[LCM Articles] Why we can't win the "war on terror"

[Abdallah Jabbour]

*http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/09/15/richardson/index_np.html
*

A provocative new book from an expert on terrorism argues that Bush's
tough-guy stance is making things much worse -- and that we should negotiate
with al-Qaida.

*By Gary Kamiya*

As the midterm elections approach, the Bush administration has launched its
latest propaganda campaign, claiming that it is our Churchillian duty to
fight the menace of "Islamofascism"—a meaninglessly broad term that
conflates secular insurgents in Iraq, al-Qaida-inspired Sunni extremists,
Syrian Alawites and Baathists, Palestinian nationalists, Shiite leaders in
Iran and Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. Those who don't sign on to this
supposedly WWII-like struggle, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld charged,
are "appeasers."

It is hardly surprising that George W. Bush has revived this kind of heroic,
clash-of-civilizations rhetoric, which has always worked for him. In fact,
this is an insultingly simplistic formulation that, by failing to
distinguish between different types of groups, not only would keep us bogged
down forever in Iraq but threatens to enmesh us in new quagmires.

In a recent speech, ambassador James Dobbins, who headed U.S. negotiations
after the Afghanistan war, made this point emphatically. "In a search for
moral clarity, the administration has tried to divide the Middle East into
good guys and bad guys," Dobbins said. "America tends to treat Middle East
diplomacy as a win/lose or zero-sum game in which Syrian, Iranian, Hezbollah
or Hamas gains are by definition American losses and vice versa. The result,
of course, is the United States always loses, because if you insist that the
population of the region choose between Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, on
the one hand, or the United States and Israel, on the other, they are going
to choose the other side every time."

It was Bush's failure to distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein
that got us into the mess we are in today. If his latest sales pitch for an
undifferentiated "war on terror" succeeds, the result will be permanent war,
the hatred of at least a sixth of the world and serious long-term damage to
our nation's standing. Whether Americans will realize this, call off Bush's
radical "war on terror," recognize who our actual enemies are and start to
fight them with our brains, not just our muscles, may determine whether a
terrorist in a cave with a handful of followers will succeed in doing what
empires and führers could not.

Louise Richardson's admirably clearheaded "What Terrorists Want:
Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat" helps dissipate the fog of
emotionalism, patriotic chest beating and just plain bad thinking that have
swirled around America ever since 9/11. Her book effectively demolishes
virtually every myth that the Bush administration has promulgated about
terrorism, and demonstrates (if further demonstration is needed) why its
policies have greatly increased the threat to the United States.

Until now, there was little chance that a dispassionate work like
Richardson's could be heard. But with Bush increasingly resembling an
incompetent, overmuscled boxer taking wild, roundhouse swings at his
opponent—and losing badly on points in the late rounds—perhaps Americans are
ready to consider a smarter approach, and start trying to outbox our
terrorism foes rather than knock their block off.

Richardson, who is the executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study, became interested in terrorism because of her background. Of
Irish descent, she grew up strongly sympathetic to the Irish Republican
Army, and as a youth considered joining the organization. Later, as a
professor of government at Harvard, she took up terrorism as an intellectual
hobby before teaching classes about it. At that time, her field was highly
unusual. Before 9/11, the "terrorism studies community," as she calls it,
was "marginalized … no major universities had positions in terrorism, and
very few even offered a course in the subject." After 9/11, she notes, a new
breed, so-called counterterrorism experts, emerged. "Their priority was
counterterrorism policy and American power … They found the terrorism
studies community incurably soft on terrorism, ignorant of policy, and blind
to the threat of al-Qaida. Members of the terrorism studies community tended
to console themselves by remarking how little the newly minted experts knew
about their subject. It is clearly in everyone's interest for this gap to be
eliminated."

Richardson says she "emerged from her academic shell" to challenge the Bush
administration's response to terrorism. "Lives have been lost because of our
government's failure to understand the nature of the enemy we face and its
unwillingness to learn from the experiences of others in countering
terrorism."

