Wars On Terror

[Written before the "war" on Iraq, originally published in New Political Science, Volume 25, Number 1, 2003,reproduced, courtesy, Znet. An earlier, shorter, version ofthis appeared in Outlook as MirrorCrack'd]

It is widely argued that the September 11 terrorist attacks have changed the world dramatically, thatnothing will be the same as the world enters into a new and frightening "age of terror"—the title of acollection of academic essays by Yale University scholars and others, which regards the anthrax attack as evenmore ominous.[1]

It had been recognized for some time that with new technology, the industrial powers would probably losetheir virtual monopoly of violence, retaining only an enormous preponderance. Well before 9/11, technicalstudies had concluded that "a well-planned operation to smuggle WMD into the United States would have atleast a 90 percent probability of success—much higher than ICBM delivery even in the absence of [NationalMissile Defense]."  That has become "America’s Achilles Heel," a study with that title concludedseveral years ago. Surely the dangers were evident after the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center,which came close to succeeding along with much more ambitious plans, and might have killed tens of thousandsof people with better planning, the WTC building engineers reported. [2]

On September 11, the threats were realized: with "wickedness and awesome cruelty," to recall RobertFisk’s memorable words, capturing the world reaction of shock and horror, and sympathy for the innocentvictims. For the first time in modern history, Europe and its offshoots were subjected, on home soil, toatrocities of the kind that are all too familiar elsewhere. The history should be unnecessary to review, andthough the West may choose to disregard it, the victims do not. The sharp break in the traditional patternsurely qualifies 9/11 as an historic event, and the repercussions are sure to be significant.

The consequences will, of course, be determined substantially by policy choices made within the UnitedStates. In this case, the target of the terrorist attack is not Cuba or Lebanon or Chechnya or a long list ofothers, but a state with an awesome potential for shaping the future. Any sensible attempt to assess thelikely consequences will naturally begin with an investigation of US power, how it has been exercised,particularly in the very recent past, and how it is interpreted within the political culture

At this point there are two choices: we can approach these questions with the rational standards we applyto others, or we can dismiss the historical and contemporary record on some grounds or other.

One familiar device is miraculous conversion: true, there have been flaws in the past, but they have nowbeen overcome so we can forget those boring and now-irrelevant topics and march on to a bright future. Thisuseful doctrine of "change of course" has been invoked frequently over the years, in ways that areinstructive when we look closely. To take a current example, a few months ago Bill Clinton attended theindependence day celebration of the world’s newest country, East Timor. He informed the press that "Idon’t believe America and any of the other countries were sufficiently sensitive in the beginning … andfor a long time before 1999, going way back to the ‘70s, to the suffering of the people of East Timor,"but "when it became obvious to me what was really going on … I tried to make sure we had the rightpolicy."

We can identify the timing of the conversion with some precision. Clearly, it was after September 8, 1999,when the Secretary of Defense reiterated the official position that "it is the responsibility of theGovernment of Indonesia, and we don’t want to take that responsibility away from them." They had fulfilledtheir responsibility by killing hundreds of thousands of people with firm US and British support since the1970s, then thousands more in the early months of 1999, finally destroying most of the country and driving outthe population when they voted the wrong way in the August 30 referendum—fulfilling not only theirresponsibilities but also their promises, as Washington and London surely had known well before.

The US "never tried to sanction or support the oppression of the East Timorese," Clinton explained,referring to the 25 years of crucial military and diplomatic support for Indonesian atrocities, continuingthrough the last paroxysm of fury in September. But we should not "look backward," he advised, becauseAmerica did finally become sensitive to the "oppression": sometime between September 8 and September 11,when, under severe domestic and international pressure, Clinton informed the Indonesian generals that the gameis over and they quickly withdrew, allowing an Australian-led UN peacekeeping force to enter unopposed.

The course of events revealed with great clarity how some of the worst crimes of the late 20th centurycould have been ended very easily, simply by withdrawing crucial participation. That is hardly the only case,and Clinton was not alone in his interpretation of what scholarship now depicts as another inspiringachievement of the new era of humanitarianism.[3] There is a new and highly regarded literary genre inquiringinto the cultural defects that keep us from responding properly to the crimes of others.

An interesting question no doubt, though by any reasonable standards it ranks well below a different one:why do we and our allies persist in our own substantial crimes, either directly or through crucial support formurderous clients? That remains unasked, and if raised at the margins, arouses shivers of horror.

Another familiar way to evade rational standards is to dismiss the historical record as merely "the abuseof reality," not "reality itself," which is "the unachieved national purpose." In this version ofthe traditional "city on a hill" conception, formulated by the founder of realist IR theory, America has a"transcendent purpose," "the establishment of equality in freedom," and American politics is designedto achieve this "national purpose," however flawed it may be in execution.

