As members of the Democratic party in the United States attributed the economic boom of the 1990s to Bill Clintons presidency, so Republicans today are giving George W Bush credit for having prevented further terrorist attacks on the American homeland since the assaults of 11 September 2001.
President Bush now claims that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism, but the merits and demerits of the Iraq imbroglio aside the war cannot be won in Baghdad. Indeed, in a television interview with NBCs Matt Lauer, (broadcast on 30 August 2004, the same day as the Republican National Convention opened in New York) Bush said: I dont think you can win it [the war on terrorism]. This is in sharp contrast to his comment a month earlier: I have a clear vision and a strategy to win the war on terror.
The president quickly took pains to distance himself from this apparent reversal of view, telling the American Legion in Nashville on 31 August: we will win.
So where does the United States stand? Does America know how to win the war on terrorism?
The United States is certainly a more secure country than it was three years ago, but that does not mean the country is safer. Airline passenger controls have been tightened to prevent another hijacking. All checked-in baggage is screened for bombs; but carry-on baggage is not screened for explosives (the apparent cause of the downing of two Russian airliners on 24 August), and air cargo (on both passenger and cargo-only aircraft) is currently not 100% inspected.
Moreover, less attention has been paid to security for airport operations, especially for those people with access to aircraft (e.g., ground crews and baggage handlers). Aircraft also remain vulnerable to the threat of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles that are abundant around the world and known to be in the hands of terrorist groups.
Charles Peñas articles on openDemocracy include:
- World or homeland? US National Security Strategy in the 21st century (May 2003)
- America must quit Iraq May 2004)
- Americas intelligence wars: asking the wrong question (July 2004)
The Madrid train bombings on 11 March 2004 awoke America to the fact that security efforts may have been overly focused on airplanes. But planes and trains are not the only vulnerabilities and any security strategy must avoid being preoccupied with defending against the last attack.
Stephen E. Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations notes:
although the CIA has concluded that the most likely way weapons of mass destruction would enter the United States is by sea, the federal government is spending more every three days to finance the war in Iraq than it has provided over the past three years to prop up the security of all 361 U.S. commercial seaports.
Amazingly, US immigration officials do not have the technology to search whether visitors to the United States pose a potential terrorist. For example, the US-Visit (Visa and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology) programme is tied to the FBIs criminal database (via fingerprints, but how many terrorists have been fingerprinted?) and not to US and foreign terrorist databases. And while the state now has the ability to confirm that a person trying to enter the United States is the same person who applied for a US visa in his or her home country, this doesnt exclude the possibility that the person used a false identity overseas.
A problem of expertise
So if the United States is only doing marginally better in defending against future terrorist attacks, how are we doing in fighting the terrorists themselves?
Intelligence is the key that allows the country to wage the war on terrorism, but the US intelligence services cant even read al-Qaidas mail. One of the less-noticed points of the official 9/11 commission was the report by the inspector-general of the department of justice (DoD) that FBI shortages of linguists have resulted in thousands of hours of audiotapes and pages of written material not being reviewed or translated in a timely manner.
As of March 2004, FBI director Robert Mueller noted that the bureau had only twenty-four Arabic-speaking agents (out of more than 12,000 special agents). At the state department, there are five linguists fluent enough to speak on Arab television (out of 9,000 foreign service and 6,500 civil service employees). The undersecretary for personnel and readiness at the DoD, David Chu, told Government Executive magazine that the department is having a very difficult time training and keeping on active duty sufficient numbers of linguists.
Perhaps the cruelest irony is that the militarys dont ask, dont tell policy has resulted in much-needed Arabic translators being discharged for being gay.
Despite these handicaps, there have been successes against some key al-Qaida operatives such as Mohamed Atef, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, Abu Zubaydah, and Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. President Bush is fond of saying that two-thirds of al-Qaidas senior leadership have been captured or killed, but the Washington Post recently reported that al-Qaida was showing signs of new life.
Beyond al-Qaida itself, how is the US doing with respect to stemming the tide of growing anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world? As secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld asked in an October 2003 internal Pentagon memo: Are we dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrasas and radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?
There is a total collapse of trust in American intentions and its only gotten far worse over the past year. When people hate the United States far more than they dislike bin Laden, how can you succeed?
Shibley Telhami, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and a member of President Bushs advisory group on public diplomacy, remarks in the Washington Post that Americas so-called hearts and minds campaign to dissuade Muslims from becoming terrorists is worse than failing. Failing means you tried and didnt get better. But at this point, three years after September 11, you can say there wasnt even much of an attempt, and today Arab and Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. and the degree of distrust of the U.S. are far worse than they were three years ago.
He continues: There is a total collapse of trust in American intentions and its only gotten far worse over the past year. When people hate or resent the United States far more than they dislike bin Laden, how can you succeed?
The sad reality is that not only do we not know enough about Iraqi Muslim culture to craft an effective policy for Iraq, but we dont know (or dont care) enough about the Islamic world writ large to know how to win the war on terrorism.
In sum, the Bush administration seems more concerned with pursuing terrorists in foreign lands so we will not have to face them here at home than addressing the underlying reasons why so many Muslims have a growing hatred of the United States. With more than one billion Muslims in the world, focusing on the former and ignoring the latter will yield only Pyrrhic victories.
