Arms and influence

National Bronowski Day

IN THE NEWS
An interesting coincidence happened a couple of days ago. Since we both had the day off, my wife and I went to Santa Cruz. We didn’t have a plan, just a desire to see where fate took us. (On a sunny, warm day on the Northern California coast, it’s unlikely fate will take you somewhere unpleasant.) We saw a sign for the Seymour Marine Discovery museum, part of a UC Santa Cruz marine biology research center. It seemed promising, so we turned off.

Boy, were we happy that we did. The museum is small, but well worth making the trip. Not only are the exhibits fascinating (be sure to see the crabs that camouflage themselves—I won’t spoil the surprise), but they also did an excellent job of explaining how, in each case, the scientists do their work. One exhibit about the mysterious drop in the Alaskan sea otter population actually walked you through the right and wrong ways to phrase the questions the scientist should ask in this case. Brilliant! I wish every zoo, planetarium, and museum like this one did a better job of educating the public about science itself. (Especially in areas like cosmology and evolution, vastly misunderstood by the people skeptical of or hostile to science.)

The coincidence happened when I was reading several quotes by scientists, posted at one exhibit. To my surprise and delight, one of the quotes was from Jacob Bronowski, whom I lauded a couple of posts ago. Bronowski’s pithy observation was that impertinent questions lead to pertinent answers. A great point, and yet another maxim worth remembering these days.

And, as you can probably guess, I’m pretty horrified by the Bush Administration’s assault on science. It’s part of the same hostility to impertinent questions and uncomfortable answers behind the Administration’s conflicts with the intelligence community. CIA analysts are a sort of social scientist, trying to divine the state of the wiorld, including the presence or absence of threats, from a confusing mass of normally imconplete data. Their work has echoes in the combination of deduction and inference that astrophysicists have to make, since they can’t put their topic of study into a lab for repeated experimental trials. They analyze, predict, and if the prediction is wrong, go back and fix the hypothesis. It’s a profession so close to the border of science and politics that, perhaps, it’s surprising that we haven’t seen more frictions between one group of people who have to take decisive action, and another group that has to be tentative about the analysis that informs these decisions. Or, perhaps, it’s just a credit to past Administrations that they understood the nature of intelligence work enough not to punish analysts for providing the most pertinent facts and analysis, in their professional judgement.

Anyway, I’ve veered off from the visit to Santa Cruz. I am actually able to enjoy myself, believe me. I don’t spend all my waking hours thinking about politics and war. It was good to see my old friend Jacob Bronowski again, granted some well-deserved recognition.

War and the US Constitution

THEORY
Last time, the topic declarations of war in general. This post, we’ll look into the wording and intent of the separation of powers in the US Constitution, when it comes to warmaking. How the Framers intended the Constitution to function in times of war is, of course, one of the most important theories that we need to be translating into how we practice war against terrorists, insurgents in Iraq, and other adversaries.

Before getting into any specifics about powers and responsibilities, it’s important to note that the term separation of powers is a bit of a misnomer. The Framers didn’t strictly divide responsibility for different .spheres of activity (taxation, foreign affairs, legal matters, etc.) and assign each one to a different branch of government. Instead, the Constitution creates a set of overlapping powers, in which no branch holds exclusive power over anything. The Constitution, therefore, deliberately institutionalizes tensions and inefficiencies. Disagreements will inevitably erupt, compromise or consensus may be necessary to get any work done, and some work won’t get done at all.

The Framers understood the inefficiencies this system would create. However, their job was not only to make a smoother-running government than the Articles of Confederation had provided, but also to ensure that the Constitutional machinery generated liberty, justice, democracy, and good decisions. The Constitution needed to guard against demagogues, the tyranny of the majority, the corrupting influences of excessive power, the nasty character of politics decided by “faction,” star chamber courts, and unwise decisions made in the heat of the moment—just as they needed to avoid the paralysis and illegitimacy of the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution, according to James Madison, assumes a variety of different kinds of human wickedness, and takes great care to guard against all of them—rather than giving too efficient, unchecked instruments of government that a tyrant or a mob could control.

