Arms and influence

Kounterterrorism

IN THE NEWS
[You take a day or two off to relax, fire up the web browser, look at the morning's online newspapers--and your blood is already boiling before the coffee finishes percolating.]

This morning's papers are carrying the story that US officials plan an "aggressive and unusually open offensive aimed at thwarting terrorist plots before and during the presidential election in November."

No, they're not. They're planning several weeks of heightening your sense of insecurity. Any relationship to actual counterterrorism is coincidental.

The word "offensive" does apply, but not in the way intended. It would be comforting to see the absence of any special precautions. Either (1) there would be no actual threat to the elections, despite the Bush Administration's continued vague warnings to the contrary, or (2) the threat is real, but being handled in the way that demonstrates the effectiveness of our extraordinary security efforts since 9/11 to keep Americans safe. Another round of highly overt precautions is a clear admission that one of two other scenarios actually fits reality: (3) the terrorists are here, but in spite of the PATRIOT Act, heightened security measures at airports, TIPS, CAPPS, and every other tool at the Bush Administration's disposal, federal officials have no idea where they are; or (4) there isn't any real threat, except to the Republicans at the polls.

Options #3 and #4 are about as bald-faced an admission of cynicism and incompetence as you can get, from the same people who promised never to politicize the deaths of thousands of people (not just Americans, in case we've forgotten) on 9/11, who are now running on their national security "accomplishments." Oddly, the one that most people can agree was a good idea, the invasion of Afghanistan, is the one the White House talks about the least. Maybe that's actually not too odd, since beyond the Administration's own alternative history version of events, we're still fighting a very hot war there, one that in the long term, we stand a good chance of losing.

Meanwhile, in countries where the officials take counterterrorism seriously, and not just as an election ploy, the real counterterrorist forces stay in the shadows. In the nation that's our closest ally in Iraq, Great Britain, the Special Air Service (SAS) isn't marching around London in a brightly colored uniform, twirling a nightstick and shouting, "'Ere, now, what's all this then?" Look anywhere else--Rome, Paris, Madrid, Toronto, Cairo, take your pick--where terrorists might strike our allies next, and the people responsible for catching these terrorists are conspicious by their invisibility. They're there, but they know that they have zero chance of catching terrorists by operating in the open.

I'd like to ask people who feel comforted by these "security measures" if they feel equally comforted by the Administration's belief that the Administration thinks they're gullible saps.

Timor ad absurdum, part II

IN THE NEWS
Several days ago, I wrote a post describing how easy it can be to turn any legitimate fear into bottomless terror. It's a principle as true of everyday life as it is of international affairs, making one of the great virtues of life a sense of proportion.

One of the regular correspondents on this blog, Oscar, wasn't sure what the ultimate point of the post was. I'll admit, I didn't spell out everything I was trying to say. When possible, I try to lead readers to their own conclusions, rather than flogging them to mine. However, in this case, I may have been a bit too obscure, so I'll bow to one of my best critics and spell out the conclusions more explicitly.

Terrorists want our fears to run riot. Therefore, if we want to "keep the terrorists from winning," we have to resist our very human tendencies to let videos of beheadings or other pieces of terrorist theater hijack our passions, and our reason in the process. We'd be inhuman not to be disgusted; we'd be fools to panic.

If you want to be a leader in the war against terrorists--and, again, I deliberately avoid the term "war on terror"--imposes, among other responsibilities, the duty to use your words, acts, and personal example to help your nation keep its fears in check. When you can't convince people to keep their night terrors in check, you have failed in the job. When you play upon those fears, you have perverted your responsibilities.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what the Bush Administration has been doing for the last few years, exploiting the fear that terrorists generate. Some of their actions--the vague Homeland Security alerts, for example--played close enough to the line that a Bush supporter could still argue against the most sinister interpretation. Perhaps the color-coded alerts were mere incompetence, not something more diabolical--which is hardly a vote of approval for the Administration's counterterrorism efforts, to be sure.

