Well, I’m almost above water. And I’ve been reading and rereading Jeffrey Record’s article blasting the Bush WoT policies, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I just can’t buy his arguments about Iraq. And yes, I know he’s a respected academic in the field, and I’m a pseudonymous blogger. Here’s the crux of my disagreement.
The critical point he makes is this:
Or to put it another way, unlike terrorist organizations, rogue states, notwithstanding administration declamations to the contrary, are subject to effective deterrence and therefore do not warrant status as potential objects of preventive war and its associated costs and risks. One does not doubt for a moment that al-Qaeda, had it possessed a deliverable nuclear weapon, would have used it on 9/11. But the record for rogue states is clear: none has ever used WMD against an adversary capable of inflicting unacceptable retaliatory damage. Saddam Hussein did use chemical weapons in the 1980s against helpless Kurds and Iranian infantry; however, he refrained from employing such weapons against either U.S. forces or Israel during the Gulf War in 1991, and he apparently abandoned even possession of such weapons sometime later in the decade.48 For its part, North Korea, far better armed with WMD than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, has for decades repeatedly threatened war against South Korea and the United States but has yet to initiate one. How is the inaction of Saddam Hussein and North Korea explained other than by successful deterrence?
There is no way of proving this, of course, but there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein ever intended to initiate hostilities with the United States once he acquired a nuclear weapon; if anything, rogue state regimes see in such weapons a means of deterring American military action against themselves. Interestingly, Condolezza Rice, just a year before she became National Security Adviser, voiced confidence in deterrence as the best means of dealing with Saddam. In January 2000 she published an article in Foreign Affairs in which she declared, with respect to Iraq, that “the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence–if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.” She added that rogue states “were living on borrowed time” and that “there should be no sense of panic about them.” If statelessness is a terrorist enemy’s “most potent protection,” then is not “stateness” a rogue state’s most potent strategic liability?
Once you acknowledge that state actors can be deterred, his answer becomes simple
Traditionally, however, war has involved military operations between states or between a state and an insurgent enemy for ultimate control of that state. In both cases the primary medium for war has been combat between fielded military forces, be they regular (state) or irregular (nonstate) forces. Yet terrorist organizations do not field military forces as such and, in the case of al-Qaeda and its associated partners, are trans-state organizations that are pursuing nonterritorial ends. As such, and given their secretive, cellular, dispersed, and decentralized ‘order of battle,’ they are not subject to conventional military destruction. Indeed, the key to their defeat lies in the realms of intelligence and police work, with military forces playing an important but nonetheless supporting role.
In detail, it looks like this:
Intelligence-based arrests and assassinations, not divisions destroyed or ships sunk, are the cutting edge of successful counterterrorism. If there is an analogy for the GWOT, it is the international war on illicit narcotics.
There’s lots more, and you ought to read his work. (personally, I think there are some other large holes in it, as in his inability – or unwillingness – to distinguish guerilla warfare from terrorism:
Terrorism, like guerrilla warfare, is a form of irregular warfare, or “small war” so defined by C. E. Callwell in his classic 1896 work, Small Wars, Their Principles and Practice, as “all campaigns other than those where both sides consist of regular troops.” As such, terrorism, like guerrilla warfare, is a weapon of the weak against a “regular” (i.e., conventional) enemy that cannot be defeated on his own terms or quickly. Absent any prospect of a political solution, what options other than irregular warfare, including terrorism (often a companion of guerrilla warfare), are available to the politically desperate and militarily helpless? Was Jewish terrorism against British rule in Palestine, such as the 1946 Irgun bombing attack (led by future Nobel Peace Prize Winner Menachem Begin) on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem (killing 93, including 17 Jews),19 justified as a means of securing an independent Jewish state? “Terrorism may be the only feasible means of overthrowing a cruel dictatorship, the last resort of free men and women facing intolerable persecution,” argues Laqueur. “In such conditions, terrorism could be a moral imperative rather than a crime–the killing of Hitler or Stalin early on in his career would have saved the lives of millions of people.”