In foreign affairs, during times of both war and peace, the Constitution also enshrined these overlapping responsibilities. The executive negotiates treaties; the legislature gives them binding power through ratification. The executive appoints ambassadors; the legislature blesses their appointment. The President is commander-in-chief of the military; the Congress controls the purse strings and has the exclusive power to declare war.

Of course, the declaration of war clause (Article I, Section 8) hasn’t stopped the United States from fighting any number of undeclared wars, starting early in its history. However, the people who fought the earliest “little wars,” like the expedition against the Barbary emirates, did tug their forelocks respectfully at the principle of declaring war. Either the war was already effectively declared by the enemy, as Jefferson argued in the case of the Barbary emirates, or the military action was too small, short, and insignificant to merit being called a war. (The notion of a police action is as old as clearing shipping lanes of North African privateers in the early 19th century, or the punitive actions in the Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia during the same period.)

At the time the states ratified the Constitution, the two hot issues concerning war-making were (1) the alien concept of maintaining a standing army and navy, (2) regular troops as the major part of that new standing army (as opposed to state militias). . Therefore, the Federalist Papers focus on these two questions, rather than discussing equally important issues, such as whether the standing army could be the platform on which an ambitious President could turn his office into a functionally monarchical or imperial title. Hamilton, in the Federalist #26, in fact, dismisses the idea that the executive could abuse his power as commander-in-chief, since Congress could always retaliate by cutting off military expenditures.

The other ways in which the federal government might abuse its warmaking power were, in fact, very hotly discussed in the parlors, workshops, and taverns. These fears were crystallized in the widely-felt concern that George Washington might turn into a Roman-style dictator. When he announced that he had served his two terms as President and had no interest in running again, a mass exhalation of relief occurred. Many at the time felt that, even more than Valley Forge or Yorktown, his decision to step down was his greatest, noblest moment.

Given the anxieties that inspired them, it’s no surprise, then, that these Constitutional guidelines on waging war and negotiating peace were canon for future generations of American politicians. Leaders who tried to bend or break them in the name of expedience or national emergency generally got an angry reception. There was no argument that a national emergency was at stake in the War of 1812 or the Civil War; there was just no need to toss away hard-won Constitutional protections for justice and liberty.

A good example is the Alien and Sedition Acts, the great stain on the presidency of John Adams. The Acts were officially designed to root out the enemy within, agents of the British, insurrectionists, and other colonial fifth columnists. Given the number of Tories still smarting from Britain’s defeat, plus the British navy still prowling the Atlantic, these were credible threats to the still-fledgling republic. Unfortunately, not only were the Alien and Sedition Acts unjust, but they were also blatantly designed to advantage the Federalists by keeping out immigrants, most of whom joined the Democratic-Republicans. The Alien and Sedition Acts were also part of a bizarre plot that Hamilton had conceived, in which be might become an American Caesar, carried to supreme power on the shoulders of an army he would lead to crush these purported enemies within. Hamilton died in a duel with Burr, and the Acts expired. Adams spent the rest of his life defending his sponsorship of the Acts from numerous (and justified) critics.

To sum up, the Framers expected the Constitutional assignments of overlapping powers to be taken very seriously by future generations. Wars were serious business--so serious that the nation needed to re-think its views on militias and a standing navy. However, the more serious the issue, the more the Framers expected that leaders would cleave to the Constitution, and not abandon it. It’s worth recognizing that, even though the Constitution may not be “a suicide pact,” it has no emergency clauses.

PRACTICE
As we’ve seen recently, the Bush Administration has gone beyond Cold War position that the commander-in-chief needs the latitude to fight major wars without a declaration. (As I argued in the last post, we as a nation should be re-considering this policy, now that there’s no risk that a declared war could trigger an escalation with a superpower adversary to nuclear levels.)

