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…