Note that assassinating Hitler or Stalin – even in their early political career – would be guerilla warfare – an attack on the troops or political structure of the state. I think that he misses the key definitions of terrorism as I understand it:
If you hate the United States, or Republicans, you might believe that killing Hastert, even though he is nominally a ‘civilian’ would somehow strike at the effectiveness or strength of the U.S. or the Republican party (note: I don’t advocate this, Ann, please don’t get any ideas…). You’d be deranged in these cases, because one of the strength of our system is its relative independence from who wields the levers of power. But you’d be ‘understandably’ evil. Comprehensibly evil. But to kill the guy who runs the Quick Mart where Dennis stops and gets his Slim-Jims, in order to frighten or intimidate Hastert moves the evil to a whole new category. The grocer’s life becomes meaningless, you make him into a pawn, devalue him as a moral agent, and in so doing, devalue yourself morally.
He buys into the notion of terrorism as an extension of warfare by irregular means. I don’t.
But there’s a deeper blindness in his piece which keeps me from stepping back from my current positions; a simple argument which he misses and which is central to my view.
Here’s the rub.
As I’ve noted in the past, I personally believe that terrorism will be here for as long as we’re struggling with ‘Bad Philosophy’. We will continue to see essentially random acts ranging from ‘mucking’ to Murrah. But the scale and threat posed by that level of terrorism will be relatively low, and the actors will be highly vulnerable to traditional police work (as were the recently-arrested Texas terrorists), unless they are backed by something that controls resources on the scale of a small state or large multinational corporation.
I can get five friends together and blow up a bridge (and I have just the friends to do it, too…). But to do something at the kind of scale that 9/11 represented takes more than the willingness to die for my cause.
Hezbollah can supply the bodies, but it is the cash supplied by that Iranians, Saudis, and (formerly) Iraqis that pays for the staff and infrastructure to educate children in the ways of hate and feed them until they become murderous adults. It is national governments that allow terrorist organizations to build camps to house and train their recruits, and provide the stable living conditions that allow the leadership the time and space to plan and organize.
The kind of terrorism that we need to be worried about is a binary agent. It requires both the kind of human actors that can be found or created in many places, but to make their actions something other than self destructive paroxysms of rage, it takes tacticians, resources, training, and weapons that need to be provided at a larger – national – scale.
And that’s the fear of what a nuclear-armed Iraq or North Korea might do. Not that they would use the weapons directly – because, after all, if they do they’re done for. But that they may find ways to place the weapons in the hands of those who could use them in ways that they might deny.
Using his model of the ‘War on Drugs’ is informative; as long as there are states which are essentially captive to narcotics cartels – say, Panama – it is impossible to stop the flow of drugs. As long as there are states which use terrorist armies as proxies, we will not be safe.
The answer is, I believe to simultaneously do three things:
1) work to dry up state support for terrorism as aggressively as we can;
2) improve our ability to detect and respond to terrorist activities internally;
3) fight ‘Bad Philosophy’. This is one that’s going to take some doing…
Dear A. L.:
The problem with Mr. Record’s analysis is that it ignores a vital calculus: 9/11 is the price that we paid for our policy of deterrence. If you take OBL at his word we were attacked because we had troops in Saudi. Why did we have troops in Saudi? To deter Saddam Hussein. Does anyone seriously contend that if we had just walked away SH would have continued to have been deterred? Further does anyone seriously doubt that if not deterred he would have resumed his pre-Gulf War activities?
Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. Exactly right Dave. The status quo was unacceptable. Whether or not it was the right move is up to debate, but making a move is obviously necessary.
A.L.
Record is on the wrong side of the 9/11 divide. He will not accept that 9/11 happened and that it has life or death has policy consequences. What was “acceptable risk” prior to 9/11/2001 is not afterwards. Period. Full Stop.
Deterrence theory assumes rational actors. Record is going out of his way to avoid the fact that the terrorism we face is an outgrowth of a psychotic culture. In the particular case of Saddam, his attempted assasination of an American President showed he was an irrational actor. Would the Clinton Administration have gone to war with Iraq is Saddam had successfully assasinated George H. W. Bush in Kuwait in 1993? Any rational leader would have avoided the risk, Saddam not only tried, but he got caught at it…and nothing was done.
