[iwar] [fc:Grand.Strategy]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-13 23:41:12


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On the War
By Stanley Hoffmann, The New York Review of Books, November 1, 2001.

1.

As soon as the shock of the terror attacks on New York and Washington
was felt, commentators began saying that September 11, 2001, marked the
beginning of a new era in world affairs.  It is a misleading
interpretation of a horrible event.  What was new was the demonstration
that a small number of well-organized conspirators could cause thousands
of victims in the territory of the "only superpower" and thus show that
the US was not any safer from attack than far less mighty nations.  But
the change of scale and the location of the targets do not represent a
transformation of international relations.  The terrorists brutally drew
our attention to a phenomenon that had long been partly hidden from
sight by the cold war and by decolonization, two historical developments
that were quite traditional: an epic contest between two great powers,
and the troubled birth of a large number of (more or less shaky) new
states. 

While these struggles went on, something drastically new was emerging: a
global society in which states were no longer the only or even the
essential players.  Insofar as they keep the appearance and trappings of
sovereignty, the states are still, on the surface, the shapers of their
foreign policies.  But unlike in the dominant model of world affairs
taught to future academics, statesmen, and businessmen, the goals of
states are now only partly "geopolitical," consisting of territory,
resources, security from rivals, prestige, etc.  States have
increasingly had to take into account the demands and wishes of their
people-jobs, welfare, ethnic or religious sympathies and hatreds,
protection from internal or external wars, etc.  Governments that
neglect such preferences and pressures do so at considerable peril. 
Nothing is purely domestic or purely international anymore. 

Even more important has been the recent emergence of a global civil
society, made up of people and groups that operate across borders and
whose decisions and acts sharply reduce the freedom of maneuver of
governments: not only multinational corporations, secular and religious
nongovernmental organizations, and investors able to move their money at
lightning speed from one stock market to another (and thus to shake up
domestic currencies), but also drug cartels, mafias, and terrorists. 
The distinction between state and civil society is of course artificial. 
Many of the components of civil society want governments to adopt
measures aimed at satisfying their demands, whether for education,
pro-tecting the environment, or treatment of AIDS or other illnesses;
there are very few "private" actors who do not need and obtain financial
or political support from governments.  But global civil society has
suffered both from neglect by students of world affairs, and from being
even more unmanageable than a world of states with only a fragmentary
collective governance.  The shock of monetary crises in the 1990s was
fortunately not strong enough to destroy the world economy.  The shock
of September 11 has been so great because it resulted from an attack; it
was not, moreover, an attack by anonymous speculators on national
currencies but by a small group of minimally armed terrorists on the
national security and sense of confidence of the world's greatest power. 
Suddenly, rogue states lost their status as the greatest potential
threat.  A world of millions of private actors means a world of
virtually unlimited vulnerability. 

This is, paradoxically, especially frightening for the United States,
the country that has done most to destroy borders and walls, to shape a
world market, to promote freedom of communications, information, and
movement.  Americans have known, since the Vietnam War, that awesome
firepower does not guarantee victory against a determined small nation. 
Concentrated will and the ability to accept casualties can compensate
for inequality in economic and military might.  The fact that American
power was partly unusable (as with nuclear weapons), and partly
ineffective when used, was disturbing enough when the foe was a
relatively small state.  It is even more disturbing to think that a few
thousand terrorists may have the same effect: Gulliver no longer tied by
Lilliputians, but assaulted by clever gnats.  The weapons of economic
and military warfare (including for mass destruction) are now available
not merely to states, but to the peoples of the world. 

2. 

How do we deal with this change? The Bush administration has shown a
great deal of schizophrenia.  On the one hand, the President himself has
declared war on terrorists and regimes that support them, thus evoking
images of large-scale campaigns fueled by the huge American arsenal. 
And he has proclaimed that whoever does not support us will be
considered to be against us.  On the other hand, this grand display of
threats has been tempered by the increasingly numerous references by
cabinet members to the duration, complexity, and uncertainty of this
war; to the financial and other nonmilitary aspects of it; and to the
fact that we expect certain states to support us for some tasks, and
other states for different ones.  This schizophrenia reflects both
division within the administration and the difficulties of the task. 