This week, Solicitor General Ted Olson argued before the Supreme Court the executive branch’s case for the detention of enemy combatants. In this case, the two enemy combatants in question are actually American citizens. The facts of the case--were the two litigants actually involved in planning or executing terrorist attacks?--are not the issue. What’s at stake is a principle: can the executive branch, by assigning someone to the “enemy combatant” category, arrest that person without making charges, indefinitely detain him without charges, deny him access to the outside world altogether (including a lawyer), and block the person from even mounting a challenge to the accusation of being an “enemy combatant”?

Needless to say, I don’t agree with the government’s position. Neither did the Framers, whose worries about warmaking had everything to do with how human wickedness might tempt us to destroy ourselves, and next to nothing about how the country would defend itself from foreign enemies. As discussed earlier, the Federalist Papers—the voice of the Constitution’s author and most fervent supporters—casually dismiss the question that the country would rise to its own defense. Instead, the Federalist Papers spends more time assuring their audience that the federal government’s powers to raise armies, fight wars, and negotiate treaties will not be abused, if the checks and balances are allowed to work as designed. Rather than identifying times when a national emergency might require suspending parts of all of the Constitution, the Federalist Papers argue that the Constitution’s machinery most need to continue functioning during these times.

Which, again, calls into question why, if we are fighting a major war in Iraq, we’re not following the Constitutional stricture that the federal government must declare the wars it fights. Force of habit from Cold War years isn’t reason enough.

At the risk of sounding as though I’m harping on a dry, legal position, I’ll spend the next post linking the declaration of war with the successful conclusion of a war. There are good, practical reasons to think we shot ourselves in the foot by not declaring war (or even talking about why we should or shouldn’t use this part of the Constitution, as designed).

The sin of certainty

IN THE NEWS

This article in the New York Times about Douglas Feith's tiny but highly influential counterweight to the intelligence agencies, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, got me thinking. Excuse me while I clear my throat for a moment of self-revelation (ahem-ahem).

I'm a great believer in the scientific method. In fact, my fervor for it goes beyond the kind of standard justifications, like, "Science got us to the moon. It has cured uncountable numbers of diseases. It created the Internet, connecting us to people and knowledge in revolutionary ways. It's worth sticking to the principles of science, however uncomfortable the results. What's the alternative?" (Kind of Carl Sagan's position in The Demon-Haunted World.)

I agree with that position, but I'd go a bit further. Back in high school, the landmark PBS series The Ascent of Man made an enormous impression on me. In particular, the host, Jacob Bronowski, devoted an episode to the sin of certainty. At the end of the episode, squatting in the desolation of Auschwitz, he picked up a handful of dirt (how much of it intermingled with the ashes of the dead) and let it run through his fingers. This was the legacy of the Nazis, with their certainties about biology and other matters: dust.

[Why isn't The Ascent of Man available on DVD, by the way?]

Bronowski, himself a polymath, spent his career tracing the connections among disciplines most considered completely separate, like physics and poetry. Bronowski's point in this episode of The Ascent of Man was to trace a connection between science and morality. Science can't tell us what values we should hold, so questions like, "What is the highest good, beauty, truth, or justice?" can't really look to science for answers. However, science does teach us a necessary rigor about what we think we know and don't know, and it keeps us honest by the perpetual skepticism about our own assumptions. At any point, we could be proven wrong, so we should always be ready to admit that possibility. Applying this principle in daily life, or in politics, can be extremely hard, but it's a necessary principle. Without it, people dedicated to proving how right they are can easily wind up in some version of the Taliban, or contribute to disasters like the famine that Lysenkoism created in the USSR.

It's why, by the way, when I talk directly with someone about the Iraq War or counterterrorism, I usually make a point of asking, "What outcome would prove to you that your strategy is wrong? If you're a supporter of Bush, when would he no longer, in your mind, be worthy of re-election?"

Back, then, to Douglas Feith. There are lots of reasons why the Bush Administration didn't believe the intelligence agencies when they told him that there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and they couldn't prove the Iraqis still had WMDs. Some believe it was simple impatience with bureaucracy. Others chalk it up to sheer stubbornness, or the influence of can-do American corporate culture. You might even throw in Bush's flinty religiosity as a contributing factor. Whatever the reason, it was clear that the Bush Administration didn't want to believe what it was hearing from the CIA, so it created its own intelligence agency, with its own sources.

