The coming storms
Scholars and pundits trade dark prophecies--and high hopes
By Jay Tolson - US NEWS
usnews.com
So how is World War IV going? With the second Bush administration well underway--and now with a new terror alert to alarm the nation--it is hardly surprising that strategic thinkers are asking the question. What is surprising, though, is that so many leading analysts still disagree over the nature of the struggle: the origins, the stakes, the objectives, the definition of the enemy, and even the aptness of the word war itself. Differing loudly in a variety of print venues, from the popular monthly Esquire to the more scholarly Wilson Quarterly , they inadvertently drive home a common point: It's a curious war indeed that makes people argue over whether they are really fighting one.
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But these debates are more than curious. They are of great consequence. And the reason is one on which most analysts would (uncharacteristically) agree: If the current struggle is as much a war of and by ideas as it is a war of arms, the character of the conflict is itself an idea with crucial consequences.
Names. The first to point out the importance of what we call this conflict was Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and considered by many a leading neoconservative thinker. Writing only two months after 9/11 in the Wall Street Journal , he argued that "war against terrorism" was too nebulous a term. Comparing the current struggle to the Cold War--which he dubbed World War III--he said that World War IV shared key elements with its predecessor. Those included its global and protracted character, its mix of violent and nonviolent means, its mobilization of human resources (not all military), and its roots in an ideological conflict. "The purpose of the piece," Cohen says today, "was to get people thinking on what seems to me the right scale."
The term "neoconservative" is often used by detractors to reduce complex and varied positions to a monolithic ideology shared by indistinguishable think-alikes. But while, in fact, assorted neoconservative thinkers put forth diverse tactical and strategic positions, it would be fair to say that most share the view that the war triggered by 9/11 is, as Cohen first suggested, something larger than a police action. In general, too, they hold that terrorism is not simply a phenomenon that will vanish under the inexorable forward march of economic globalism, as, to some extent, President Clinton and his policy advisers believed. It would also be fair to say that many aspects of the Bush administration's prosecution of the war--and particularly its national security doctrine embracing both pre-emptive military action and the promotion of democracy as the only real long-term means of draining the swamps of jihadi terrorism--are heartily embraced by most neoconservatives. (No surprise, observers might say, since many helped formulate Bush's policies.)
Writing in Commentary , Norman Podhoretz has been among the most steadfast supporters. In last September's "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win," he drew together several earlier articles praising the Bush doctrine and responding to its critics (as in the cogently argued "Israel Isn't the Issue"). In the February issue's "The War Against World War IV," Podhoretz asks whether Bush, in his second term, will abandon his aggressive agenda, succumbing to second-term doldrums, waning public support, or the steady onslaught of criticism. Arguing that Bush will not, Podhoretz offers full-throated endorsement of the World War IV paradigm. The only thing that stands in the way of America's success, he concludes, is a defeatist outlook that harps on the setbacks or possible dangers, whether in the Middle East or in America.
Scenario. A dramatic instance of such doom-mongering appears in the January/February Atlantic in a piece penned by Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism specialist who worked in the past four administrations and leapt into the limelight with the publication of his book, Against All Enemies. If that book could have been subtitled "How We Failed to Prevent 9/11," the article "Ten Years Later" could be subtitled "How Everything We Have Done Since 9/11 Might Quite Possibly Lead to the Following Devastating Scenario." It all starts with a Southeast Asian couple--not Arab, therefore unnoticed--who set off explosives in a couple of Las Vegas casinos, followed almost immediately by attacks on various other pleasure-and-amusement centers around the country. The result: a cascade of depressing economic, social, and legal developments. All of them plausible. And why not? Clarke does what he and scores of fellow defense and security experts in Washington do all the time: He gins up one of the hundreds (or possibly thousands) of scenarios for how things might go wrong.
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And according to this one, could things have played out differently? Here Clarke answers with a bravado that only a super-bureaucrat could muster: It could have if Bush had kept focused on al Qaeda by sending more troops into Afghanistan and by staying out of Iraq. And if he had done a half-dozen other things, from a better job at public diplomacy to real follow-through on his commitment to energy independence. Most important, Clarke asserts, a militarily beefed-up police action aimed at what were "at one time just a few radical jihadis " would have prevented the fulfillment of the neocons' prophecy of "an ongoing low-grade war between religions."
