THE WRONG WAR
BY AMIR TAHERI
NY Post
July 31, 2004 -- <font size=4>FOREIGN policy was expected to be at the center of this year's duel between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry. Kerry, in accepting the Democratic nomination on Thursday, raised expectations by admitting that America was <font color=blue>"a nation at war."<font color=red>
Nevertheless, Kerry's speech of more that 5,200 words devoted only around 500 words to foreign-policy in general and the war against terrorism in particular. Even then, Kerry used those words for sloganeering.
Kerry's speech revealed a man who, though vaguely conscious that the world has changed, prefers to assume that it has not.
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"The world tonight is very different from the world of four years ago,"<font color=black> Kerry told the convention. <font color=blue>"We are a nation at war — a global war on terror against an enemy unlike any we have known before."<font color=red>
Yet Kerry did not say in what ways the world is different. And when it came to dealing with this different world, he had little to offer but pre-9/11 the solutions.
Nor was the Democratic nominee willing to define the nature of this war and point out why this <font color=blue>"enemy"<font color=red> was unlike any that the United States has known.
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It is important for the Americans to understand that they face a war that involves more than a mood. It involves real people, command structures, states that offer safe haven, global networks of finance and propaganda, and fifth columnists of various faiths and ideologies in many countries, including the United States.
How would he fight?
At the same time, however, this is a new type of war because it is not about territory, control of natural resources, access to markets, and/or other classical causes of trans-national conflict. This is an asymmetrical war in which old tactics of low-intensity conflict have been redefined to allow the use of modern technologies.
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How would a President Kerry fight this war?
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His answer is simple: <font color=blue>"As president, I will wage this war with the lessons I learned in [the Vietnam] war,"<font color=black> the senator told the convention.
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This is precisely the problem.
The lessons of Vietnam could be misleading in fighting the war against terrorism.<font color=black> In Vietnam, the war was over territory: The Communists who had seized control of North Vietnam wanted to annex the south. The United States had intervened to prevent that and enable the South Vietnamese to choose a different future.
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That war was fought in Indochina, thousands of miles away from America. The Vietcong would not send death-squads to kill Americans in New York and Washington. Nor did it dream of conquering the world for its ideology, whatever it might have been, or to force all humanity to adopt its beliefs. And the Vietcong enjoyed significant levels of support and sympathy inside the United States, which is presumably not the case in the current war against terrorism.
One of the things the Americans need to do in the war against terrorism is to unlearn the lessons of Vietnam.
1967 vs. 9/11
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Kerry's speech was dominated by one powerful image: that of himself in <font color=blue>"that gunboat in the Mekong delta."<font color=black>
But that was the image of 1967.
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The image of 2004 is that of hijacked jetliners running into the twin towers in New York. U.S. strategy in this war must be built around that image.
The choice the United States has is not between war and
peace. The enemy it faces does not understand peace. As a
statement attributed to Osama bin Laden, and addressed to
the Europeans, said recently, there can be no peace with
the <font color=blue>"infidel." <font color=red>
The choice here is between war and endless war. This is
not an enemy that could be drawn into Paris <font color=blue>"peace talks"<font color=red>
to win Nobel Prizes for the participants.
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Kerry says <font color=blue>"We need to be looked up to, and not just feared."<font color=black> Yet, while it is always pleasant to be looked up to, what is needed now is that the terrorists, and their allies and patrons, should fear the United States. <font color=red>The bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins of this world are unlikely to look up to the United States. But they can be made to fear it, to the point of running to hide in caves and holes.<font color=black>
Kerry says he would wage <font color=blue>"a smarter, more effective war on terror."<font color=black>
Ok, but how?
First, he would <font color=blue>"ask hard questions and demand hard evidence."<font color=red>
But when it comes to terrorism, hard questions don't necessarily produce hard evidence. Often, such evidence becomes available only after an attack, not before.
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Anyway, once a President Kerry has asked his hard questions and obtained his hard evidence, he would only be at the start of a long road to a policy. He would next have to persuade other nations (variously described in his speech as <font color=blue>"allies," "erstwhile allies" and simply "others"<font color=black> to accept his <font color=blue>"hard evidence"<font color=black> and side with the United States. <font color=red>Then the whole matter would have to be taken to unspecified <font color=blue>"international institutions,"<font color=red> supposedly for approval.