Sometimes, the experts are wrong. Sometimes, you are. However, if you set out to find evidence to prove a point, you will. That's the easy part, since you can always bend and twist the facts to fit your position. (Hussein isn't giving a full accounting of the WMDs destroyed, so he must be hiding them somewhere. There's an unconfirmed report of a meeting in Prague between Iraqi and al-Qaeda representatives, so al-Qaeda must be an appendage of Hussein's shadow war on us.) What's hard is living with skepticism of yourself.

When scientists bend and twist the facts, the result can range from professional embarassment (the cold fusion fiasco) to wide-scale disaster (Lysenkoism). When politicians bend and twist the facts...

Bronowski today could be squatting in the ruins of a building in Fallujah, holding a handful of dust.

Meanwhile, back at the Triple Isotope Ranch...

IN THE NEWS

Thanks to Body and Soul for a reminder that, while we're focused on Iraq, other policy wheels keep spinning--in this case, the continued investment in new types of nuclear weapons. Who's the target for these weapons? When might we ever have a use for them? Do they improve any kind of deterrence of nuclear or non-nuclear attack, or do they deepen the impression that the United States is a surly, scary hegemon?

These are all questions worthy of a discussion that we're not having right now, in spite of the fact that it's an election year.

The dog that didn't bark

THEORY
The last few "theory and practice" posts have focused on the slipperiness of war aims, and the disasters that can result when you lose your grip on them. In short, when it comes to how you fight a war, flexibility is a good thing. Flexibility over goals, however, is usually a polite way of describing confusion. As we've discussed, a nation unclear about why it's fighting, or what victory means, is usually on the proverbial road to ruin. Ending a war is often hard enough; confusion over what constitutes victory makes reaching the end that much harder.

The most pungent example, of course, was the seach for "peace with honor" in the Vietnam War. What was an acceptable peace, and exactly what about the nation's honor was at stake? The bitter disagreements over these questions complicated and delayed the achievement of these goals--however hawks, doves, or someone in between (like Lyndon Johnson) might envision them.

Fortunately, governments have ways to enforce clarity about war aims--tools that are as inescapable as the law, in fact. Formal declarations of war may not be as common as they used to be, but they're useful instruments for defining war objectives.

Of course, the United States hasn't declared a war since 1941. Before getting into the reasons why, let's rewind a bit further in history.

Formal declarations as we think of them have a long history. The Hundred Years War began with Edward III's letter to King Philip VI of France. Edward claimed the French throne was legitimately his, and "we give you notice that we intend to conquer our inheritance by force of arms." At this point in the history of Western Europe, war was a struggle between dynasties, in which the warring parties mobilized forces of mercenaries and anyone who owed a feudal obligation. Later, in the Age of Reason, when states as we think of them first came into being, the sovereign declared war to articulate a change in the relationship with some other sovereign, including the usual list of demands and grievances. Up to this point, declarations of war were communications between leaders, from feudal to absolute monarchs, and were considered part of the normal diplomatic intercourse between these authorities. With the rise of the nation-state, a declaration of war took on a new meaning: a statement made not just between sovereign governments, but to one's own population. The declaration aimed to mobilize the population, justify the losses to come, and explain the goals for which the nation would be fighting.

Not every war, of course, involved a declaration--but most did. The French monarchy's struggle with the Hugenots may not have involved a formal declaration of war, but its earlier battle with the Cathars did--the papacy's blessing of a crusade against heretics. Rebels, schismatics, and other internal enemies often did not deserve the trappings of civilized diplomacy; nor did relations with the infidels. However, a declaration of war, however framed, remained the norm.