Riddle me this A.L., why did the European, Russian and Chinese sales agents bug out days after 9/11?
They did so because it was plainly obvious that America was coming for Saddam.
Saddam had WMD he had used on foreign (Iran) and internal (Kurdish) enemies.
He hid what WMD he had from UN inspectors and went out of his way to retain the ability to rapidly reaquire industrial scale WMD capability the moment UN sanctions were lifted.
Saddam had funded and supported terrorists, and not just in Israel. He was training terrorists in the high jack of aircraft using old air liners at Salman Pak. Which was widely known before 9/11/2001 through terrorists we had captured.
Further, our war with Saddam had not ended in 1991. It was a cease fire at best and a low level shooting war most of the rest.
Given Iraq’s
1) support of terrorism,
2) possession and use of WMD,
3) demonstraited hostility,
4) irrational leadership and
5) the cash flow of oil wealth to fund 1-4,
it would have been an impeachable offense for Bush to not invade and conquer Iraq.
If the other side in a war with you is irrational and is certain to have access to WMD in the future. Then Preemptive War is the only rational answer.
Record represented the best the Democrats have on national security and foreign policy leadership, and he is completely irrational about the nature of the threat. This is why Democrats will not be trusted with federal power. Record, like his party, is on the wrong side of the 9/11/2001 divide.
Mr. Telenko:
Wow. A very powerful posting. However, I believe I disagree with you on a particular. You write:
“Given Iraq’s
1) support of terrorism,
2) possession and use of WMD,
3) demonstraited hostility,
4) irrational leadership and
5) the cash flow of oil wealth to fund 1-4,
it would have been an impeachable offense for Bush to not invade and conquer Iraq.”
Was it Talleyrand who said “It would have been worse than a crime, it would have been a mistake”?
I doubt it would have risen to the level of an impeachable offense. But no president could expect re-election if he failed to take dramatic action following 9/11 (and I don’t mean invading Afghanistan).
Wow. Perceptive post. Excellent comments. I have nothing original to add to these arguments except my applause.
Record really is behind the curve. We were treating terrorism like the war on drugs before 911 and this course of action was an abject failure. The man is blind. The Left sees what it wants to see and has curiously decided to block out the images of Americans leaping to their death in order to not be incinerated. What will it take to get the message through?
I’ve been thinking recently about Pearl Harbor. I can’t think of any Americans behaving in such a way after the Japanese attacked. I cannot even imagine Americans standing up and saying such horrible things after Pearl Harbor. Why are so many of these people so out of it? In 1941 most people didn’t get to see Pearl Harbor in live action. They didn’t see Americans dying. On 911 that’s what we all saw. What is wrong with them?
My question to AL, because I love his posts, is how are we going to combat bad philosophy? This is the crux of the issue because our success depends in large part on a united country as well as a united West and we are clearly not united.
If this were true, then failure to invade and conquer Saudi Arabia is, a fortiori, a hanging offense.
Andrew J. Lazarus (7:08am)–
1) support of terrorism, [you found the AQ link?] Yes; many Ba’athist-AQ links are documented beyond reasonable doubt. Some of the actors have confusing names and aliases; see Dan Darling’s posts at this site for details of who did what with whom.
2) possession and use of WMD, [you found them at last?!] If the question is Saddam’s clear intention to maintain WMD programs for re-activation, again, Yes. See Kenneth Pollack’s article in this month’s Atlantic, available online.
3) demonstraited hostility
4) irrational leadership
5) the cash flow of oil wealth to fund 1-4
Regarding Saudi Arabia, perhaps you will find fewer fans of that benighted country than you might have expected.
Terrorism experts long ago established that there was no AQ link to Iraq, whatever Darling may have to say.
regarding
“it would have been an impeachable offense for Bush to not invade and conquer Iraq.”
