What War Means
by Dimitri
K. Simes
From the Thanksgiving 2001 Special Issue of The National Interest
(PDF version 33k)
The tragic terrorist attacks of September 11 are likely to have a profound impact on American policy at home and abroad, not to mention on the American way of life. However, it is less than certain that September 11 will truly become a transformational event with enduring consequences. Much depends on subsequent developments, such as possible new terrorist attacks against the United States and the duration and relative success of the war on terrorism. Nevertheless, to ensure that September 11 has the appropriate impact on America, we have to be honest with ourselves in assessing what went wrong. The purpose of such honesty is not to justify the unjustifiable, to develop sympathy for our enemies, or to blame America for its own victimization. On the contrary, our goal in evaluating the past must be to ensure that it is we who will shape the future.
A process of intense introspection is clearly in order, and several questions must be answered. At the broadest level, how could the United States have fallen so far, so quickly? In the space of one late summer morning, Americans were forced to move from celebrating U.S. global political, military and economic pre-eminence and the advancing triumph of democracy worldwide, to confronting a shocking vulnerability. More narrowly, how could 19 terrorists have penetrated four layers of defenses designed to protect U.S. citizens—by receiving visas, organizing a substantial conspiracy undetected from within America, carrying crude but deadly weapons through airport security, and seizing control of four huge passenger jets? And what could motivate people to sacrifice their lives to kill Americans? How could they have been unaffected by living among us? How could they have failed to develop any empathy for their future victims, to say nothing of some level of identification with the American people?
Rigorous, honest self-examination is not easy. Yet we must be honest with ourselves in understanding the complexities behind the attacks. It is emotionally satisfying to reduce the problem to one of "right vs. wrong", as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has done. It is politically appealing to suggest that September 11 represented an attack on the innocent citizens of eighty nations rather than an attack on America—that the tragedy merely happened to take place on American soil—as President Bush has said. But these answers are intellectually inadequate. While it is true that Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network hate modern Western civilization, there is little doubt that they view America as the main obstacle to their objectives and therefore as their principal target. Bin Laden and his network were certainly prepared to inflict "collateral damage" on eighty countries, but the goal of the operation was to strike at the United States. Nineteen terrorists were willing to commit suicide to fulfill that mission. And the organization behind them was willing to risk devastating retaliation in waging a war against the United States that it had declared publicly several years ago.
It well serves American purposes for the Bush Administration to frame the events of September 11 as an attack on eighty rather than an attack on one at a time when Washington is attempting to assemble a broad international coalition. But useful diplomatic rhetoric and patriotic flag-waving must not blind us to reality.
Who We Are, What We Do
The big, the powerful and the wealthy are always resented to some extent, and America’s essential defense of its interests—including support for Israel and for moderate Arab states—could not but cause some hostility. But it is also clear that the propensity of the first truly post-Cold War U.S. administration for global social work—whether through diplomatic pressure, sanctions or occasional cruise missile attacks—contributed to a worldwide backlash. The Clinton Administration explained growing anti-Americanism with a new theory: some hidebound foreigners resent America regardless of what it does, because it is the most powerful nation committed to liberal democracy and free markets. This self-serving approach to the problem of anti-Americanism allowed the administration to portray its efforts at nation-building and its intervention in other states’ internal political disputes as relatively cost-free; the United States would have to shoulder only the modest expenses of the operations themselves, not the burdens of their larger consequences.
Though this theory was eventually elevated to the status of conventional wisdom among much of the country’s foreign policy elite, it is demonstrably false. The entire history of terrorism contradicts the notion that abstract issues of political philosophy are, by themselves, sufficient to trigger violent attacks. This has certainly not been the case in Israel, where there is a clear connection between terrorism and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nor has it been the case with respect to terrorist attacks in India, Sri Lanka, Russia, Spain or the United Kingdom, where particular ethnic or religious groups seek independence or even union with a neighboring country. Terrorism in Colombia and the Philippines has been a product of rebel groups with very specific agendas, as has terrorism by Islamist extremists in Algeria and Uzbekistan. The foiled plot to hijack a French airliner and use it to destroy the Eiffel Tower was connected to France’s relationship with the Algerian government and the latter’s war on domestic Islamist extremists. America’s own experience with Middle East terrorism in the 1980s was triggered by Palestinian anger at the United States for its strong support of Israel and similar anger among Lebanese Shi‘a and their Iranian and Syrian sponsors over the U.S. role in Lebanon’s civil war.
Why should Al-Qaeda be any different? Al-Qaeda may have originated in the Wahhabi branch of radical Islam—which rejects Western civilization—but it has not attacked targets in the Western world at random. Nor has it concentrated its efforts against the most secular and permissive Western nations, which are in Europe, not North America.
On the contrary, bin Laden’s terrorist network has been obsessively focused on the United States. The reason is that specific U.S. policies are unacceptable to Al-Qaeda and threaten its perceived core interests and beliefs. First, bin Laden is clearly outraged at the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, the site of Islam’s most holy sites. Second, and in practical terms perhaps most important, he deeply resents American support for moderate Arab regimes, some of which, such as Egypt and Jordan, have cracked down on fellow radical Islamists. Finally, bin Laden opposes America’s role in the Arab-Israeli dispute. While this final issue may be low on his list of priorities, and appears to be a relatively recent addition to the list, there is no question that television images of wounded and dead Palestinians enrage radical Muslims and inspire many to fight the United States.