States in the 19th and 20th centuries increasingly fell into patterns of fighting "little wars" without formal declarations. The American republic's first protracted war after independence, the struggle with the North African emirates (the so-called "Barbary pirates"), seems to have been the first time the United States fought an undeclared war--very early in its history, during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. Even though Jefferson evaded the responsibility of going to Congress for a declaration before deploying a squadron to the Mediterranean, he was, in fact, adhering to the conventions of war declarations. Jefferson justified the deployment by saying that it was purely defensive, to protect American shipping. If, once the infant US Navy arrived in the Mediterranean, the commander of the expedition found that a de facto state of war between the United States and the Barbary kingdoms already existed, a de jure declaration of war would be unnecessary. (In fact, the pasha of Tripoli obligingly began hostilities.)

Still, the United States, like other powers, was willing to take military action in small conflicts--Nicaragua, China, Haiti, etc.--without formal declarations of war. However, once the United States emerged as a world power, formal declarations with Spain, Germany, and other enemies certainly were the rule for major conflicts.

What changed this pattern was the Cold War. Declarations of war "plant the flag," creating commitments, raising expectations, and investing prestige. Once a government declares war, it either wins or loses it, in the eyes of the nation. In Korea, the US public certainly wanted a WWII-style total victory, with the aggressor state not only vanquished, but dismantle. US leaders, of course, were worried that escalating the Korean War to the point where we could have won such a victory might have spiralled out of control--a WWI-like dynamic of commitment and escalation among great powers, but now with nuclear weapons.

After 1945, therefore, the United States therefore went to war many times without once declaring war. It's hard to think of Korea and Vietnam as minor conflicts, even though they were "limited wars." However, US leaders still kept clear of the legal and psychological commitments that a declaration of war would have created, preferring instead to look for some other legal instrument (a Congressional authorization, a UN mandate, a mutual protection clause in a treaty) to formally trigger and define the conflict.

The first Gulf War was, arguably, the last major Cold War conflict fought in this fashion. Even though the Cold War was officially over (in fact, the USSR had ceased to exist), the United States was still not sure of the likely Russian reaction.

PRACTICE
In 2003, no one seriously believed that Russia or China would come to the defense of Iraq. If the Iraqis did have WMDs, a declaration of war wouldn't have made a difference one way or another: either they would use these weapons to defend themselves, or they wouldn't. (The Bush Administration barely asked for a UN mandate.) The second Iraq War was certainly a major conflict. There was no risk of nuclear retaliation against US cities. The Bush Administration argued that, in the normal terms of foreign relations, the Iraq War was fully justified.

So why didn't the United States declare war?

Even more perplexing is why we did not declare war against the Taliban regime. We had a direct connection between the 9/11 attack, cited as the Pearl Harbor of our time, and the Taliban alliance with al-Qaeda. However, we didn't declare war as we did in 1941.

This question points out the proverbial "dog that barked in the middle of the night." (If you need the context, it's from a Sherlock Holmes story, "Silver Blaze," in which the fact that a guard dog had not barked at an intruder was the significant clue.") The question is so obvious that it begs asking. Fully mobilizing the country, if in fact Iraq was the center of gravity in the war against terrorists, would have been completely justified. You might not think that "rogue nations" deserve civilized courtesies, but the US public certainly does. So, again, why no declaration of war?

I'll leave it up to you to answer this question for yourself for the time being. I have my own opinion, which I'll post later.

Elections aren't everything

IN THE NEWS
If you want to peer through a clear window into the swirl of politics in the Middle East, see Brian Whitaker's series of articles in The Guardian. It's pretty non-partisan stuff, but it's a good tonic to two simplistic notions:

• There is something called "the Middle East" that's comparable to "Western Europe". Not even close. Sure, there are strains of cultural continuity here and there, but for the most part, it's hard to lump together the Sultan of Brunei, a Berber clan leader, the wife of a Western-educated Saudi engineer, and a religious scholar in Qum and have anything meaningful to say about all of them. The cultural boundaries that separate these societies are palpable, though, but that says more about how we feel different from them than, say, the four individuals cited above feel kinship to each other.