I would have to agree, but for a completely different reason. Although everything mentioned here is a good reason for the war in Iraq, I would have to say that they are not the biggest reasons. I believe that the entire economic welfare of the United States is at stake and that countries such as France and Russia were and probably are helping to create the foundation for America’s downfall. Every opinion and/or publication that discusses the war with Iraq and the war on terror fail to mention this important fact.
So what is this reason for the war in Iraq? It is the Petro-Dollar. The U.S. dollar is the Reserve Currency for all oil transactions. What does this mean? This means that every country in the world has/must have US dollars on hand to purchase oil. Where did these countries hold these funds? The World Trade Center!! Think of the US like your local Credit Union that can make loans based on the amount of money their customers deposits. Now consider that if someone finds out that the Credit Union is closing because everyone has decided to switch to The Bank of France. Sound rediculous, but really it isn’t that far off.
Iraq: Baghdad Moves To Euro
By Charles Recknagel
Prague, 1 November 2000 (RFE/RL) — Iraq is going ahead with its plans to stop using the U.S. dollar in its oil business in spite of warnings the move makes no financial sense.
Baghdad this week insisted on and received UN approval to sell oil through the oil-for-food program for euros only after 6 November. Iraq had threatened to suspend all oil exports — about 5 percent of the world’s total — if the body turned down the request.
The move comes despite repeated cautions that Baghdad’s departure from the oil industry standard of the dollar will cost the country millions in currency conversion fees. UN officials have said Iraq will have to reduce the price of its crude oil by about 10 cents a barrel in order to compensate buyers for the additional costs.
September 11, 2001
What has happened to the dollar after September 11? I can tell you, I went to Europe this past summer and exchanged $500.00 and got $425 Euros back. Did I mention that Saddam made out like a bandit when the dollar crashed. Did I also mention that what bank Saddam used for Iraq? The account, kept at the New York branch of the French bank BNP Paribas. What a coincidence.
Indymedia.org
summary
Although completely suppressed by the U.S. media and government, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking — it is an oil currency war. The real reason for this upcoming war is this administration’s goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. This essay will discuss the macroeconomics of the `petro-dollar’ and the unpublicized but real threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency. The author advocates reform of the global monetary system including a dollar/euro currency `trading band’ with reserve status parity, and a dual OPEC oil transaction standard. These reforms could potentially reduce future oil currency warfare.
Basically if OPEC switched the Oil Currency to the Euro, America would have a Third World Currency overnight. Every country in the world would exchange their US dollars for Euros and give all those dollars back to us which would cause the collapse of our entire economic system. The new Super Power would be Europe and France by defacto. This is why France and Germany would not participate, they wanted the sanctions lifted and Saddam protected so the OPEC switch to the Euro could happen.
When I first began to absorb this information, which was almost a year ago, I had mixed feelings. I can now see the whole picture and all I can say is “Thank God we have Bush for President”. I am an American, and President Bush is defending not only my physical welfare from these terrorist pigs, but also my entire way of life for myself and my family. And for those of you who still need proof that Saddam and Bin Laden.
US ‘proof’ of Saddam’s al-Qa’ida link
By Stephen Hayes, The Weekly Standard
17nov03
“According to the memo – which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points – Iraq/al-
Qa’ida contacts began in 1990 and continued through to mid-March 2003, days before the
Iraq war began.”
“But there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Hussein’s Iraq worked
with bin Laden and al-Qa’ida to plot against Americans.”
Stephen Hayes is a staff writer on The Weekly Standard. Article Published in the Australian.
Wow, it feels good to get all of this out of my system. I am not writing this to change anyone mind about anything, but just to inform others who may not be aware of this point of view.
Sincerely,
SBD
SBD_ If Saddam had switched to the Euro, why did we find boxes full of US currency, and not Euros?
Other than that, a thought-provoking post. Thanks.
Regarding
SBD_ If Saddam had switched to the Euro, why did we find boxes full of US currency, and not Euros?
Iraq is the only country to switch to Euros for Oil Currency in the Middle East. Everyone around Iraq uses dollars. The dollar is more widely accepted in the area so if you need to pay for something, IE Militia to attack our troops, the dollar still rules in the Middle East.
