pure, theocratic state and its
rabid anti-Americanism threatened to radicalize every Arab street and
challenged every secular, moderate or corrupt regime in the Arab and Islamic
world.

But immediately beyond Al Qaeda, the high moral condemnations of global
terrorism rapidly become relative, and the definition blurred. The Security
Council resolution calling on all states to join in controlling the
financing and movements of terrorists avoided giving a definition, though
the chairman of the committee set up to implement the resolution, Sir Jeremy
Greenstock, the British ambassador to the United Nations, declared that it
was self- evident: "What looks, smells and kills like terrorism is
terrorism."

Even groups that have been declared terrorist by the State Department, like
the militantly Islamic and anti-Israeli Hezbollah and Hamas, have been set
aside in the new war in the higher interest of garnering broad Arab and
Islamic support against Al Qaeda. In fact, only Iraq appears to have
generated any serious consideration in the administration as a potential
co-enemy.

The quandary is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Israel,
Washington's closest ally in the Middle East and the recipient of the
biggest share of American foreign aid, may be more nervous these days than
its neighbors or enemies. Any anti-terrorist coalition, Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon warned in the Jerusalem Post, "will not be at our expense."

"I don't think it's so difficult to say who is a terrorist, at least not for
the American government and public," said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign
policy expert at Johns Hopkins. "The question is what to do about it."
The situation, of course, is not that new. The United States has wooed the
Arabs before, most notably President Bush the elder for the coalition in the
Persian Gulf war, and the realities of global politics have always made for
curious and shifting bedmates.

The United States teamed up with Stalin against Hitler, and then spent 40
years single-mindedly waging a cold war against the Soviet Union. Nobody was
disqualified as an ally in that struggle, from China on down to Mobutu Sese
Seko of Zaire and that self-same Taliban.

Yet few veteran foreign policy watchers can remember when a single event has
had so instant and so profound an effect on the entire dynamic of world
politics.

"It is essential to mobilize with great urgency when an enemy strikes
suddenly and catastrophically," Sam Nunn, the former Democratic senator from
Georgia, said this week. "Decisions and actions that would normally occur
over 5 to 10 years occur in only a few months. But this accelerated fight
against terrorism must be integrated into a broader national security
strategy. We must understand what changed on Sept. 11, and what did not
change."

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