However, when you get to the point where you're accusing your opponents in an election of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, simply by criticizing your national security policies, the mask falls away. It's not "just politics in an election year," or the occasional overheated statement by people on the fringes of the Republican Party. These fundamentally anti-democratic accusations are a deliberate policy, executed by Republicans at all levels of their party, to increase our fears of terrorist attack for political advantage, when true leaders in the war against al Qaeda should be helping us control our fears.

The great irony is that undammed fear, not a Kerry victory in 2004, is what al Qaeda wants. In their own strategy documents and speeches, al Qaeda leaders like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri describe at length their belief that a small number of al Qaeda operatives can frighten the American colossus into self-destructive actions. No, they're not expecting the United States to become timid and capitulate to al Qaeda's demands; they are expecting us to behave like the monsters they think we are, by rushing headlong into disaster. Like the angry bull in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, we'll charge at the red cape, only to slam headlong into the anvil hidden behind it. Here's a sample statement from Osama bin Laden, quoted from a 1998 interview with ABC correspondent John Miller:

We are certain - with the grace of Allah - that we shall prevail over the Jews and over those fighting with them. Today however, our battle against the Americans is far greater than our battle was against the Russians. Americans have committed unprecedented stupidity. They have attacked Islam and its most significant sacrosanct symbols ... . We anticipate a black future for America. Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.

This isn't braggadacio. Al Qaeda is simply repeating the same strategy that other terrorist groups, religious and secular, have pursued over the last several decades. The Baader-Meinhoff Group in West Germany, for example, believed terrorism would excite ham-handed police measures and arbitrary restrictions on civil liberties. The average German, now radicalized, would be sympathetic with the "revolutionary vanguard" (the terrorists), and capitalism would soon fall. It's a logical approach for anyone fighting "the war of the flea": try to trick your vastly more powerful enemy into doing something profoundly stupid.

That's what the terrorist want. It's easy to give it to them, if our emotions run far ahead of our reason. The job of President of the United States is halt those fears, not to ride them for cynical gain.

Half the trainers

IN THE NEWS
Yesterday, I said there were several signs that the Bush Administration found itself cornered into some of the correct ways of fighting an insurgency. The top leadership in this country doesn't understand the virtues of the classic counterinsurgency strategy, however, so it's actively seeking to break out of this corner.

Because my earlier posting was already long enough, I didn't detail all the warning signs that the White House cared more about counterproductive measures like chasing Muqtada al-Sadr than productive ones like training the Iraqi security forces. If you want more evidence that the Administration is dedicated to pursuing the wrong course in Iraq, read this piece in The New York Times about the sorry state of the training effort (if those two words don't constitute an oxymoron at this point). A year and a half after the invasion, the fulcrum on which our efforts will turn, the training of Iraqi security forces, has half the American personnel it needs. Fortunately, NATO is helping to some degree, "most notably France," despite the Bush Administration's earlier claims that it didn't need European help, and alliances are so 20th century.

Whatever time, manpower, and attention is being spent on a post-election assault on Fallujah, the continued siege of Sadr City, or other pointless measures, should be shifted immediately to the training effort. In both the short term and long term, we need a real Iraqi army and police force. Unfortunately, rather than protecting police recruits, we repeatedly watch them killed as they queue up for enlistment. When we fight the insurgency, we do so alone, even though the Iraqi troops who might be fighting with us--or, more accurately, whose operations we should be supporting--will someday need to be left to their own devices to defend their country. If we don't see them today winning battles, we'll never see them years from now winning the war.

Making a necessity out of a virtue

IN THE NEWS
By now, we've all heard the reports that large portions of Iraq are too dangerous for Coalition and Iraqi government forces to operate. Additionally, a cloud of confusion has descended over the Iraqi/American relationship. Are the Americans, as this news story relates, letting the Iraqis drive operational decisions? Or is this merely a public relations ploy to convince the Iraqi and American publics that the provisional government can stand on its own?

Both sound like bad turns in the war, but they might be good news. Classic counterinsurgency strategy (not counterterrorism) points in the direction where the American and Iraqi authorities seem to be headed. It matters greatly how they arrive at these decisions, and whether they fully understand what the deteriorating situation now requires.