Once the Oil begins to flow again in Iraq, I believe Iraq will demand that they be allowed to produce more oil than OPEC would like. They will need to rebuild Iraq from the oil revenues. This will eventually break up OPEC which will be a tremendous benefit to the United States.
Jeffrey Record’s paper is a direct contradiction of Pres. Bush’s historic Nov. 6 speech before the National Endownment for Democracy in Washington DC, where he says, “”Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe — because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.”
This was a revolutionary commitment to continue the regional democratic revolutions that the US promoted and nutured in Europe, Asia, and what was the Second World, into the Middle East:
Bush again: “This is a massive and difficult undertaking — it is worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed — and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran — that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution …
Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.”
I’m afraid that Jeffrey Record has begun the Counter-revolution right three in the US Army War College. He wants us to settle for a “friendly autocracy.”
We know all about friendly autocrats in this here archipelago that Ferdinand Marcos used to tyrannize. I tell you though, the day of diktat is over, autocrats will not find a friendly place here, and neither would Mr. Record and his counter-revolutionary laziness.
It was so much easier in the era of perfect symmetry, for which he may be nostalgic, an era when “the distorted strategic environment” as Col. Ralph Peters called the Cold War, caused the United States to make grievous errors in tolerating and supporting dictators like Marcos and Saddam.
I only wish the US had done to Marcos what Bush has done to Saddam.
Ain’t no way they’re coming back though. NO WAY! The only friendly autocrat is a deposed one with a beard that has stopped growing.
*Philippine Commentary*
Nice to see so many agree with the arguments I presented in “The War Against the Terror Masters.” I have only one point to underline: the war doesn’t always have to be waged by men with guns and missiles. Much of the time it will be political.
Put another way: regime change can–and when possible should–be accomplished by supporting democratic revolution. The countries that support terrorism are all tyrannies (that, and not some version of Islam, is their common denominator). If the tyranny is destroyed, the support for terrorism will end.
A free Iran would not support Hizbollah, Hamas, etc. The Iranians today often demonstrate with banners saying “don’t help the Palestinians; help us!”
Ditto for Syria. We should be supporting the democratic opposition in such countries, as in Saudi Arabia. And we could and should have done a lot more to support the democrats in Iraq, it would have “prepared the political battlefield”.
One of the ways Ledeen’s comrade at AEI, Ahmed Charlatan Chalabi, became the darling of the neo-conservatives was his mirage of Iraq under his leadership not only pro-US, but even accepting of or favorable to Israel. Always tell the marks what they want to hear. In the event, we found out that Chalabi’s following in Iraq was no greater than that of the Iraqi clerk at my 7-11, and the “intelligence” his defectors sold us about Saddam’s weapons was mostly (perhaps entirely) bogus.
I haven’t seen Ayatollah Sistani opine on Israel and the Palestinians, but I’m pretty sure there’s more space between him and Ariel Sharon than between him and Saddam.
Now we’re going to hear the same wishful thinking about Iran. Given the financial picture in Iran, I suppose it’s possible there’s some support for reducing cash sent to Hizbollah and other terror groups, but I don’t believe there’s a pro-Zionist groundswell hiding in the reformist movement. I’d be more worried that to establish Islamic bona fides, the reformers in Iran will try to out-do the conservatives in anti-Israel rhetoric, a process that we saw in the Palestinian polity and which there devastated a significant moderate bloc.
What an accomplishment to see the terms of the debate shifting to those outlined by Michael Ledeen (4:02pm) and Andrew J. Lazarus (6:33pm). We should indeed be skeptical of the idea that more “democracy” in the Mideast will always tangibly advance US short-term interests. (Especially regarding Israel; Zayed discussed a poll in which ~80% of respondents answered that Saddam was justified in his attacks on Israel).
But as Bush pointed out in the speech referenced by Dean Jorge Bocobo (3:26pm), the alternative of supporting repression and convenient tyranny has proven to be a loser’s game for us in the long run. Bravo Pres. Bush for confounding the Conventional Wisdom and saying it out loud!