• Americans have an idea about elections: everyone in the world sees them the same way It's a nice idea, and to a limited extent, it's true. (I'm not one of those people, for example, who tries to twist the message of the Tienanmen Square protests into something it wasn't. I'm mortified by academics who argue, often to keep access as China specialists to the subject of their research, that these poor, beknighted Chinese students just didn't understand concepts like democracy and liberty the way we do.) However much people might agree about the mechanics of how elections work, not everyone sees their goals or outcomes as equally desirable. (In this vein, Frances Fitzgerald has an interesting discussion of the South Vietnamese elections in Fire in the Lake.) Elections certainly are not a silver bullet, and they're not necessarily as effective a tool of building national identity as, say, common service in the national military (one of the ways nationalism in Western Europe grew). In fact, elections can push societies in exactly the opposite direction: the electoral struggle over whatever tangible or intangible goods the government has to offer can aggravate animosities among different ethnic groups, clans, sects, or other divided parties. This is Fareed Kakaria's point in The Future of Freedom, and I think it's a hard one to dispute.

Whitaker's series is a great starting point for discussion, however, even if you or some of your friends take issue with anything in these articles. Certainly, these articles make it crystal clear that, like "the handover of sovereignty," elections in Iraq could happen in form, but in substance, they could be worthless, or even worse than worthless.

Your hearts and minds stay here. You go to Jordan.

IN THE NEWS

[Not every post I do on this blog will fit into the extended argument about warfare, politics, and terrorism. Whenever I run into something in the news worth tying into this blog's issues, I'll post it uner the headline IN THE NEWS. I wish I could accompany it with the old movie cliche of the spinning newspaper, but who knows what might happen if I sharpen my Macromedia Flash skills.]

Anyone interested in winning the war against terrorists should read this story in Salon about an immigrant family deported to Jordan in the post-9/11 FBI and INS sweeps. It's relevant to this blog for some obvious reasons:

• As argued in my earlier posts, warfare is about creating a political outcome. It's not the only tool available for creating that outcome, though.


• Both counterterrorism and counterinsurgency require a lot more non-military action than other forms of warfare do, so it's important for us to keep in mind how other parts of the US government--the State Department, the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, the Department of Energy, the INS, etc.--are helping or hurting the effort to beat al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.


• Taking a particular building, or even a city block, in Kandahar or Fallujah won't make a different in the war against terrorists. Seriously. Control of terrain in and of itself accomplishes nothing. (Assuming the people fighting us in Fallujah are tied to al-Qaeda at all--but that's the topic for other posts.) In contrast, squandering the opportunity to win good will and allies does matter, if this kind of stupidity throws away, say, a chance to recruit a much-needed Arabic speaker into our military. Or if members of this family become radicalized enough to support anti-American efforts. Or if this particular case becomes enough of a cause celebre outside the United States that it digs a deeper hole for us, at a time when we need to have moral authority, or just simple trust, to win the "hearts and minds" part of the war against al-Qaeda.


• The executive branch has demanded the power to change the law (the PATRIOT Act) or change its application (the proverbial blind eye that used to be turned to Muslim illegal immigrants the way we still turn it towards other ethnic groups). All of these changes have been to the detriment of the freedoms we enjoyed before 9/11. The 2004 presidential election will be a chance to measure, among other things about the Bush Administration's policies, whether these new legal, prosecutorial, and administrative efforts have been worth whatever sacrifices we've made. Is what happened to the Kesbeh family helping us defeat al-Qaeda?

P.S. If you've read my earlier posts already, you've probably noticed that I'm choosing my terms carefully. For example, in this post, I refer repeatedly to the war against al-Qaeda, not the war on terror (an open-ended struggle to end evil in the world--something in which we all arguably had a contribution to make, but not what 9/11 heralded as "the day the world changed").

Some site updates

The shakedown cruise of the USS Arms and influence continues...

I'm still getting used to the blog medium. Plus I'm merging the conventions of the blog (such as displaying posts in reverse chronological order) with the idea of building an extended argument, one chunk at a time (which you'd expect to see in normal chronological order). To get me off the horns of this particular dilemma, I added an outline to the left that will link to all the "extended argument" posts in their correct order. Meanwhile, the daily postings will continue in the usual reverse chronological order.

I'm playing around with categories, so I'm creating one category per main topic in the extended argument. ("War aims" was the first one.)