Fortunately, there's a lot of past experience that can inform the revised strategy. Immediately after World War II, insurgencies sprouted like toadstools around the globe. The slow-motion collapse of European colonialism was the most important cause. Other factors, such as the military experience and organization of partisan forces fighting the Japanese, Germans, Vichy French, and Italians also contributed. The Greek Civil War, the inspiration for the Truman Doctrine speech, was only one of many insurgencies. Other civil wars raged in Malaya, the Philippines, China, French Indochina, and Algeria, to name but a few. In a little-known aspect of this "age of insurgency," non-Russian populations fought their own shadow wars against the Soviet Union, such as the short-lived resistance movements in the Baltic States.

Most local governments and their great power patrons fought these initial wars poorly. After some muddling through, and some initial successes like the defeat of the Hukbalahap guerrillas in the Philippines, a number of canonical principles of counterinsurgency warfare emerged:

• You cannot fight guerrillas unless you vastly outnumber them. Counterinsurgency experts quoted various arbitrary ratios, as high as 10 to 1, as the threshold. However, every war being different, the ratio in practice depended on the country and the combatants.


• Even if you outnumber the guerrillas, you cannot defeat them everywhere simultaneously. Sir Robert Thompson, the chief British strategist in the Malayan Emergency, articulated the most famous version of this principle. (Click here for one of Thompson's books on the subject.) Thompson argued that counterinsurgent forces must pursue a "spreading stain model." Starting modestly with areas that would be easier or more symbolically important to secure, the government needs to establish temporary security with the army, police, and intelligence forces. During this initial occupation period, the government needs to win back the "hearts and minds" of a substantial amount of the local population. At the same time, it needs to be re-building the regional government and training new, locally-based security forces. Once the government has convincingly re-established itself in this region, it can then spread the campaign to other parts of the country.


• The foreign patron of a government under siege cannot win the war; only the local government can. Victory in counterinsurgency means a strong local government in charge, and perhaps not in control of the entire country. For example, the Philippine government defeated the Huks, the greatest threat in the Forties and Fifties. It did not, however, successfully extend the same effort to more remote locations where Muslim separatists still fought the government. The defeat of the Huks was enough, however, to put a government in Manila back in control of most of the country.

Obviously, all these points apply to the situation in Iraq. There are not enough troops to secure all of the country. The US military is feeling this problem most acutely, since fighting insurgents blunts the technological and doctrinal advantages it had when fighting the Iraqi army. GPS navigation devices, laser-guided munitions, and cluster bombs matter very little when you're trying to stop roadside bombings. Iraq is too big and too populous for the United States, the Iraqi provisional government, and allied forces to be everywhere. They have to pick and choose their battles carefully, and they have to pursue some version of the "spreading stain" strategy to succeed.

Unfortunately, far too many signs indicate that American decision-makers don't understand these principles. Most significantly, the United States is continuing largely pointless assaults on Fallujah, Najaf, Sadr City, and other urban areas. The recurring nightmare of combat in Fallujah resembles the big unit sweeps in the Vietnam War. In both cases, powerful American forces temporarily seized an area, then had to leave to pursue enemies somewhere else. The insurgents return to the original locale, forcing the Americans to re-evict them. This darkly comic exercise would be funny, except for the loss of life and popular support they cost. Top US decision-makers seem to be pushing hard for an intense assault on many as many parts of Iraq as possible, when a slower but surer approach would be far more successful.

In other insurgencies, counterinsurgent forces, including the United States, flailed until they hit on the correct strategy, which included the three principles described above. Early mistakes cost lives, money, time, and political capital, but these errors proved in many cases to be reversible. The Bush Administration seems to understand the importance of fighting alongside an Iraqi government with at least nominal sovereignty. This new government, however, has yet to be prepared to fight at the level it needs to, and it has scant opportunities to win the loyalty, approval, or just the sufferance of local populations.