Richardson has two main critiques of Bush's antiterrorism policies. The
first is now accepted by virtually everyone who is not invested in Bush's
war: We should never have attacked Iraq because it had nothing to do with
international terrorism. By doing so, we squandered international support,
stirred up Muslim and Arab rage, and made the terrorism threat far worse.
Her second point is more controversial because it directly challenges the
Bush administration's Manichaean, good-vs.-evil response to terrorism: The
entire "war on terror" was a mistake. "Our objective should not be the
completely unattainable goal of obliterating terrorism; rather, we should
pursue the more modest and attainable goal of containing terrorism
recruitment and constraining resort to the tactic of terrorism."

This means learning about our enemies, not just demonizing them. Under
Bush's leadership, however, thinking is tantamount to appeasement. When it
comes to terrorism, America is still more or less in the first day of class,
ignorant of its enemies and in denial about their motivations. "What
Terrorists Want" makes a compelling case that dogmatic certainties, moral
posturing and tough-guy sloganeering offer cheap emotional rewards and pay
domestic political dividends, but are completely counterproductive.

Richardson starts her analysis by offering a lucid definition of terrorism.
In her view, terrorism "simply means targeting civilians for political
purposes." She then notes terrorism's seven key characteristics. First, it
is politically inspired. (Refuting Colin Powell's pious—and silly—statement
about al-Qaida that "we should not try to cloak their … criminal activity,
their murderous activity, in any trappings of political purpose. They are
terrorists," she notes, "in point of fact, it is precisely because they did
have a political purpose that they were, indeed, terrorists.") Second, it
must involve violence. ("Cyberterrorism" is not terrorism.) Third, its
purpose is not to defeat the enemy but to send a message. Fourth, the victim
and the act usually have symbolic significance. Fifth, it is carried out by
substate groups, not states. (Richardson acknowledges that this is a
controversial definition, and admits that states do employ terrorism. She
draws the distinction because without it, discussions of terrorism become
conceptually unwieldy.) Sixth, the victims of terrorism are not the same as
the intended audience. Seventh, terrorism deliberately targets civilians. A
final crucial point: Terrorists are weaker than their enemies. This is why
they embrace terrorism.

Are there "good" terrorists and "bad" terrorists? Richardson wisely declines
to enter that endless debate over means and ends. Rather, she sticks to her
criteria, regardless of whether a terrorist claims to be a "freedom fighter"
or indeed of whether he has subsequently become a statesman. Terrorists do
not retroactively get not to be terrorists because their side won.
Richardson cites the case of former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin:
That he became a statesman in the '70s does not alter the fact that he was a
terrorist in the '40s. What is noteworthy, however, is that Richardson does
not use the term to demonize but to describe. It is simply a fact that
Begin, like his counterparts in the Red Brigades, the Tamil Tigers, Hamas,
al-Qaida and countless other groups, was a terrorist. This does not mean
that he was an evil monster forever beyond understanding, or that he was
insane or a criminal, or that he had no legitimate motive. It means simply
that he used violence against civilian targets for political ends: i.e., he
was a terrorist.
Used in this neutral fashion, of course, the word "terrorist" has quite a
different value than it does in the way it is customarily used in the
American press, where it is a virtual synonym for "evildoer." Richardson
rejects the widespread notion that "to understand or to explain terrorism is
to sympathize with it." She makes it clear that she regards the intentional
targeting of civilians as profoundly immoral. But she in effect brackets or
suspends issues of morality, focusing first on other characteristics of
terrorism. This astringent, detached perspective allows her to situate
terrorism in a larger historical and social context without falling into
facile judgments or generalizations.