In a current version, published shortly before 9/11 by a prominent scholar, there is a guiding principlethat "defines the parameters within which the policy debate occurs," a spectrum that excludes only"tattered remnants" on the right and left and is "so authoritative as to be virtually immune tochallenge." The principle is that America is an "historical vanguard." "History has a discernibledirection and destination. Uniquely among all the nations of the world, the United States comprehends andmanifests history’s purpose." It follows that US "hegemony" is the realization of history’s purposeand its application is therefore for the common good, a truism that renders empirical evaluation irrelevant. [4]

That stance too has a distinguished pedigree. A century before Rumsfeld and Cheney, Woodrow Wilson calledfor conquest of the Philippines because "Our interest must march forward, altruists though we are; othernations must see to it that they stand off, and do not seek to stay us." And he was borrowing from admiredsources, among them John Stuart Mill in a remarkable essay.[5]

That is one choice. The other is to understand "reality" as reality, and to ask whether its unpleasantfeatures are "flaws" in the pursuit of history’s purpose or have more mundane causes, as in the case ofevery other power system of past and present. If we adopt that stance, joining the tattered remnants outsidethe authoritative spectrum, we will be led to conclude, I think, that policy choices are likely to remainwithin a framework that is well entrenched, enhanced perhaps in important ways but not fundamentally changed:much as after the collapse of the USSR, I believe. There are a number of reasons to anticipate essentialcontinuity, among them the stability of the basic institutions in which policy decisions are rooted, but alsonarrower ones that merit some attention.

The "war on terror" re-declared on 9/11 had been declared 20 years earlier, with much the same rhetoricand many of the same people in high-level positions.[6]  The Reagan administration came into officeannouncing that a primary concern of US foreign policy would be a "war on terror," particularlystate-supported international terrorism, the most virulent form of the plague spread by "depraved opponentsof civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age," in the words of the Administrationmoderate George Shultz.

The war to eradicate the plague was to focus on two regions where it was raging with unusual virulence:Central America and West Asia/North Africa. Shultz was particularly exercised by the "cancer, right here inour land mass," which was openly renewing the goals of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he informed Congress.The President declared a national emergency, renewed annually, because "the policies and actions of theGovernment of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreignpolicy of the United States."

Explaining the bombing of Libya, Reagan announced that the mad dog Qaddafi was sending arms and advisers toNicaragua "to bring his war home to the United States," part of the campaign "to expel America from theworld," Reagan lamented. Scholarship has explored still deeper roots for that ambitious enterprise. Oneprominent academic terrorologist finds that contemporary terrorism can be traced to South Vietnam, where"the effectiveness of Vietcong terror against the American Goliath armed with modern technology kindledhopes that the Western heartland was vulnerable too." [7]

More ominous still, by the 1980s, was the swamp from which the plague was spreading. It was drained just intime by the US army, which helped to "defeat liberation theology," the School of the Americas nowproclaims with pride.[8] In the second locus of the war, the threat was no less dreadful: Mideast/Mediterranean terror was selected as the peak story of the year in 1985 in the annual AP poll of editors, andranked high in others.

As the worst year of terror ended, Reagan and Israeli Prime Minister Peres condemned "the evil scourge ofterrorism" in a news conference in Washington. A few days before Peres had sent his bombers to Tunis, wherethey killed 75 people on no credible pretext, a mission expedited by Washington and praised by Secretary ofState Shultz, though he chose silence after the Security Council condemned the attack as an "act of armedaggression" (US abstaining).

That was only one of the contenders for the prize of major terrorist atrocity in the peak year of terror. Asecond was a car-bomb outside a mosque in Beirut that killed 80 people and wounded 250 others, timed toexplode as people were leaving, killing mostly women and girls, traced back to the CIA and Britishintelligence. The third contender is Peres’s Iron Fist operations in southern Lebanon, fought against"terrorist villagers," the high command explained, "reaching new depths of calculated brutality andarbitrary murder" according to a Western diplomat familiar with the area, a judgment amply supported bydirect coverage.

Scholarship too recognizes 1985 to be a peak year of Middle East terrorism, but does not cite these events:rather, two terrorist atrocities in which a single person was murdered, in each case an American.[9] But thevictims do not so easily forget.

Shultz demanded resort to violence to destroy "the evil scourge of terrorism," particularly in CentralAmerica. He bitterly condemned advocates of "utopian, legalistic means like outside mediation, the UnitedNations, and the World Court, while ignoring the power element of the equation." His administrationsuccumbed to no such weaknesses, and should be praised for its foresight by sober scholars who now explainthat international law and institutions of world order must be swept aside by the enlightened hegemon, in anew era of dedication to human rights.