Instead, the Bush Administration has chosen to make a necessity out of a virtue. Ceding control of some parts of the country should be a temporary but necessary evil. However, US authorities seem impatient to break out from the insurgent cordon, escalating the violence in Fallujah and elsewhere. What's the point of these assaults? What outcome are they designed to produce? It's hard to tell, except that American officials are not pursuing the tried-and-true "spreading stain" approach. That step would require listening to the experts—and as we know, Bush, Rumsfeld, and other key decision-makers have a violent allergic reaction to any expert recommendations.

Delaying tactics

IN THE NEWS
Normally, this story about the indictment of several aides working for House Majority Leader Tom Delay wouldn't fit into the topical frame for this blog. However, what's missing from the discussion are the charges that Delay misused the Department of Homeland Security to track down the Democrats from the Texas state legislature who were trying to delay the redistricting vote. I assume that means the question is still open, not just dropped behind the podium where today's indictments were announced.

The collapse of terrorist convictions

IN THE NEWS
Several blogs are abuzz over David Cole's article, arguing that the Justice Department has achieved a total of zero convictions in post-9/11 terrorist cases. That's a bit misleading: there have been no convictions of foreign terrorist suspects, though there have been in cases where US citizens or residents are involved. The most famous is the Lackwanna Six, a group of New Yorkers who trained in Afghanistan and, by their account, found themselves over their heads. Their al Qaeda trainers tried to keep them, but they managed to slip away, returning to the United States. Later, the Justice Department touted their guilty pleas as proof of the value of the PATRIOT Act.

There's more to the Lackwanna case than you'd glean from a brief news article. If your natural skepticism compelled you to look around a bit, you'd quickly find analyses like this one from the Brookings Institution that cast doubts on the Lackwanna story. And, with a little more digging, you'd find this longer article from The New York Times that really muddies any moral or legal clarity about the case.

With decades of hindsight, we know that someone in the Rosenberg "atom spies" case was guilty. (A lot more guilty than, for years, many critics on the Left argued.) Certainly, Julius Rosenberg was betraying atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. His wife, Ethel, knew she involved in something that was wrong, but not nearly at the level of treasonous culpability as her husband and brother. Ethel Rosenberg may have deserved some kind of punishment, but not the gas chamber. Like Ethel Rosenberg, the Lackwanna Six may have been criminals, or criminally stupid. Based on the information available, they were not terrorist masterminds, or wild-eyed suicide bombers.

Miscarriages or misapplications of justice matter a great deal in the war with al Qaeda. The eyes of the world are on us, and we also do not want to pervert our legal heritage in order to save it.

But at least we're all safe from Cat Stevens. Now, if only the TSA and the DOJ would go after someone really creepy, like Wayne Newton, I'd sleep better.

Slipped out the back door

IN THE NEWS
One reason I don't watch TV news is that it constantly passes my TMBM. I watch what amounts to a snippet of information, and I'm left with the nagging feeling that there must be more (TMBM). Then I wonder why I wasted my time watching the news at all, when there are other sources with more information.

Or, maybe not. Today's Washington Post published an Associated Press story about an Afghan leader released from Guantanamo Bay that got my TMBM alarms ringing. US forces arrested Haji Naeem Kuchai, the leader of the Kuchi nomads in southern Afghanistan, at the end of 2002 (sometimes reported as the first days of 2003--the exact timeline is murky, then quickly sent him to our infamous prison in Cuba. Kuchai sided with the Taliban, fled to Pakistan during the 2001 invasion, then returned to Afghanistan to represent his people at the loya jirga that created the interim government and elected Hamid Karzai president. After the loya jirga, Kuchai continued representing the nomads to the central government. In fact, he was en route to a meeting with Karzai when American troops detained him.

You've now read about all the information that was in the AP article, and you might be experiencing the same nagging sense I had that key facts are missing. Since we live in the Internet age, the next logical thing to do is go to Google.

I'll save you the few ergs it might take to type the search keywords, and the few minutes it took me to discover the alternate spellings of his name. There is more to the story, and it follows an all-too-familiar script.