I agree. Down memory lane: one of Yasser Arafat’s responsibilities under Oslo was to control Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Yitzhak Rabin famously said Arafat would be able to “run affairs without the Supreme Court, without B’Tselem [a leftist Israeli Human Rights group], without the bleeding hearts.” When it suited Arafat, he followed this script. You know when Arafat was ordered to arrest “militants”, no one was thinking of a Western-style arrest with a specific indictment or charge, and a bail hearing. They meant Third World throw-away-the-key arrest (the type President Bush is bringing to our shores in the Padilla case). Then it didn’t suit Arafat any more. Disaster.
The other side of the coin is that the general populace of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and even Jordan are generally sympathetic to the Palestinians (not totally without cause). There is no reason to think that would change if their governments became democratic. Even democratic Arab governments might (indeed, probably would) support terror groups, just as our democratic government supported the Nicaraguan contras, UNITA Angolan rebels, and Afghan Mujahedeen. (By the end, UNITA and its psychotic leader Savimbi were as cruel and violent as any of Africa’s marauding berserkers.)
The only step we can take actually to reduce support for anti-Israel terror groups, over against merely suppressing it, is—frankly—to get the Sharon Government out of the Greater Israel movement. And, since I’m generally extremely critical about absolutely everything the Bush Administration does both foreign and domestic, I feel compelled to point out that this is one small area where they appear to be doing a good job. It probably helps that Paul Wolfowitz is a relative dove on the Israel/Palestine issue.
An Iranian friend of mine who left Iran about a year ago and is active in exile politics here in Europe tells me that the reformers and the conservatives are widely seen as the same people. As he puts it, the ruling class uses two different masks, but it’s all theater. In speaking of Iran’s future, he often uses the phrase “after the revolution,” and he’s not talking about the reformers triumphing over the conservatives.
While I’m rather sceptical about the prospects, the Chalabi case is disanalogous: there is a genuine “movement” in Iran and it has had it with a political order based on Islam. In contrast with Iraq, pan-Arabism is not a factor since Iran is not an Arab country. In Turkey, public opinion is quite pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli, and yet it’s still an ally of Israel. The old Iran worked with Israel too.
I’ll be darned. Thomas Friedman writes on Israel and comes in to my *LEFT*, so to speak. (I admire Friedman’s writings on Israel greatly.)
I think the difference is that I believe the Bush Administration is actually twisting Sharon’s arm to do this (or maybe Sharon has made this discovery all on his own). But, heck, Friedman has a lot more sources than I do.
Armed Liberal:
The “binary agent” argument has already been answered by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications:
* “. . . the Iraqi regime had a long history of sponsoring terrorism against Israel, Kuwait, and Iran, providing money and weapons to these groups. Yet over many years Saddam did not transfer chemical, biological, or radiological materials or weapons to themm ‘probably because he knew that they could one day be used against his secular regime'”. (CEIP, p. 48, quoting Rohan Gunaratna)
* Even the alarmist and politicized National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 raised the possibility of Iraq’s attempting “clandestine attacks against the U.S. Homeland” only in the contingency that “Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable”.
* “. . . the notion that any government would turn over its principal security assets to people it could not control is highly dubious.” (CEIP, p. 49)
Apart from the fact that they didn’t actually have the stuff.
Armed Liberal:
As long as there are states which use terrorist armies as proxies, we will not be safe.
Sure, removing state sponsors can help a lot. Removing the Taliban helped the US against al Qaeda, cutting off Saudi money would help Israel against Hamas, cutting of US money would have helped Britain against the IRA; overthrowing Saddam helped — Iran against the Mujahedeen al Khalq.
abu frank –
Sadly, ‘hasn’t’ doesn’t mean ‘won’t’. The fact that WMD have not been given to terrorist proxies suggests that there is some barrier to doing so. There was also a barrier against major terrorist acts against the US homeland; that was broken.