In a wide-ranging historical tour, Richardson demonstrates that the 9/11
attacks, far from being unique, are merely the latest manifestation of an
ancient phenomenon. The three earliest known terrorist groups were the
Sicarii, or Zealots, of the classical age, the medieval Assassins and the
medieval-to-modern-age Thugs. The Zealots, militant Jews determined to oust
the Romans from Palestine, favored stabbing their victims in crowds, a
tactic intended to spread panic. The Assassins were a fanatical Shiite sect
that aimed to purify Islam and reconstitute it as a single entity. They also
favored assassinations performed by stabbing, and their followers considered
it shameful to escape—much like today's shaheed, or "martyrs." So
inexplicable was their suicidal behavior that observers thought they must be
high on hashish—hence their name, Assassins. The Thugs, a bizarre Hindu
sect, do not fit Richardson's definition of terrorists, since their motives
were purely religious, not in any way political, but she includes them
anyway because they are commonly considered to be terrorists, and because
they resemble modern terrorists in certain ways. The Thugs believed that
they needed to supply the goddess Kali with human blood. Toward that end
they carefully selected victims, whom they first befriended and then
strangled with a silk tie in the most painful way possible. In longevity and
number of victims, they are by far the most "successful" terrorist group in
history. They operated in India for an incredible 600 years, during which
time they are believed to have killed 500,000 people.

The French Revolution played a key role in the genesis of modern terror: Its
hallmarks were "terror from above," i.e., terror imposed by the state, and
the notions that killers are the guardians of the will of the people. It
also marked the emergence of purely secular terrorist ideology. Previous
terrorist movements had been driven in large part by religion, but after
1789 terrorism was to remain secular until the Iranian revolution in 1979.
Russian theorist Mikhail Bakunin, who advocated terrorism by small elite
groups as a means of bringing down the state, prefigured modern social
revolutionary terrorists like the Red Brigades. Nineteenth century Irish
nationalists and Russian anarchists also practiced terror, as did scattered
anarchists in the U.S. and Europe, who succeeded in killing President
McKinley, among other heads of state.

Some might argue that contemporary terrorism is different in kind because it
is so much more bloodthirsty. Richardson acknowledges that 19th century
terrorists killed very few people compared with their 20th century
counterparts, but argues that the reason was the example set by the two
world wars, in which states killed mass numbers of civilians for political
reasons (for example, Dresden, the London Blitz, the siege of Leningrad,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki). These mechanized slaughters helped obliterate the
distinction between combatants and noncombatants. "The greater brutality of
terrorists reflected a greater brutality in political life generally." It is
not that terrorists got more evil—the world did.

But though terrorism is as old as the hills and has been practiced by many
cultures and religions and for many different reasons, its sheer awfulness
leaves it mysterious. What kind of a person would deliberately kill innocent
men, women and children, for political goals that are often virtually
unattainable? Aren't they insane, or simply evil, on the face of it?

The answer is no. Richardson answers that three things are required to
create a terrorist: "a disaffected individual, an enabling group, and a
legitimizing ideology." Some of the 9/11 terrorists were educated,
middle-class Muslims who had grown up in Europe and felt profoundly
alienated from the societies in which they lived. They met other individuals
in the same boat, some of whom had links to global jihadist movements—the
"enabling group." (Psychiatrist and former Foreign Service officer Marc
Sageman has made a close study of these relationships, which he argues are
crucial to global jihad, in his book "Understanding Terror Networks.") And,
of course, the "legitimizing ideology" was an extreme version of Salafi
Islam.

Psychologically, terrorists see the world in black-and-white terms, identify
with the sufferings of others and desire revenge. But they are not, except
in rare cases, mentally ill. (Richardson points out that most terrorist
groups reject obviously disturbed individuals, because they are not worthy
to carry out acts that terrorists see as driven by a higher moral purpose.)
They are often motivated by perceived humiliation. Practically, they seek
what Richardson calls the "Three Rs: Revenge, Renown and Reaction."
Click Here

Having defined terrorism, given a history of it and established that
terrorists are quite "normal"—even exceptionally idealistic—in their
psychology and goals, Richardson then turns to the most important and
provocative part of her book: a powerful critique of America's reaction to
9/11. She argues that the 9/11 attacks did not change the world—"rather it
was our reaction to September 11 that changed the world." And not for the
better.