From Reuters, published on the same day on the Post's web site: Karzai had personally requested the release of the 11 prisoners, including Kuchai, flown out of Guantanamo Bay yesterday. In fact, the Afghan government spokesman quoted in the article used the phrase "repeated requests," which makes me wish I had a tape recording of the conversations on this topic between Karzai and US officials from January 2003 until yesterday. I'm also guessing that there were some heated discussions with Kuchai after his release, since Karzai's office also made a point of saying, "The prisoners have shown their strong support for the peace-building and reconstruction process of the country and have intended to take active part in it." (This quote comes from the original AP article, not the Reuters piece.)

From the web sites of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International: The Associated Press may have little interest in Kuchai's story, but human rights organizations have been trying to draw attention to Kuchai's detention for over a year and a half with no charges filed. The only information Human Rights Watch could get from the Defense Department is summarized in this sentence: "In April 2003, U.S. Department of Defense officials told Human Rights Watch that Kuchi [sic] was a former Taliban official and a 'scumbag' involved in smuggling arms over the Pakistani border." If working with the Taliban before the invasion, then with the new government after the invasion, earns you a trip to Guantanamo Bay, the prison authorities there should be prepared for a new influx of thousands of tribal leaders. The US officials in Kabul should be prepared to have no one to represent a substantial fraction of the Afghan population, especially in the Pashtun-dominated south, the stronghold of the Taliban that, someday, Karzai or some other president will have to govern.

From somewhere on the Internet: Amnesty International organizes regular letter-writing campaigns on behalf of political prisoners and torture victims. For decades, new Amnesty members have been surprised to discover that repressive regimes in places like Chile, Libya, South Africa, and the USSR answer these letters. Unfortunately, the US government has been notably unresponsive to Amnesty International "urgent action" letter-writing campaigns on behalf of prisoners held in the "war on terror."

From Afgha.com: Meanwhile, the Kuchi people appear occasionally as the poster children for Afghanistan's problems. In this story, reprinted from Relief Web, Ruud Lubbers, head of the United Nations' refugee efforts, cites the plight of the Kuchi as representative of Afghanistan's larger humanitarian crisis. The refugee problem is both a cause and symptom of Afghanistan's continued political turmoil, so the US official who called Kuchai a "scumbag" is truly clueless. Even if he were, in his heart of hearts, a Taliban loyalist, the Kuchi people's sad story gives him an excuse to side with the Taliban. On the other hand, if he's too furious after a year and a half in Guantanamo Bay to ever work with Karzai and the Americans again, he might be interested in having a chat with the local Taliban guerrillas, even if he had only been trying to survive while their regime was still in power. (If you want to learn more about the Kuchi refugee problem, aid organizations have been posting information in everything from official reports to meeting minutes.)

From Fact-index.com: Various web sites like Fact-index.com have been tracking what little information there has been about Kuchai's detention. His name repeatedly appears in chronologies like the one linked here, as well as summaries of stories about detentions, human rights concerns, and security challenges.

A few minutes, and I found more information about the Kuchai story than Stephen Graham, the AP reporter in question, included in the story that got me Googling. Unlike Graham, I'm not based in Kabul, so I can't ask the obvious follow-up questions to Karzai, Kuchai, and US officials there, so I stil can't give you all the information you might like. Sorry.

Even so, as an unpaid blogger, not a paid journalist, I wonder if the AP would provide me with a retainer for doing their legwork (fingerwork?) for them? Nah, I didn't think so.

I'm being a bit too flip, I'm afraid. Afghanistan has become the forgotten war, which most Americans probably think we won. We haven't won it yet, and we probably won't if we keep ignoring Kuchai and the other 29 million Afghanis this way.