We may reasonably disagree as to the odds, and as a consequence as to what policies are appropriate to put in place to respond, but to simply say ‘they haven’t and therefore they won’t’ doesn’t cut it.
A.L.
The barrier against terrorist attacks in the USA (what happened to the 1993 WTC plot here?!) was mostly geographical. There wasn’t any compunction against terrorist attacks on overseas American facilities that were easier to reach and where it was easier to set up a terror cell.
There are probably a dozen wretched, nasty countries with WMD they could give to terrorists, including places like North Korea that are hard to deter and the Stans (whom I assume kept weapons or at least “weapons programs” from the breakup of the USSR). We surely won’t be able to overthrow and occupy all of these countries, so we’d better have other plans based on homeland security, infiltration, police work, and Cold Waresque threats of massive retaliation.
Andrew J. Lazarus (7:30am):
…so we’d better have other plans based on homeland security, infiltration, police work, and Cold War-esque threats of massive retaliation.
Instead of the steps A.L. discusses, or in addition to them?
I vote “in addition to.” By its very nature, Defense against a determined, intelligent, patient, and ruthless foe will never be entirely successful. We also need a winning Offense against these latter-day jihadists and nihilists. And, as has been discussed at length on other threads, the issues are mostly cultural, political, and religious–not military.
Andrew, how was the geographic challenge to terrorist attacks in the US different in 1993 than 1983? Were airfares that much lower?
I’ll suggest instead that an ideological and doctrinal change happened in our enemies – which we inadvertently supported through our hamhanded political responses and weak military reactions.
And I’m actually spending a bunch of time this week (partly in response to Record’s article, partly in response to this *LA Times article* by Chalmers Johnson, which advocates “…tactics of cunning and subtlety, based on a profound understanding of the people and cultures we are dealing with…”
Both of these, alonmg with Andrew’s quote above, seem to call for a wider covert war.
Which seems weird, given the negative I and manyt of my friends on the left had to the covert wars of the past.
I haven’t figured out where I stand on this – and probably won’t for a while.
A.L.
Let me say a little about the War On Drugs model since I am a civilian expert on the topic.
1. The war on drugs is at it’s core racist. The main impetus for it was a way to attack minorities without naming them by race. You just target their favorite drugs. Google Charles Whitebread and his speech in California before a group of judges or read his books on the subject.
2. Prohibition gives the financial incentive for criminals to engage in the trade. Thus the government is through the mechanism of law enforcement is financing it’s enemies. I call this aspect the Government Cocaine Price Support and Gang Finance Program.
3. Chronic drug taking may well be a response to chronic pain. Read my articles posted here on the subject. If that is the case we are targeting the wrong enemy in the war. The enemy is pain not drugs.
4. All this will end when people understand the issues not superficially (“I’m against the drug war – but it is a good model for some other problem” doesn’t fly in my book) but on a deeper level.
===========================================
The bottom line is that the drug war is a perfect example of everything that is wrong about government. It is a self inflicted wound that government efforts can only make worse of course requiring more government efforts which will make things worse etc.
The war on fascists has in fact some hope of success if we chose the right model. Any one who chooses the War On Drugs Model is not serious.
I failed to mention that government induced profitability of drugs allows the “drug barons” the ability to buy states.
States run on money. If letting the narcos run a state is the most profitable situation for a state that is what will happen. (Capitalism works!!)
William Colby (former head of the CIA) thinks it has already happened in America. They just cover their tracks better here.
You sure about that source, M. Simon? William Colby of CIA has been dead quite a number of years…
Mr. Lazarus: My sympathy for Ahmed Chalabi has nothing to do with Israel, and my writing about Iran only notes that the Iranian democrats are NOT very sympathetic to the Palestinians (or to Arabs in general, for that matter).
The positions of leaders like Sistani have a lot to do with Iran, and our lack of an Iran policy. They know that the Iranians can kill them, and they have not seen that we are able to protect them, and they see no evidence that we are actively working against the IRanians, either on the ground in Iraq or within Iran itself.
So they try to curry favor in Tehran. Just what one would expect.
And just what the Iranians want.