Richardson points out that the terrorist attacks were spectacularly
successful, but they hardly emerged out of a void. Muslim rage, driven by
U.S. policies ranging from coziness with autocratic Arab regimes to support
for Israel, as well as by socioreligious frustrations that U.S. policies had
nothing to do with, had been building for years. Americans thought the
attacks came out of the blue because we are insular, are ill-educated about
the world in general and the Middle East in particular, and—with that
touching, maddening innocence and assumption of national superiority that
have bemused observers from Henry James to Graham Greene—were unable to
conceive why others might hold legitimate grievances against us.

Rather than try to educate Americans—teaching them, for example, that
superpowers throughout history have been hated, or about the complexities of
our Middle East policies—the Bush administration "retreated to simplistic
formulas of good and evil." By so doing, Richardson argues, it squandered a
crucial opportunity to "educate the American public to the realities of
terrorism and to the implication of the United States' global preeminence."
(She does not point out that the likelihood of the Bush administration,
which regards U.S. hegemony as given by divine fiat, doing this is somewhere
between zero and none.)

As for our reaction, its effects have been little short of catastrophic. By
invading Iraq, we created the very terrorist boogeyman we feared. And by
declaring an unwinnable "war on terror," we escalated the conflict
unnecessarily, elevated Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida to a bad eminence they
did not deserve, and condemned ourselves to certain defeat. As Richardson
points out, all a terrorist has to do is set off one bomb somewhere to make
us "lose" the war on terrorism. This is making things much too easy for
them.
Richardson notes that terror attacks are designed to, and inevitably do,
inspire fear, and reaction, out of all proportion to the actual threat they
pose. "We believed that we now faced a powerful enemy driven by irrational
religious fanaticism and determined to use weapons of mass destruction
against us," she writes. "In fact, our enemy was much less powerful than we
thought, demonstrated a persistent capacity for rational behavior, and had
concrete political as well as religious motivations, and its interest in
weapons of mass destruction was driven more by a desire to intimidate us and
defend itself against us than by the desire to deploy them in the United
States."

Richardson's last point about WMD seems to me dubious at best, and leads one
to wonder if her mostly salutary emphasis on the rational motivations of
terrorists leads her to misread al-Qaida. After all, if al-Qaida was
prepared to crash jets into the World Trade Center, why wouldn't they use
weapons of mass destruction (which she argues they had little chance of
obtaining) as well? That caveat aside, however, her demythologizing of
al-Qaida, and her insistence that a "more focused and more moderate
reaction" to the attacks would have been more effective than the path we
followed, are convincing. Richardson points out that thanks to the invasion
of Afghanistan, which she supported, the danger of a WMD attack actually
went down after 9/11.

Richardson's most audacious argument is that America should try to talk to
its enemies, to find out what they want and whether their demands are
negotiable. "We take as a given that their demands are so extreme as to be
nonnegotiable, but it would be worth finding out if that is, in fact, the
case. Yet suggestions that we actually talk to the terrorists are considered
tantamount to treason," she writes. She points out that although they
routinely deny it, countries do in fact negotiate with terrorists, and
sometimes successfully. "Britain ended the IRA's terrorism only through
negotiating with the terrorists and … the cease-fire currently enjoyed in
Sri Lanka is a result of government talks with the hated Tamil Tigers."
(That cease-fire has recently broken down.)

Richardson's proposal is certain to be greeted with outrage. But she is not
dogmatic or naive. She is under no illusions about how dangerous bin Laden
and his partner, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are—after all, they carried out by far
the most destructive single terrorist attack in history. And she
acknowledges that bin Laden, and his fellow Islamist terrorists, are
motivated by both religion and politics—and that religious motivations make
terrorists "more absolutist, more transnational, and more dangerous." She
notes, "To this day we do not know quite how much relative weight Osama bin
Laden attributes to his religious and his political goals. The manner in
which he has altered the listing of his various aspirations in his various
statements suggests that the political is primary and religion a tool. But
we do not know that for sure, and he would certainly deny it."

Richardson thus avoids the mistake made by University of Chicago terrorism
scholar Robert Pape in his "Dying to Win." By arguing that al-Qaida
terrorists were primarily motivated by anger at foreign occupation of their
homelands, Pape seriously understated the religious dimension of Islamist
terrorism. Richardson does not make this mistake.