Carnage kitsch

IN THE NEWS
I somehow missed the passage of Public Law 107–89 on December 18, 2001, when the US Congress officially designated every September 11 on future calendars as "Patriot Day." As I wrote earlier, I try to pass that anniversary quietly, or even act as though it's a normal day. I was shocked, therefore, to find out that Patriot Day is more than a token statement by American politicians, lost somewhere in the Congressional Record. No, unfortunately, Patriot Day is more than a bizarrely-named remembrance of mass murder: it's a merchandiser's dream.
I first caught wind of the merchandising bonanza while watching The Daily Show (fake news that's better than the "real" broadcast news). Lewis Black was fuming about the 9/11 merchandising, including Hallmark cards, a Beanie Baby, and worst of all, a commemorative coin minted from, we're told, silver recovered from Ground Zero.

I wasn't in New York City when the 9/11 attack occurred, but did visit Ground Zero some time afterwards. I've never encountered anything like it. Ground Zero felt like the place where an demonic god struck the earth with a hammer forged from despair, leaving behind a never-fading echo of the moment when that hammer struck. It was the perfection of evil, the absence of life, a breach into the realm of death that will never close. I can't imagine wanting a doll, coin, T-shirt, collector's plate, or anything else "commemorating" this mass grave. But that's just me.

One of the unfortunate costs of a market economy is that you can't stop people from turning tragedy into profit. But how indecent or inappropriate can it get? Out of curiosity, I did a search on eBay and found a cornucopia of 9/11 merchandising, such as jewelry (including a Disney pin, complete with a quotation from the dear, departed Walt himself), sewing patterns, figurines, plates, patches, T-shirts, caps, and of course, the coins.

I've seen some of these items before, but they seemed to be part of the immediate reaction to 9/11, a statement of collective sympathy, grief, and outrage. The items that gave particular attention to firefighters, police, EMTs, and other emergency workers honored the risks they took, the lives they saved, and the many of these public servants who died. Three years later…

I can't say when the "right" time it is for people to stop needing the talismanic power of a T-shirt, and the comfort it elicits when someone gives a sympathetic nod. Undoubtedly, some people still need it, and perhaps some of us are clinging to that grief and outrage a bit too long. There was never a time—not 9/11, the day after, a year after, or now—when I could imagine someone describe these commemorative items as being "collectible."

During the Middle Ages, there was a brisk business in holy icons. Rulers searched and bartered objects that purported to be the lance that pierced Jesus' side, the Holy Grail, and other. Louis IX of France built the chapel of St. Chapelle in Paris as a reliquary for what he believed to be the genuine Crown of Thorns. Eventually, however, people realized the stunning volume of fakes that received such honored placement in cathedrals, shrines, churches, monasteries, and castles. (If someone were to collect all the alleged pieces of the True Cross, one medieval wag observed, you could build a ship bigger than Noah's Ark.) The Catholic passion for iconography led to a Protestant reaction against it. The Church, according to the Protestants (and, to be fair, other schismatics before them) rested on a solid foundation of faith, compassion, charity, and other virtues, not bones and splinters of dubious origin.

There is, as I said, something otherworldly and terrible about Ground Zero. Its presence in our national life touches an emotional or spiritual reality that flows like a dark current through many of us. As with any great passion, it can inspire us to nobility, or deceive us into great mistakes. It should never, however, be collectible.

Their killers, our killers

IN THE NEWS
One of the favorite laugh lines among Republicans is, "Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty—and poverty won!" Unfortunately, the Bush Administration making the same mistake: by declaring war on terror, terror will win. Counterterrorism forces a choice among which killers you want to eliminate, and which you must support. In the Middle East, there is no way to eliminate terrorists, or terrorism, within our lifetimes, particularly as we pursue our own counterterrorism campaign.

To begin with, it's impossible to declare war on terror or terrorism. Terror is a state of mind, and an outcome of many events, from volcanic eruptions to suicide bombings. Terrorism is the deliberate use of attacks on civilians, and like any kind of warfare, it is designed to produce a political outcome. Governments and non-governmental groups alike are capable of committing acts of terrorism, in this sense of the word, although the connotation usually points to revolutionary or counter-revolutionary groups like the Basque separatist organization ETA, or the ARENA death squads in El Salvador's civil war.