In both regions of primary concern, the commanders of the "war on terror" compiled a record of"state-supported international terrorism" that vastly exceeded anything that could be attributed to theirtargets. And that hardly exhausts the record. During the Reagan years Washington’s South African ally hadprimary responsibility for over 1.5 million dead and $60 billion in damage in neighboring countries, while theadministration found ways to evade congressional sanctions and substantially increase trade. A UNICEF studyestimated the death toll of infants and young children at 850,000, 150,000 in the single year 1988, reversinggains of the early post-independence years primarily by the weapon of "mass terrorism." That is puttingaside South Africa’s practices within, where it was defending civilization against the onslaughts of theANC, one of the "more notorious terrorist groups," according to a 1988 Pentagon report.[10]

For such reasons the US and Israel voted alone against an 1987 UN resolution condemning terrorism in thestrongest terms and calling on all nations to combat the plague, passed 153–2, Honduras abstaining. The twoopponents identified the offending passage: it recognized "the right to self-determination, freedom, andindependence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of people forcibly deprived of that right …, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation"—understood to refer toSouth Africa and the Israeli-occupied territories, therefore unacceptable.

The base for US operations in Central America was Honduras, where the US Ambassador during the worst yearsof terror was John Negroponte, who is now in charge of the diplomatic component of the new phase of the "waron terror" at the UN. Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East was Donald Rumsfeld, who now presides overits military component, as well as the new wars that have been announced.

Rumsfeld is joined by others who were prominent figures in the Reagan administration. Their thinking andgoals have not changed, and although they may represent an extreme position on the policy spectrum, it isworth bearing in mind that they are by no means isolated. There is considerable continuity of doctrine,assumptions, and actions, persisting for many years until today.

Careful investigation of this very recent history should be a particularly high priority for those who holdthat "global security" requires "a respected and legitimate law-enforcer," in Brzezinski’s words. Heis referring of course to the sole power capable of undertaking this critical role: "the idealistic newworld bent on ending inhumanity," as the world’s leading newspaper describes it, dedicated to"principles and values" rather than crass and narrow ends, mobilizing its reluctant allies to join it in anew epoch of moral rectitude.[11]

The concept "respected and legitimate law-enforcer" is an important one. The term "legitimate" begsthe question, so we can drop it. Perhaps some question arises about the respect for law of the chosen"law-enforcer," and about its reputation outside of narrow elite circles. But such questions aside, theconcept again reflects the emerging doctrine that we must discard the efforts of the past century to constructan international order in which the powerful are not free to resort to violence at will. Instead, we mustinstitute a new principle—which is in fact a venerable principle: the self-anointed "enlightened states"will serve as global enforcers, no impolite questions asked.

The scrupulous avoidance of the events of the recent past is easy to understand, given what inquiry willquickly reveal. That includes not only the terrorist crimes of the 1980s and what came before, but also thoseof the 1990s, right to the present. A comparison of leading beneficiaries of US military assistance and therecord of state terror should shame honest people, and would, if it were not so effectively removed from thepublic eye. It suffices to look at the two countries that have been vying for leadership in this competition:Turkey and Colombia. As a personal aside I happened to visit both recently, including scenes of some of theworst crimes of the 1990s, adding some vivid personal experience to what is horrifying enough in the printedrecord. I am putting aside Israel and Egypt, a separate category.

To repeat the obvious, we basically have two choices. Either history is bunk, including current history,and we can march forward with confidence that the global enforcer will drive evil from the world much as thePresident’s speech writers declare, plagiarizing ancient epics and children’s tales. Or we can subject thedoctrines of the proclaimed grand new era to scrutiny, drawing rational conclusions, perhaps gaining somesense of the emerging reality. If there is a third way, I do not see it.

The wars that are contemplated in the renewed "war on terror" are to go on for a long time."There’s no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland," the Presidentannounced. That’s fair enough. Potential threats are virtually limitless, everywhere, even at home, as theanthrax attack illustrates. We should also be able to appreciate recent comments on the matter by the1996–2000 head of Israel’s General Security Service (Shabak), Ami Ayalon. He observed realistically that"those who want victory" against terror without addressing underlying grievances "want an unendingwar." He was speaking of Israel–Palestine, where the only "solution of the problem of terrorism [is] tooffer an honorable solution to the Palestinians respecting their right to self-determination." So formerhead of Israeli military intelligence Yehoshaphat Harkabi, also a leading Arabist, observed 20 years ago, at atime when Israel still retained its immunity from retaliation from within the occupied territories to itsharsh and brutal practices there.[12]