The first question that comes to anyone's mind has still not been
answered.  Whom are we fighting? If it is bin Laden and his associates,
formidable as they may be, we risk finding that dismantling their
network is likely to be a slow and frustrating task in a world without
walls, and that even successes in this particular struggle will not put
an end to many other murderous forms of terrorism.  To proclaim a war on
terrorism in general, even if one means only terrorist cells and forces
not directly sponsored by states, is ambitious indeed, for we need to
distinguish among types of terrorists.  Some have limited missions and
do not see the US as their principal enemy.  In Sri Lanka or Northern
Ireland, in Corsica or Chechnya, in Palestine or in the Basque province,
most terrorists see themselves, convincingly or not, as "freedom
fighters." It is hard to imagine US forces acting directly against them. 
It is the groups that have declared war on America, or on the entire
Judeo-Christian world, that the US must respond to. 

Many insist that the US make war against states that serve as hosts and
helpers of terrorists.  Here again distinctions are essential.  Are all
the states in which terrorists operate their willing accomplices? In
this case, the category includes states incapable of exerting control
because they are too weak (Lebanon) or because they are insufficiently
vigilant (the US and many of its democratic allies).  Should the "war"
be directed only against the states that sheltered or aided Bin Laden?
This risks sending us into an Afghan quagmire of disastrous proportions,
causing a huge new exodus of miserably poor people, and creating
revulsion and perhaps revolt among the Pakistanis, or at least some
factions among them.  Should the US make war against those whom it has
declared to be terrorist, or terrorist-sponsoring, states, even if their
links to bin Laden are hypothetical or dubious? This list includes
states that have now promised to help the US (Syria, Sudan) as well as
longstanding enemies (Iraq) or semi-enemies (Iran); trying to "punish"
these could all too easily boomerang and reduce international support
for the US.  A determined project of ridding the world of all rogues and
terrorists is a dream that would be seen abroad as a demonstration of
rabid imperialism.  The US has to be more modest in its goals. 

The second question concerns the means by which war is carried on.  The
administration's recent emphasis on diversity of tactics has been wise. 
Terrorism should be fought as a crime against the innocent, just as
organized crime is at home.  More effective than military operations are
likely to be the instruments of police and counterintelligence,
including the patient collection of information, the silent penetration
of cells, the cutting-off of financial support, the dismantling of the
communications used by the networks.  Military attacks risk causing both
political damage, by weakening regimes that would let us operate from
their soil or friendly governments whose domestic support is shaky
(Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia), and what is euphemistically called
collateral damage, i.e., killing innocent victims, among whom the
terrorists have been living.  Indeed, the very scope of our military
forces makes surprise attacks difficult.  Small teams of US special
forces are reported to be inside Afghanistan; but it seems likely that
by the time our planes and combat forces arrive, training camps and
former hiding places for terrorists will be empty.  This is particularly
the case in Afghanistan, as many past attackers have found out: there,
more is definitely less. 

As Reverend J.  Bryan Hehir has argued, attacks that do not take every
precaution against killing the innocent or destroying the infrastructure
of the society in which the civilian population lives would be both
immoral and counterproductive.[1] This brings us to the third question. 
How can we fight terrorism without undermining our position in a world
where the support of other governments and peoples is essential? One
reason for prudence in punishing governments that help terrorism is that
we can hardly avoid punishing their societies as well (and in doing so
we may sharply increase popular hostility to ourselves).  At worst we'll
be faced, after the collapse of those currently in power, with the
formidable task of finding new leaders who will not appear as our
puppets.  Our choice of local allies during the cold war days has often
been sufficiently catastrophic that we should now be dubious about the
kind of nation-building, or rebuilding, we could undertake in regions we
don't understand.  After all, the Taliban derived from programs
supported by the CIA and the American-supported Pakistanis not so long
ago.  Should the Taliban's rule collapse, it is far from clear that an
eighty-six-year-old exiled former king and a Northern Alliance that has
little support in much of Afghanistan (and that Pakistan dislikes) could
provide very effective rule.  There are more than enough tribes,
factions, and animosities in Afghanistan to make an extremely cautious
policy desirable. 