Since 9/11, the United States' war with terrorists has escalated, but only against a particular set of groups with whom we were already effectively at war. The United States has not assumed new operational duties against the al Aksa Martyr's Brigade, Jemaah Islamiyah, the Janjaweed, or the Chechen militants. We already treat these groups as someone else's problem, as long as (1) they are not attacking us directly, or (2) they do not threaten an American vital interest. Meanwhile, we focus on the terrorists, like al Qaeda or, at home, the Aryan Brotherhood, who threaten us.

That simple formula should be clear, but in practice, it can be obscured by the hurly-burly of daily events. What drives US policy toward the Israelis and Palestinians is regional instability, one of the byproducts of this conflict. It complicates and distracts other diplomatic conversations; the humanitarian concerns, at least from this perspective, are a secondary. Of course, many well-intentioned people in public life want to help the average person living in Ramallah or Jerusalem. These officials do care what happens to the victims of violence, but at the end of the day, their first job is to protect American interests. Our interest in ending "cycle of violence" compels US diplomats to be honest brokers between the warring parties; US generals, however, are not drawing up war plans to intervene in the West Bank.

That's a fairly sober point of view. However, we've lost our ability to focus in this fashion, and the Iraq war has added its own confusions. Not only do we lack the mental clarity needed to deal with terrorists, but we also have lost much of the leverage, resources, and credibility we need.

If a pollster were to pose the question, Is the United States fighting a war against terrorism in the Middle East? the people surveyed would probably look at the pollster as if he were an idiot. Replacing the word terrorism with terror or terrorist wouldn't change the impression that the pollster is a bit of a dunce.

Yet, as you can tell from the previous discussion, these distinctions are critical. Additionally, as we've seen, we don't go to war against all terrorists in the Middle East. In fact, we're frequently forced into situations where we have to overlook the violence waged by some groups, or even actively support factions whose brutality naturally make the average American queasy.

Although Seymour Hersh's book, Chain of Command, starts with the Abu Ghraib scandal, it ends with a chapter that I actually found more painful to read. In the final section, Hersh surveys the lost opportunities that the Iraqi invasion swept off the table. Now we're paying the price, whether we're ready to admit it to ourselves or not.

What seems like ages ago, the Bush Administration was pounding the table, insisting on war because of the Iraqi WMD threat. Today, we indeed have just such a threat, but from Iran instead of Iraq. We are now in no position to deal with Iran, either as a regional troublemaker or a new nuclear power. Today, Iran announced that it will start enriching uranium, regardless of what the IAEA, the United States, or anyone else says about it.

Clearly, no one has leverage over the Iranians, particularly the Americans mired in Iraq. Military options are off the table, unless the Europeans undertake them. The double-barreled blast of tax cuts and the cost of war have made it impossible to spend money on any American initiative, military or otherwise. The Iranians have also seen how the United States proved toothless in the face of the North Korean nuclear threat, and will laugh off any saber-rattling from Washington. (Meanwhile, the South Korean government was forced to admit that it had its own nuclear program, no doubt because deterrence in Korea can't depend on American power the way it did before March 2003.) Both the Iranians and North Koreans did take the rhetoric in the "axis of evil" speech seriously, even if it just confirmed what they already suspected about the Bush team. In short, the invasion of Iraq, which failed to find any nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, has accelerated the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs. If we were worried about terrorists getting a suitcase bomb in 2003, we should be far more worried in 2004. Iran's theocrats, unlike the deposed Iraqi Baathists, have the long-standing ties to terrorist groups and the ability to develop nuclear weapons.

The United States also lost its ability to deal with the terrorist themselves. Hersh spends a few key pages on Syria's unsuccessful efforts to collaborate with the American government on counterterrorism. Syria has its own long-standing Islamist problem, in their case with the Muslim Brotherhood—the same movement responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat and other major terrorist acts in the last few decades.

Syria is also the patron of Hezbollah, so it hardly has clean hands. However, it has yanked Hezbollah's reins before, particularly when Syrian president Hafez al Assad wanted to stabilize Lebanon after the Israeli withdrawal. Syria was also part of the coalition fighting Iraq during Operation DESERT STORM, and its own Baath party competed off and on with the Iraqi Baathists for the support of secular Arabs.