So, in other words, nothing to see here, citizens. Everything's fine. Hope you find the site easy to read. Move along.

(Seriously, I'm always open to suggestions about the site, since I'm new to this blogging thing.)

How great a victory?

THEORY
I'll finish this discussion about war aims with a brief note about levels or types of victory. After the Korean War, people bitterly disagreed over whether the conclusion--a return to the status quo ante--was in fact a victory. Limited war for limited objectives certainly seemed like a distastefully odd concept for a nation that had, a few years earlier, won a total victory over Germany, Italy, and Japan. Over time, however, as feelings grew less raw, and as the shape of the Cold War balance of power took a clear shape, the Korean War did in fact look more like a victory--at least, the best outcome we could have hoped for, given the circumstances. Unless we used nuclear weapons, the military stalemate would not be broken. Crossing the nuclear threshold, however, not only posed an enormous moral risk, but at the coldest practical level, could easily have shattered our alliances, created worldwide hatred of the United States, and possibly led to a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. In hindsight, we can still argue how great or trivial these risks might have been, but clearly, for decision-makers at the time, they were not worth taking.

So the victory in Korea may not have been total, but it was certainly acceptable. South Korea recovered and grew prosperous. North Korea was contained.

Victory, therefore, can take three shapes:

(1) Risk elimination. Military action removes the source of the threat--the Nazi regime, the Confederacy, etc.--completely.

(2) Political success. The war ends with the political objectives achieved, without having to eradicate the enemy altogether. Most wars have ended this way, including he first Gulf War. Our success at containing Iraqi expansionism--ousting the Iraqis from Kuwait, crippling their army, and eliminating the Iraqi WMD arsenal and programs--was more than enough reason to declare victory.

(3) Revenge. This type of victory may surprise you to see in this list, but it's a legitimate measure of success. Frequently, military action doesn't need to eliminate the enemy, nor does it have to change the map of the world. Instead, it simply has to satisfy the need to hurt someone who has hurt you. I'm not arguing that this type of victory is moral, practical, or by any measure a good idea. I'm just saying that, in the real world, not the world of military theory, this is often the outcome that the people involved will say is satisfactory. (For a good discussion of the impulse for revenge as the basis of justice and one type of social cohesion, I recommend reading Emile Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society.)

PRACTICE
Let's take both the target of our war--terrorists, terrorism, and terror--and the types of victory I sketched above and put them together:

Somewhere in this table is your definition of victory. Pick one--but choose wisely. Be prepared to ask yourself some hard questions about what the United States needs to do to win, according to your definition of victory. And be clear in your mind about what you've chosen, since as we discussed earlier, fuzzy war aims usually lead to disastrous outcomes.

The war against what?

THEORY
I think it’s worth jumping ahead a bit to the question, What is terrorism? The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere (such as smaller engagements in the Philippines, Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Colombia) are all supposed to contribute to victory in a larger war against someone (terrorists) or something (terror or terrorism). Therefore, it’s critical that we paint a very clear picture of who or what is in our crosshairs in this larger struggle.

The three words—terror, terrorism, and terrorist—have very different meanings. People use them interchangeably, but a war on terrorists isn’t the same as a war on terror or terrorism.

Terror is a state of mind. In World War II, both the Blitz and the Allied strategic bombing campaign attempted to inspire terror in the enemy population. Early air power theorists like Duohet argued before the war that, under the strain, horror, unpredictability, and privation of continued bombing, enemy populations would crack. With national will lost in the ruins of major cities, enemy leaders would have to sue for peace. Of course, in World War II, the theory did not work, with the possible exception of the two A-bomb attacks on Japan. However, strategic bombing is not the only way to manufacture terror. Suicide bombings by groups like the al-Aqsa Martyr Brigade are as much an attempt at terror as the firebombing of Dresden. And these other efforts at creating terror have had their successes.