Readers who already agree with that conclusion may overlook the fact that this is a guess more than an argument. What is missing is any exploration of the origins of the conflict, a point on which Clarke might have scored points against World War IV boosters. And that is what Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University and a former Army officer, provides in the winter issue of the Wilson Quarterly . "The Real World War IV" takes strong exception to the neoconservative notion of the war's origins, both the timing and the larger causes. Instead of a lack of forceful U.S. military action in the Middle East before 9/11, Bacevich sees America's increasing reliance on force there in the two pre-9/11 decades as a major cause of the current war. "Designating the several U.S. military campaigns initiated in the aftermath of 9/11 as World War IV effectively absolves the United States of accountability for anything that went before," he writes.
What went before, he says, began in earnest under President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Before that year, Carter himself went along with his seven predecessors in seeking to secure stability in, and access to, the oil-rich gulf region with only a minimum of overt U.S. military force. But several things happened. First, he was slapped down for a 1979 speech urging Americans to seek happiness in areas other than material abundance. Defeatism in the face of an economic downturn, his critics screamed. Chastened, Carter almost simultaneously witnessed two developments in the Middle East that threatened access to the very oil that fueled Americans' quest for greater prosperity: the Iranian revolution and the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. In his 1980 State of the Union address, Carter pledged that any effort by "any outside force" to threaten U.S. interests in the gulf region would be repelled "by any means necessary, including force." The Carter Doctrine, as it came to be known, launched World War IV, Bacevich says, and each successive president would ratchet up military operations in the region (sometimes simply by aiding and abetting dictators like Saddam Hussein), aggravating resentments and tensions as they did.
Bacevich makes clear that he is not blaming the victims or exonerating Osama bin Laden or other Islamic extremists. All the same, he says, "we have overinflated the strategic importance of the Middle East, and taking a more realistic and balanced approach to the region would require making changes here at home that we are unwilling to make." In saying that military actions stemming from America's pursuit of material abundance are a major cause of World War IV, Bacevich rules out any possibility of idealism or altruism in Bush's security policies, particularly as applied to the Middle East. And that is where Thomas Barnett, author of an important article in the February issue of Esquire , offers a more nuanced--and certainly more hopeful--perspective.
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Breakdown. Barnett's position extends one of the central arguments of his widely hailed book, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. There, the former U.S. Naval War College researcher and professor argued that 9/11 signaled a major system breakdown in the U.S.-backed globalizing process. "In the process of rapid expansion," Barnett says, summarizing his analysis of the go-go '90s, "economics got way ahead of politics, technology got way ahead of security." Older structures intended to support global security, including the United Nations, were simply not up to the task, he believes. The growing disjunction between global security and economic globalization aggravated--and was aggravated by--the distance between the "Core" nations that generally play by and profit from the rules of globalization and the "Gap" nations that do not yet operate by those rules. By Barnett's analysis, 9/11 was a gesture of defiance orchestrated by a well-organized group of extremists who seek to keep the people of the Gap outside the Core--and locked into a totalitarian theocracy fundamentally opposed to the openness that comes with globalization. Those extremists, Barnett adds, rightly associate globalization with American ideals and interests. But--and here Barnett differs decisively with Bacevich--the historical uniqueness of those ideals and interests is that they benefit not just one player but all players in the non-zero-sum game of globalization.
But if Barnett earlier praised Bush's new bold security initiatives (including regime change in Iraq) for redressing a system imbalance, his Esquire article warns that bold military moves will lead to nothing if America does not now induce other Core nations--not just the obvious European ones but also India and China--to participate in new and often ad hoc security arrangements involving extensive and vigilant policing of the troubled Gap areas. In addition to transforming our own military for large peacekeeping operations, America must engage in more imaginative and persuasive diplomacy, using enticements, for example, to bring Iran into the game as a responsible regional player instead of merely threatening it not to build the bomb. "Iran's the key," he writes, urging Bush to think like Nixon on the road to detente with China. "Squeeze it now while it's scared--and while Arafat's still dead. America has played bad cop long enough with Iran. For crying out loud, Iranians are the only people in the Middle East who actually like us!" To lock China into a new security arrangement--and particularly to get it to cooperate in the effort to remove North Korea's Kim Jong Il from power--Barnett urges Bush to drop the U.S. defense guarantee to Taiwan, which will only stop Taipei from making unnecessary symbolic gestures of independence from the mainland.
"I hate all the World War IV stuff," says Barnett. "In the Middle East, the administration successfully started a big bang. Now they are in a state of planning. To lock in their gains, they are going to have to make some compromises. We have to convince the world that our security equals the world's security. We did that during the Cold War. But that's where Bush's people are stumbling now."
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How's that war going, then? Maybe, if Barnett is right, the best answer is to rephrase the question: Are we finally learning how to win the peace? |
