Interesting analysis and speculation:
Enemy Sightings
Good news and bad.
By Tom Nichols
Events in Moscow, Bali, and elsewhere have again illuminated two facets of the war on terror that bear emphasizing. One is that this is not just a war against Americans, and that other nations cannot much longer indulge the fantasy that the terrorists have no interest in killing their citizens.
The second point is even more striking, and is one that offers us reason to be hopeful at this point in the war: Our enemies, apparently, are stupid. By this I don't mean uneducated, or bereft of cleverness, or lacking in determination. Rather, al Qaeda and those who support them have no sense or concept of strategy whatsoever. At a time when America was having trouble building a coalition against them (and against their potential friends in Iraq), they have done the United States a great service by reminding our friends and allies that groups like al Qaeda are indiscriminately ruthless, focused only on rejoicing in the immediate suffering their attacks create, and more interested in widespread violence than in actually furthering their supposed goals. Their recent attacks have been strategic blunders of the first order — just as was September 11.
It is important to remember that before September 11, al Qaeda was engaging in a series of activities that were actually working. The attack on the USS Cole produced a retreat, as Navy ships were pulled from ports. Car bombings in Africa, rather than producing outrage, produced fatigue among U.S. policymakers, as bin Laden's death-of-a-thousand-cuts approach ground down U.S. willingness to maintain a strong overseas presence, which is exactly what (theoretically, anyway) bin Laden wanted. There is no evidence that these repeated attacks were part of a "strategy" per se. But a terrorist high command with an ounce of sense would have to have realized that these sharp stings in far-flung areas, executed at relatively low cost and risk to the terrorist network itself, were having their intended effect.
September 11 was a grand mistake, galvanizing the United States and the world community, and ensuring that the West would now pay close attention to a network that had achieved its successes by avoiding, rather than courting, the world's scrutiny. Still, once the liberation of Afghanistan was achieved, there was a good possibility that al Qaeda would find time to regroup as America's allies (all but Britain, anyway) would peel away and leave the Anglo-American alliance to handle the problem. The coalition that had begun with NATO engaging in the historic act of invoking Article Five of its charter now looked to be fraying; incidents like the "friendly fire" accident in which Canadian troops were killed in Afghanistan by an American pilot helped to fuel a suspicion that the Yanks were perhaps a bit too trigger-happy to be guiding the war on terror. And once President Bush made clear his determination to remove Saddam from power, criticism of the Americans that was previously muted now broke into the open, with nations like France and Russia seeing their role as constraining, rather than aiding, the United States.
But then someone bombed a French tanker.
This attack, after a period of relative quiet, could not have come at a more-opportune time, and reminded France (who had lost eleven citizens in a terror attack in Pakistan some months before) that their diplomatic efforts were of no concern to the terrorists. Germany, too, lost people in an attack against a Tunisian synagogue, prompting Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to warn that al Qaeda represented a "new totalitarianism."
The nightclub bombing in Bali was a gross error as well. Few Americans died, but the losses among innocent Australians has now given Australia a visceral stake in the fight that they didn't have — and that al Qaeda, if they had stopped to think, didn't need to give them. As Australia's Defense Minister Robert Hill said afterward, "Whilst (terrorism) needs to be addressed at source in places such as Afghanistan, we nevertheless have to also attack it where it's been realized. This is, you know, brought home to us in the most stark and terrible way."
These kinds of attacks should be no surprise, in that bin Laden's number-two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, long ago warned America's allies, particularly Germany and France, to get out of the Middle East. What this was supposed to achieve, other than picking a needless fight with two nations that would likely have backed away from a confrontation, is unclear. Meanwhile, al Qaeda is again showing it is apparently a poor houseguest; not only were they despised by many in the Taliban, but now Yemen, long thought to be infested by al Qaeda, is cooperating with the United States to find them and, as in the case of the recent CIA strike, to eliminate their leaders on their territory.
And now, in the most astonishing display of political tone-deafness to date, al-Jazeera is reporting that it has a tape of bin Laden himself praising the attack in Bali…and more importantly, the one in Moscow.
It's not clear yet whether the near-massacre at a Moscow theater this fall was carried out with the help or advice of al Qaeda. And indeed, the Chechen attack in the center of the Russian capital was a foolish move in and of itself. (Chechen terrorists, it seems, are no more politically adept than any others, but that's an issue for another time.) The attack came just as Vladimir Putin was about to go to the Asia-Pacific summit and give his friend, President Bush, an earful about attacking Iraq. Instead, Putin stayed in Moscow and pledged himself ready to stay the course in the fight on terror. As one Russian bystander at the siege hissed: "Putin has only one choice. Bush showed the world what to do with these bastards after September 11. It's Putin's turn to liquidate them in Russia."
But despite Putin's efforts to link the hostage-takers with al Qaeda, other nations remained skeptical. So now bin Laden — or someone trying to sound like him — is actually clearing up any doubt about his approval of (if not complicity in) the attacks. And as if to help the Americans make the case that he might be in cahoots with Iraq, bin Laden warns there will retaliation for an attack on Iraq, and not just against the United States. He adds threats against U.S. allies, specifically mentioning Britain, Italy, Canada, Germany, and Australia, unless they distance themselves from Washington's "criminal gang" and its "modern-day pharaoh," President Bush.
There is no other word for this but one: stupid. The last thing al Qaeda should want is to play into Vladimir Putin's hands, or to help George Bush shore up his support among wavering allies. Instead of seizing an opportunity to divide America from her friends, and perhaps even to help cool the increasingly friendly relationship between Moscow and the West, the terrorists seem to be busy removing impediments both to their own extermination and to a final reckoning with Iraq.
Why are our opponents so politically ungainly, so unable to comprehend the consequences of their actions? There are several possibilities, chief among them that they have been so insulated from the West for so long that they have no idea what sorts of states and cultures they're attacking, or of how relations among those states even work. It's also possible that they have imbibed their own poisonous ideology for so long that they cannot imagine that it is failing them now, preferring to see — as Saddam Hussein apparently does as well — a West characterized more by bickering and weakness than by strength and resolve. (The Chinese made this mistake when watching the UN allies disagreeing at times over the Korean War, much to their regret.)
But there's one more possible explanation: They don't care. They may not really care how far along they progress toward their alleged "goals," and in the meantime are more entranced by the images and sounds of human suffering than by how that suffering does or does not further their agenda. This would not be the first time this has happened: Hitler's irrational need, for example, to inflict as much monstrous punishment as possible on the Soviet Union helped to seal his doom, as he ignored the more sound strategic advice of his commanders while he continued to pursue his vendetta.
If this is the case, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that it means more attacks, and more carnage. Terrorism is, fundamentally, easy to do on a small scale. (Look what two losers with a rifle managed to pull off around Washington last month.) The good news is that the incoherence of terrorist strategy means that they are going to make the job of eradicating them that much easier in the long run. As long as they strike without regard to the effects of their actions beyond the spilling of blood, they will help to accomplish their own isolation, build support for the coalition, undermine the fatuous arguments of the American left, Europeans and others who think terror is a result of U.S. policy, and serve up constant reminders of the justice — and undeniable need — of the war on terror.
— Tom Nichols is chairman of the Department of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College, and the author most recently of Winning the World: The Cold War's Lessons for America’s Future. The views are those of the writer and not of the U.S. government.
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