 |
 |
 |
 
 
 |
Our War's Mistaken Premise |
| Benjamin R. Barber The president is changing tactics. Forget weapons of mass destruction, the war in Iraq is about terrorism; time to go back to the United Nations to get some help with the military occupation and with paying the $87 billion reckoning for staying in Afghanistan and Iraq that is now being acknowledged. But he has reaffirmed his strategic vision: It is America's strategy of preventive war against rogue states, the very concept that has been the source of America's inability so far to defeat terrorism or establish anything resembling democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq. That is the powerful lesson that can be drawn from the carnage at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, from the emerging insurrectionary alliance between Baathists and radical Muslim groups, the reemergence of the Taliban and its politics of assassination in Afghanistan, and the renewed rise of sectarian militia forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan. To fully understand America's failure, we have to back up to 9/11. Preventive war, the novel national-security doctrine announced after 9/11, exempted the United States from the obligation to justify war on grounds of self-defense or imminent threat. It promulgated a new right "to act against emerging threats before they are fully formed," to "act preemptively" against states that harbor or support terrorism. It is this strategic doctrine, and not tactics or policies on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, that is now failing so catastrophically. The war on terrorism remains the Bush administration's ultimate rationale. The administration continues to insist that "in Iraq, we took another essential step in the war on terror" (Vice President Cheney), that "military and rehabilitation efforts now under way in Iraq are an essential part of the war on terror" (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz), that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a "terror regime" and that the ongoing war there today must be understood as part of the war on terror (President Bush). Yet terrorism is flourishing -- not just in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kenya and Indonesia but in Afghanistan, where the Taliban were supposedly defeated, and in Iraq, where, prior to the war, there was no sponsored international terrorism at all. The harrowing truth is that preventive attacks on "rogue states" and "those who sponsor or harbor terrorism" fail because they are premised on a fatal misunderstanding of what terrorism is and how it operates. In operational terms, terrorists are not cancers on the body of a weakened nation-state that die when the state dies. Rather, they are migrating parasites that temporarily occupy hosts (rogue states, weak governments, even transparent democracies). When a given host is destroyed or rendered immune to such parasites, they opportunistically move on to another host -- ever ready to reoccupy the earlier host if it is revived as a "friendly" regime. With their Taliban host eliminated, al Qaeda cadres moved on -- to the Afghan hinterland, to Pakistan, to Morocco, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, the Philippines, maybe back to Hamburg and to those places identified early on as harboring the terrorists of 9/11, Florida and New Jersey, and now back to Baghdad and Kabul. Terrorists are not states, they use states. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself said after 9/11, in words he has apparently forgotten, "the people who do this don't lose, don't have high-value targets. They have networks and fanaticism." Because they are "stateless martyrs," as happy to die as to kill, terrorists cannot be defeated through preventive military victories over countries that may share their agendas or harbor their agents. They have neither an address to which complaints and troops can be sent nor conventional "interests" that can be negotiated or penalized. Al Qaeda is in effect a malevolent NGO. Terrorists are, in the president's words, "enemies of the civilized world." But what makes the world civilized is its adherence to the rule of law, its insistence that it will not attack adversaries, however evil, unless first attacked by them, its reliance on multilateral cooperation and international courts rather than unilateral military force and the right of the strongest. The president's policies meet fear with fear, trying to "shock and awe" adversaries into submission. But fear is terrorism's medium, not ours. Democracies that respect the rule of law cannot win wars unilaterally and in defiance of international law -- not when the enemy has no policy but chaos, no end but annihilation (including its own). Harry Truman once said that all war prevents is peace. Preventive war has neither created peace nor preempted terrorism. The intelligence and police cooperation that the Bush administration has quietly been engaged in has, to the contrary, had more success. But it is directed at terrorists, not rogue states, and it has succeeded through the very cooperation and multilateralism that unilateral preventive war undermines. Pursuing preventive war at a growing cost in American lives and money against regimes the Bush administration doesn't like or countries that brutalize their own people may appeal to American virtue, but it undermines American security. The only proper way the United States can honor both its national interests and those who have died in this war and its aftermath is to abandon its failed preventive war doctrine and rejoin the world it has tried in vain to pacify through unilateral preemptive force. Benjamin R. Barber is the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and a principal of the Democracy Collaborative. He is author of "Jihad vs. McWorld" and "Fear's Empire: Terrorism, War and Democracy." © 2003 The Washington Post Company
|
|
Reports & Studies | Working Papers Home | About the Collaborative
| Programs & Activities |