After that? Here is Kerry's answer: <font color=blue>"Only then with confidence and determination we will be able to tell the terrorists: You will lose, we will win!"<font color=red>
Will such a warning make the bin Laden and Saddam Husseins of this world tremble?
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The value of allies
Kerry also says: <font color=blue>"We need to build our alliances, so that we can get the terrorists before they get us."<font color=black> Yet he also says: <font color=blue>"I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security."<font color=black>
Well, that is what Bush did when he led the war to liberate Iraq. And this is what President Bill Clinton had done when he sent troops to break the Serbian fascists in Bosnia and, later, in Kosovo. <font color=red>In both cases, the U.N. Security Council had indicated its unwillingness to back the American position.
Kerry, however, has made his strategy conditional on support from unidentified allies.
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But who are these allies?
A majority of NATO members backed the United States in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, as did a majority of the European Union members, plus Japan. In the Balkans, Greece alone of NATO members led the opposition to U.S. policies. In the case of Iraq, France played that role.
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Thus what Kerry's offers amounts to nothing but bringing occasional dissidents such as Greece and France on board.<font color=black> Is that so important in the larger scheme of things? Americans might be surprised to learn that <font color=blue>"we will win"<font color=black> if, and only if, French President Jacques Chirac agrees to join Kerry in fighting al Qaeda or in deploying NATO forces to Iraq.
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But what if the Americans have no support from other nations and yet need to fight against an enemy? This is not a hypothetical question: It happened to the British in 1939-40, when they had to fight Hitler alone.
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Defense won't win
Kerry says: <font color=blue>"I will never hesitate to use force when it is required; any attack will be met with swift and certain response."<font color=red> This means that Kerry's strategy in the war against terrorism is reactive, not pro-active.
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He also says: <font color=blue>"The frontlines of this battle are right here on our shores"<font color=black>, and then proposes a series of new security measures, especially for container ships and airports.
But while such defensive measures might be necessary, it is vital to take the war to the terrorists.
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It is important that fear should change camp: Instead of Americans living in fear, make sure that the terrorists and their sympathizers do. In this war, search-and-destroy tactics must play a central role for victory, the only acceptable outcome, to be achieved.
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Kerry says: <font color=blue>"The United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to."<font color=black>
This is stating the obvious. The problem arises when you have to go to war but you don't want to. There are also times when you do not have to go to war, but want to because you wish to topple mass-murderers like Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.
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Kerry's position on Iraq is an exercise in ambiguity. In
1991, he voted against the use of force to drive Saddam
out of Kuwait, although that had been unanimously approved
in the U.N. Security Council. Later, he said he regretted
that vote. In 2002, he voted for toppling Saddam by war,
although this did not have specific U.N. support. And now
he implies that he regrets that vote, too.
As a multilateralist, Kerry should have voted for
intervention in Kuwait in '91 and against intervention in
Iraq in '02. But, each time, he did the opposite.
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Kerry says he will reform the American intelligence services so that <font color=blue>"policy is guided by facts."<font color=red>
Intelligence, however, is seldom capable of producing
facts. The best it can do is to point at probabilities.
But even when it can provide facts, war decisions are made
on the basis of a leader's political judgment. A leader is
not a computer which, when fed with certain facts, decrees
war. And going to war is too serious a decision to be left
to spooks.
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'Plans for peace'
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The most disturbing idea that Kerry launched, however, came when he spoke of a message that he would send to American troops on the first day of his presidency: <font color=blue>"You will never be asked to fight a war without a plan to win the peace." <font color=red>
Logically, this means: never.
No one enters a war with a precise plan for peace. When
President Franklin D Roosevelt declared war against the
Axis, he did not have a plan for peace. And what could be
the <font color=blue>"plan for peace"<font color=red> that any U.S. president could offer
before committing American troops to combat in the war
against terrorism?
Should America stop the war against terrorism until a <font color=blue>"plan for peace"<font color=red> is drawn up? Will a Kerry administration withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan before they are stabilized and democratized?
These questions need to be debated during the campaign.
Kerry was nonchalant about the nuclear build-up by North Korea and Iran.
He dismissed the issue with an anodyne phrase: <font color=blue>"We need to lead a global effort against nuclear proliferation."<font color=red>
Just an effort, nothing more. <font color=lack>
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NEW YORK POST |