Armed Liberal:
. . . how was the geographic challenge to terrorist attacks in the US different in 1993 than 1983? Were airfares that much lower?
Andrew will have to speak for myself, but IMO, the obvious change betweeen the failed World Trade Center attack of 1993 and the successful Twin Towers attack of 2001 was in the competence of the attackers. The 1993 operation was badly mishandled; it would have been reckless to assume that every such attempt would be; it’s normal for skill to improve with experience.
In contrast, for Saddam out of the blue to “launch clandestine attacks on the US Homeland”, with his own personnel or through al Qaeda subcontractors, would have been completely out of character.
One of the strange things about this debate is the readiness with which hawks have embraced the proposition that he would be prone to do just that. They don’t argue the point in any detail; it seems that to them it’s just obvious. The argument, such as it is, seems to be: “Saddam’s a bad guy and hates the US; attacking civilian targets in the US would be a bad thing and harmful to the US; so he’ll likely try and do that.”
But Saddam, bad as he was, was not in the business of being a “bad guy”; he was in the business of being a national dictator and regional strongman, and very successful at the former part. You don’t climb to the top of the greasy pole in a place like Iraq by random acts of evil; you get there by the ruthless and single-minded pursuit of power, by doing whatever assists in that pursuit and abstaining from whatever doesn’t.
As regional strongman he was obviously much less successful; his understanding of the world outside Iraq seems to have been poor. There’s a good deal of truth in Pollack’s characterization of him as a “serial miscalculator”. It’s true too that he was wily and unpredictable. But in broad outline, there was nothing very extraordinary or novel about his conduct. His attacks on Iran and Kuwait would not have astonished the contemporaries of Bismark or Louis XIV; his harbouring groups antagonistic to his neighbours (Abu Nidal against the PLO, the Mujahadeen al Khalq against Iran) is a resource of statecraft familiar for millennia (in another age, they might have been pretenders to neighbouring thrones).
Neither was he likely to attack the US simply for the pleasure of doing so. According to traditional statecraft, he had no reason to consider himself unalterably the foe of the USA, rather he should make and break alliances and hostilities with any country at any time as might best suit his interests.
Whatever profit (in radical Arab opinion) he might have to gain from atrocious attacks on US targets, he was evidently and rightly deterred from risking. There is just one alleged exception, an attempt to assassinate ex-President Bush in Kuwait in 1993; the fact that it is such an exception is good reason to doubt it, along with the weakness of the supporting evidence, the incentives to Kuwait to fabricate the evidence, and the proven weakness of US intelligence in debunking false anti-Saddam allegations.
(further to the above) evidently and rightly deterred
which is the Armed Liberal’s “binary agent” theory kicks in. But that leaves you to wonder, what the profit for Saddam is supposed to be in that.
Well, there is a strong autarkic theme in American politics right now from both the Left and Right – each saying, let’s build a wall pull back, and sit behind it – which is part of how I take the LAT article today.
If we were hit hard enough, we’d likely vacillate between that position and ‘nuke em all’; and if we did pull back…Israel is left to its own nucelar deterrent, and the Arab world is suddenly powerful indeed.
A.L.
I also highly reccommend reading Record’s words for yourself. First off, the man is hardly a nonpartisan observer. He worked as an assistant to Sam Nunn and Lloyd Benson. Secondly, he literally suggests treating the Wot the same way we treat the drug war. Now, anyone that thinks the drug war has been an unmitigated success, heck a success of any kind is dangerous and probably deranged. If we were to expect the same amount of terrorists to enter this country as drugs manage to despite the huge resources dedicated to stopping them, there wouldnt be much left but rubble. Finally, its hard to take Record seriously when he utterly fails to address, or even acknowledge the stated neocon plan of reforming the Middle East as the long term solution to terrorism. He certainly never takes the ‘fly paper’ theory into account as far as Iraq, notwithstanding that every foriegn national who suicide bombs Iraq is one less who might do so in Baltimore. To not even recognize that important argument displays either ineptitude of the highest order or a thinly veiled partisan agenda. Go read the study, it speaks for itself.