Nonetheless, there are several obvious objections to her proposal. Reading
bin Laden's statements as collected in "Messages to the World," it is far
from clear that any of al-Qaida's demands are negotiable: Many of their
grievances are historical, and others involve total rejection of policies,
principally American support for Israel, that Richardson admits are not
going to change. Richardson's call for dialogue makes more sense with
ambiguous terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, which are a combination
of what she calls "transformative" (i.e., absolute in their demands) and
"temporal" (i.e., have specific political goals). With bin Laden, the ratio
clearly tilts more toward transformative. He has offered specific truces to
European countries, but never to the U.S. Moreover, the familiar objection
to negotiating with terrorists—that by meeting their demands one will only
encourage more terrorism and more demands—cannot simply be dismissed,
although Richardson points out that that is not always the result of
negotiations. In short, it is difficult to imagine a practical way that a
negotiation with al-Qaida, or the splintered autonomous Salafi groups that
have sprung up in al-Qaida's wake, could succeed.

Richardson, however, is not advocating that negotiations must lead to
concessions. And it is hard to contest her conclusion that gaining
intelligence about the enemy—which can be done secretly and through
intermediaries—is always a good thing. "By knowing your enemies, you can
find out what it is they want. Once you know what they want, you can then
decide whether to deny it to them and thereby demonstrate the futility of
their tactic, give it to them, or negotiate and give them a part of it in
order to cause them to end their campaign … The most likely outcome would be
to discover that they are not a unitary actor and that some have negotiable
demands and others do not. Then the direction of policy should be to exploit
these differences and sow dissent among them."

Richardson's strongest argument for negotiating and, if necessary,
implementing policy changes is not to prevent al-Qaida from attacking again
but to prevent others from joining the jihad against America, and to weaken
al-Qaida's ties to Muslim populations. She puts forward a two-track
strategy: using good intelligence, allies and judicious force to destroy
terrorist groups while simultaneously addressing the grievances that lead
people to embrace terrorism. "Conducting a war of ideas is a more nebulous
and less energizing concept than waging a 'real' war of bombs and bullets,"
she writes. "In order to win a war of ideas … one has to engage with the
adversaries and even concede at times that they may have a point."

There is, of course, a taboo against changing our policies "in response" to
terrorism. But Richardson argues convincingly that this taboo, however
morally satisfying, is tying our hands in our fight. If we refuse to
implement desirable policy changes on principle simply because terrorists
have also demanded such changes, we have obviously severely limited our
freedom of action and our ability to respond effectively.

An obvious case in point is our presence in Iraq. Let us assume, for the
sake of argument, that it would be in our national interest to withdraw our
troops from Iraq. Must we then refuse to withdraw simply because al-Qaida or
other Islamist terrorists demand that we do so? That would be an absurd
result—it would mean that we are being held hostage by the terrorists. Yet
that is precisely the position held by the Bush administration. This is not
the policy of a mature government, confident of its superior strength and
willing to outsmart its adversary, but of a shrill, insecure,
hyperaggressive one whose actions are playing into its enemy's hands.

Indeed, Richardson points out that the Bush administration's absolute,
holier-than-thou reaction to 9/11 bore a disturbing similarity to bin
Laden's. "By using the extreme language of conviction that bin Laden uses,
by declaring war, even a crusade, against him in response to his war against
us, we are mirroring his actions. We are playing into his hands, we are
elevating his stature, we are permitting him to set the terms of our
interactions. Given that he has a very weak hand and we have a very strong
one, we should not be letting him set the parameters of the game."

For its part, the Bush administration has been highly effective at setting
the parameters of the game—and intimidating the cowering Democrats—by
claiming that it is "tough" on terrorism while the Democrats are "weak."
Richardson cuts through this posturing by arguing that the only point that
matters is who is effective.

It is an obvious point, but to convince voters of it, Democrats will have to
overcome decades of GOP rhetoric that paints them as the 97-pound weakling.
But with the tough-guy approach discredited, and the prospect of an endless
and unwinnable war looming, Americans may finally be ready to wise up.
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