Terror war doubts rise
BY CRAIG GORDON
Newsday Washington Bureau
August 11, 2006
newsday.com
WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush likes to boast of five attack-free years in the United States since 9/11. He claims to have decimated the al-Qaida network.
But the re-emergence of an al-Qaida-style mega-plot -- even a foiled one -- shows just how little headway Bush's war on terrorism has made in defeating Islamic extremism, several analysts said yesterday.
Some gave Bush and British officials good marks on the cops-and-robbers part of stopping the plot, but most sharply criticized Bush's broader war-on-terror campaign as severely disjointed and distracted by the decision to go to war in Iraq.
Not only did the war cause Bush to draw time and attention away from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other extremists, it fueled anti-U.S. hatred in the Islamic world that creates a seemingly endless supply of plotters and would-be martyrs, they said.
More than that, several analysts said the sophistication and coordination of the current plot show that far from being out of business as a driving force in terrorism, as Bush would suggest, al-Qaida still has the brains and muscle to mount a major attack.
"We took our eye off that ball when we didn't finish that job in Afghanistan at the outset, and when we decided to add Iraq," said Leslie Gelb, a longtime foreign policy analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations.
Now Gelb sees the United States facing a decades-shaping battle for influence with Muslim extremists, one in which everyday people in the Middle East are deciding whether to cast their lot with America or the terrorists.
And the terrorists are making headway in the battle for public opinion, whether among insurgents in Iraq or with Hezbollah in Lebanon, fighting the U.S. ally Israel.
"This is a time when we would hope Muslims would be turning against extremists in their midst who are killing other Muslims, but that isn't happening," Gelb said.
This debate flared in the political arena yesterday as well, with Democrats like Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid saying the plot shows that Bush's anti-terror fight has failed. Republicans shot back that Reid and others were trying to score political points off the near-tragedy.
And one analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, James Jay Carafano, scoffed at the notion of yesterday's arrests as anything but a success story for Bush.
But the criticism of Bush's anti-terror fight runs broad and deep in foreign policy circles, particularly because of the Iraq war. Bush calls it the central front in the war on terror and says the administration has separately captured or killed two-thirds of senior al-Qaida leadership.
Many analysts consider the war a distraction from what should be the major focus of U.S. foreign policy -- finding a way to hunt down terror leaders and stop the attacks at their source.
In the Bush administration, insiders acknowledge there is little day-to-day focus on bin Laden, mainly because U.S. officials believe he is no longer in a position to dictate attacks and organize major plots.
"I don't think anybody thinks he has any command and control," said one administration official, referring to this plot. "I don't think anyone thinks he called this in."
But experts insist that any White House comfort over that belief is severely misplaced. They say the fact that al-Qaida appears able to regenerate itself so readily suggests a serious long-term problem -- one allowed to fester and grow as the administration focused on the military aspects of the fight.
"We have rolled up some key guys, no doubt about it, but when we roll up the third, fourth, fifth operations chief of al-Qaida, that's nothing to celebrate," said Tom Sanderson, an expert on terrorist threats at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "That's a signal that good people are taking over as soon as the other guy gets knocked off." |