To demand that the often besieged governments of other countries be with
us, or else, makes sense only if they are in a position to be with us
without committing suicide or reinforcing their internal enemies.  Such
a demand may be far less than successful in getting hostile or critical
governments to side with us out of fear of American power.  It may push
friendly but frightened governments to seek a fence to sit on out of
fear of their domestic foes. 

3. 

Another question concerns American unilateralism.  Commentators may have
announced its demise too soon.  In a situation infinitely more complex
than the one we faced when one unpopular leader, Saddam Hussein, invaded
and annexed a small Arab state, we must ask how the coalition that
Secretary of State Powell has been skillfully building is being seen by
his colleagues in the government.  Do they see it as a partnership in
which our allies will not only provide various forms of support, but
also take part in the major decisions? As often before in NATO, the
danger is that we will look at our allies as junior partners of our
firm, asked to supplement our forces and to pay for the common good. 

There are two reasons to worry about this.  One is that we have a large
enough number of critics in the world, as well as old friends who do not
want to be seen as protégés of the US, to need and seek a seal of
international legitimacy (especially at a time when Russia, as in 1990,
is cooperative and China discreetly nonhostile).  That legitimacy could
be provided by the Security Council of the United Nations, and the
administration has acted wisely in suspending its suspicion of the UN
and in persuading the council to pass on September 28 a resolution
obliging UN members to cooperate in combatting terrorism.  If ours is
the cause of humanity, if terrorism against civilians is something that
threatens everyone, if security from terror attacks is a universal
public good, we should behave not as a country that seeks revenge for
what it has endured, and has the power to twist arms throughout the
world, but as a country that seeks a broad mandate by accepting the
norms and constraints of international law.  The Security Council
resolution is a step in that direction, although it contains no
definition of terrorism and provides for no specific action by the UN
itself. 

A considerably more direct involvement of the UN in the campaign against
terrorism would have legal and practical advantages.  Legally, the
International Criminal Court (resisted so reflexively by American
"sovereign-tists") should be allowed to extend its jurisdiction to
crimes against humanity committed by terrorists.  A UN agency or office
against terrorism could facilitate-especially among states that are not
particularly friendly with one another yet have their own reasons to
combat terrorism-exchanges of intelligence and arrangements for
cooperation.  There may also be a need for a temporary UN trusteeship
over a post-Taliban Afghanistan, to preserve peace, to rebuild an
administration, and to reconcile factions. 

Another reason to resist the itch of unilateralism and of what I have
elsewhere called bossism[2]-the use of international and regional
institutions to impose our views-is that in order to succeed, the
struggle against terrorists and the states that support them needs to
begin with an adequate understanding of our adversaries' grievances, if
only to allow us to shape a perceptive policy and to avoid acting in a
self-destructive way.  Reading newspapers and listening to public
officials and commentators since September 11 has been a disconcerting
experience.  While the press and television in friendly countries have,
mostly without animosity, discussed why the US is the target of so much
hostility (and not only in the Islamic world), in the US the question
has largely been dismissed.  Or the answer has been self-serving,
simplistic, and summary-it's the virtues of democracy, or of capitalism,
or of an open society, that make others envious and angry. 

It would be far better to realize that this hostility toward the US has
many layers.  Some of the terrorists and their supporters are religious
fanatics who see in the US, the West, and Israel a formidable machine
for cultural subversion, political domination, and economic subjection. 
The kind of Islamic revanche bin Laden projects in his statements is
both so cosmic and based on so peculiar an interpretation of the Koran
that there is very little one can do to rebut it.  But there is a great
deal one can do to limit its appeal.  This kind of an ethics of
conviction feeds- like so many other forms of totalitarianism-on
experiences of despair and humiliation, and these can be understood and
to some degree addressed. 