Unfortunately, the US government has neither the time nor the interest to work with Bashir al Assad, the current Syrian president and son of the former one. Many of the issues that the Syrians want to discuss—for starters, their demand for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, their support for Hezbollah, their dominance of Lebanon, and any WMD program they might have—are fairly sticky. However, they're not impossible to address, especially if 2003 was the anno mirabilis for the Middle East that the Bush Administration depicts.

Unfortunately, 2003 was more like an anno diabolis. Leaving aside the ways our security has degraded since the Iraq invasion, it's important to understand how little the alignments between regional powers and their terrorist or insurgent allies have changed. After the American armored forces entered Baghdad, the Syrians still supported Hezbollah. Iran still supported Hamas. The governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates continue to contribute to charities and madrassas that are sources of terrorist funding and recruitment. The Pakistani ISI continues to help the Taliban however it can. Israel is expanding its collaboration with various Kurdish groups, including commando training and other forms of military support. On the governmental terrorism side of the coin, the United States remains in partnership with oppressive regimes like those in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. (The background on President Niyazov of Turkmenistan is especially worth reading.)

In other words, the moment we make the pursuit of al Qaeda the priority that trumps all others, we find ourselves making choices among killers. There are the ones with whom we'll work; these are the others we'll ignore or attack. Other issues become secondary, tertiary, or not even on the agenda at all. As anyone familiar with the region will tell you, pressure on ugly regimes like Niyazov's have all but disappeared, and the Bush Administration has dismissed any concerns about the Sharon government's strategy in the occupied territories.

There isn't any room for a grand crusade against terror, terrorism, or even all terrorists. The US government will make its choices among killers, whether or not the American public understands the choices made in its name. The more we use sloppy language that illustrates our ignorance, the less credible we look to other countries who have their own considerable experience with terrorists. The more our leaders talk about a quixotic war on terror, the more the United States worries and frightens the rest of the world.

Terrorists attack, nation yawns

IN THE NEWS
Pretend you're the editor-in-chief of a major newspaper. Please arrange the following stories, all of which were covered on September 11, 2004, in the order of prominence you would give them on the front page of your publication:

1. CBS Defends Its Report On Bush Military Record


2. Bush and Kerry Step Up Attacks in Swing States


3. Israelis Kill 3 Palestinians


4. 14 Governors Receive Mail That's Rigged With Matches


5. Cheney Offers an Explanation of His Comment About Kerry

I'd bet that you'd give #4 some prominence on the front page. Au contraire: while some of these stories made the front page of The New York Times, #4 ended up on page 10.

Without reading the Times article, you might dismiss this issue. After all, if this were really a case of terrorism, and not a relatively harmless prank, the solons at the Times would give it more attention, right?

Judge for yourself, based on this quote from the article:

Aides to several governors, including Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, said they had been told by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the case was being treated as one of domestic terrorism, and Jennifer Meith, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Fire Marshal's Office, said that was her understanding as well.

In the opinion of David Neiwert, an expert on right-wing extremist groups, the Aryan Brotherhood is a likely suspect in this case. (The letters had a postmark from a prison where the Brotherhood is known to be organized, and the Aryan Brotherhood web site contained some cryptic messages that may have been related to the attempted attack.)

Americans, including the press, have a blind spot about domestic terrorists. We're more frightented by Richard Reid, the post-9/11 shoe bomber, than the Aryan Brotherhood. One terrorist, however deranged and incompetent he was, changes how airlines screen passengers, so that every traveler now removes his or her shoes while going through security. The other…Gets buried on page 10. Right wing terrorists are definitely worth taking seriously, as evidence by the Oklahoma City bombing. For whatever reason, though, they don't excite the same anxiety as Islamist terrorists, even though there are probably far fewer of the latter than the former currently within the United States.

Personally, I'd rather not fly, hop a train, or ride the bus with members of either al Qaeda or the Aryan Brotherhood. They scare me equally.