Terrorism is a particular tactical approach, not an outcome. Terrorism tries to create terror through assassinations, kidnappings, sabotage, and bombings. Just like Hitler aimed V-1 and V-2 rockets at the English population, terrorism deliberately attacks citizens, not soldiers. As a distinct tactic, terrorism is a form of “asymmetric warfare” that lets a group fight on the cheap. Both governments and independent groups have used terrorism, such as the Chilean junta, the Iraqi Baathists, the Red Brigades (Italy), and the Tupemaro “urban guerrilla” movement (Uruguay). Bombings that deliberately target innocent bystanders are the most infamous incidents of terrorism, and according to Bruce Hoffman of the RAND Corporation, they are on the rise worldwide. However much they use indiscriminate bombings and other techniques, terrorism isn’t something to which groups are necessarily wed. The same group may depend more or less on terrorism throughout the course of a conflict: the National Liberation Front, for example, used terrorism in its early phases of the insurgency in South Vietnam. As the movement gained recruits, the NLF shifted to a heavier emphasis on guerrilla operations. Because a group has used terrorism, they are and forever deserve to be identified as terrorists—particularly since terrorists seem to be a distinct type of organization.

Terrorists are a highly recognizable type of radical organization that depends on terrorism as the primary tool in its arsenal. These groups are generally secretive, disciplined, ideological, and, of course, ruthless. Their goal is usually a total transformation of society to a totalist regime, ranging from communist (the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany) to a Islamist (al-Qaeada). Terrorists are fiercely independent, willing to take assistance from governments when offered, but always suspicious of being co-opted by them. They will even come to blows with their former patrons or protectors, if they think the situation warrants, such as in the the attempted PLO coup against the Jordanian monarchy. Paramilitary groups like the Salvadoran death squads are also arguably terrorists by this definition, even though they may have closer-than-usual ties to the military or security services of a government.

PRACTICE
So, whom or what are we really fighting: terror, terrorism, or terrorists? I don’t think anyone really knows. Whichever one you choose, however, victory will look very different.

Victory against terrorists requires defeating some or all of the terrorists hostile to the United States. Perhaps we could stop at al-Qaeda, or we might want to also prevent further bloodshed by eliminating the threat we face from other foreign terrorists who may turn against us (for example, Hezbollah), or domestic terrorists plotting attacks (such as the Army of God, or the recently-arrested duo of William Krar and Judith Bruey). We also want to make sure that these groups don't regenerate, or merely change their names, so a sustained, thorough effort is critical.

Victory against terrorism means eliminating the use of assassinations, kidnappings, sabotage, and bombings as an acceptable tactic by any combatant. Just as world opinion turned against the use of chemical weapons, and has increasingly turned against land mines, so too could terrorism become taboo. (In fact, the Geneva Convention and other international agreements already define them as unacceptable tactics. Clearly, though, they’re not having the desired moral effect yet.)

Victory against terror has much the same nature. However, this effort requires a broader effort to eliminate the sorts of things that human rights groups like Amnesty International and the International Red Cross have targeted, such as the myriad ways (not just terrorism) that some governments use to intimidate their own or enemy populations.

These distinctions should make it clear that we’re fighting a war against terrorists, not terrorism or terror. If the new definition of national security means, “No more 9/11-like attacks,” then we need to focus on terrorists like al-Qaeda. If we shift our sights to terrorism or terror, people can rightly complain, “This isn’t the war we signed up for.” The 9/11 attack wasn’t merely one breed of a larger species of threats; it defined the threat, attacks by terrorists. The war in Afghanistan made sense, since it went after al-Qaeda in its safe haven (and had the added benefit of getting rid of the Taliban in the process). The war in Iraq was not justified under this definition, except if (1) Iraq had supported al-Qaeda or equally threatening groups that were planning attacks on US targets, or (2) Iraq was supplying (or might supply) al-Qaeda with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Since neither condition turned out to exist, the fact that the Baathist regime ruled through terror wasn’t relevant to our stated war aim, “No more 9/11-like attacks.”

I hope this discussion makes it easier to talk about other points. I find nearly everyone tripping over terminology, which is a good reason why so many “discussions” since 9/11 don’t seem to be addressing the same topic.

And I promise that the next post will be shorter.