But there are more limited bills of indictment against the US, focused
on specific American policies.  Sometimes, the targets are the corrupt
or brutal regimes that have been propped up by American economic and
military assistance.  Sometimes there is solidarity with the
Palestinians' demand for an end of occupation and, at last, genuine
self-determination.  Sometimes there is concern for Iraq's children, who
are claimed to be victims of US sanctions.  Sometimes it is a sense of
having been used and discarded- acute among many Pakistanis after the
end of the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.  Throughout the
developing world, resentment of American wealth is accompanied by
protest against the misery of refugees, or continuing mass poverty. 

It is dangerous to confuse those different categories and lump them as
anti-American.  We have tended, in the last ten years, toward a form of
self-congratulation that can be grating for others: we are the
"indispensable nation," the carriers of a globalization that will bring
peace, democracy, prosperity, etc., the champions of an economic system
that will eventually lift all boats, the catalysts of world order.  We
have not been sufficiently sensitive to other peoples' fears for their
cultures, and to others' sense of shock at the inequities that come with
capitalism and globalization. 

No policy the US adopted would affect the implacable hatred of bin
Laden.  But we need to know why others sometimes feel threatened by us. 
We have been celebrating the solidity of our status as the dominant
nation after the collapse of Soviet power and of the Soviet threat. 
There are, when it comes to overall power, no rivals in sight, and
benign American hegemony, we often say, provides a modicum of order
without threatening anyone.  And yet a powerful country can both attract
and repel.[3] By conventional measures of power we may be unbeatable,
but those who feel threatened by us or annoyed by our self-righteous,
ostentatious, and opulent predominance can do us great harm.  We need
not only to protect ourselves better at home (instead of waiting for a
decisive victory abroad), but also to understand why even nonterrorists
sometimes feel smothered by America's cultural, economic, political, and
military omnipresence. 

Who will wage "America's new war"? The (mainly civilian) professionals
of violence, or those who realize the limits of our power? A prudent
policy would concentrate on the bin Laden networks of underground
plotters and the financial manipulations that support them.  It would
use minimal military force only when the chances of success are good,
aiming at isolating and neutralizing the Taliban regime rather than at
immediately overthrowing it (and risking thereby a worsening of the
sufferings of the Afghans)-unless it disintegrates through desertions
and divisions.  It would draw as much as possible on the expressed
willingness of UN members to cooperate in actions against terrorism. 
But it would not let the present need for allies against it obliterate
our efforts to combat human rights violations by regimes, for example on
Afghanistan's northern borders, whose repressiveness risks driving more
of their victims into terrorism. 

Such a policy would give diplomatic priority not only to coalition
building but to resuscitating the Israeli- Palestinian peace process. 
It would also show that, after the atrocities of September 11, we can
listen both to the imperative of justice and to the views of others.  It
would avoid turning the lurid predictions of a "clash of civilizations"
from a gloomy fantasy into a high risk.  It could take advantage of the
opportunity offered by the tragedy of September 11 to try to strengthen
control over the most dangerous and elusive part of global civil
society.  But this should be done not only by states (in a porous world)
or through interstate cooperation (always dependent on momentary
circumstances) but by international and regional agencies. 

Some US leaders have expressed verbal support for such a policy.  Let us
hope they have the commitment, patience and skill to make good on their
words and will not plunge into military action that will kill innocent
people.  Let us also demand of them the intelligence and compassion to
understand that beyond lining up allies against terror, the national
interest means seeking partners in a quest for the many and differing
solutions to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness in a
bewildering world.  We should now realize that we cannot safely enjoy
these values at home if others, abroad, cannot hope for a share of them. 

-October 3, 2001

Notes

[1] "What Can and Should Be Done?" America, October 8, 2001. 

[2] See "The US and International Organizations," in Eagle Rules?,
edited by Robert J.  Lieber (Prentice-Hall, 2001), pp.  342-352. 

[3] See Philip C.  Wilcox Jr., "The Terror," in The New York Review,
October 18, 2001, p.  4, and Joseph S.  Nye, "Defending our Homeland,"
The New York Times, September 25, 2001, p.  29A. 

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