This is not to say that the United States has been wrong to protect Kuwait, to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, to support regional leaders such as Egypt’s Anwar el-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, or to support Israel, which is both the only true democracy in the region and a key ally. But we should not pretend that there are no consequences to the determined pursuit of U.S. national interests. The notion that particular U.S. policies and actions could have painful consequences may contradict America’s post-Cold War triumphalism, but no law of history says that good deeds go unpunished.
As the American public lost interest in international affairs in the 1990s, narrow elites and special interest groups won increasing influence over U.S. foreign policy decision-making. Many such groups seemed to argue that commendable objectives—at least as they saw those objectives—could be pursued at almost no cost because of their inherent virtue. Meanwhile, those who called for a more realistic definition of American national interests, for the establishment of priorities, or for difficult choices among conflicting goals, were accused of indifference to American values by those parading their purportedly superior morality. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich once described himself as a "cheap hawk" to signify that he was a hawk who nevertheless wanted to spend less on defense. By the mid-1990s, "cheap moralists" joined the "cheap hawks" as principal architects of U.S. foreign policy.
The origin and shocking success of the September 11 attacks derive precisely from this fundamental contradiction between American policy, on one hand, and our national self-image on the other. The combination of what is perceived as hegemonic conduct abroad with a remarkable laxity in defending the U.S. homeland (with the notable but insufficient exception of predominant U.S. military power) was a prescription for disaster. Of course, in the absence of intelligence information, no one could have predicted a terrorist use of commercial jets as weapons of mass destruction with such devastating success. But anyone who watched the United States dance on a global minefield during the Clinton Administration could have seen that an explosion was in store.
The Clinton Legacy
One feckless military intervention followed another in the Clinton years. Yet U.S. military power was used not against those who threatened America or attacked its allies; instead, it was deployed against those whose practices we found disagreeable. In Somalia, for example, the Clinton team escalated America’s involvement from protecting United Nations humanitarian aid to the destruction of a particular warlord and an effort at nation-building. The result was the loss of American lives and a humiliating withdrawal. In Haiti, the United States invaded an island ruled by a corrupt and repressive but basically friendly junta in order to restore power to a corrupt and repressive left-wing priest. That priest, by the way, re-established diplomatic ties with Cuba immediately before leaving office, as if to tell Washington what he really thought of its help.
In Bosnia, the United States eventually facilitated NATO intervention to protect the region’s Muslims. The Muslims could have been protected more effectively, however, if the administration had sought the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina—which had no history as an independent state—into three ethnically homogeneous entities. This solution was clearly preferred by the Serbs and Croats, the majority of the republic’s population, and resisted only by the Muslims, who, being a plurality of the population, accordingly expected to dominate the government of any unitary state. Despite this, the Clinton Administration rejected the Vance-Owen plan and all other proposals that could have ended the civil war quickly and saved lives. The administration justified its position by arguing that it did not want to "reward Serbian aggression." Nevertheless, it never adequately explained why it was permissible for Bosnia to withdraw from Yugoslavia, but impermissible for the Respublika Srpska to secede from Bosnia.
In the case of Kosovo, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—the administration’s principal champion of promiscuous nation-building—allowed the Kosovo Liberation Army (kla), earlier described as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, to manipulate the United States into supporting an Albanian rebellion. In Paris, the Clinton Administration issued an unrealistic ultimatum to Slobodan Milosevic, demanding that NATO troops be granted free passage and portage rights in Serbia proper, which guaranteed a NATO-Serbia conflict. Widespread killings of Albanian civilians did take place, but only after the newly energized KLA stepped up its activities, provoking a predictably brutal response that led NATO to announce plans to attack Serbia.
In addition to angering those on the receiving end of its cruise-missile diplomacy, the Clinton Administration successfully alienated a number of important countries, including China and Russia, in the process. The Clinton team’s response to its inadvertent attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was cavalier in this context. Washington seemed unable to understand why the Chinese were not satisfied with the explanation that the strike was accidental. At the same time, the U.S. media portrayed the widespread indignation among Chinese students as totally unprovoked. The best way to assess the Chinese reaction to this incident may be to imagine the U.S. response had China unintentionally bombed the American embassy in a relatively friendly country—Thailand, for example—during a bombing campaign that proceeded over U.S. objections and without approval from the United Nations Security Council. In such a context, would we view such an act as a simple accident?
Interestingly, in the one instance during its tenure in which genocide was unquestionably taking place, in Rwanda, the Clinton Administration did worse than nothing, for it retarded the efforts of others to extend assistance. Rwanda was too far away, was not a feature of nightly news reports, and lacked a domestic constituency in the United States.
Sanctions of various types also became a weapon of choice in U.S. foreign policy during the Clinton Administration, though the Republican-controlled Congress—eager to make statements about foreign policy, but limited in its ability to shape it—also shares responsibility for this development. Between 1993 and 1998 alone, the United States imposed sanctions 61 times—out of a total of 125 cases since World War I. Sanctions eventually targeted 75 countries and some 42 percent of the world’s population for reasons ranging from support for terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or other sensitive technologies, to concerns over human rights and the environment and even the mislabeling of tuna. While unilateral U.S. sanctions were described by one study as effective in only 13 percent of cases, they were hugely successful in generating animosity toward the United States on the part of governments and peoples around the world.
While not everyone who resents the United States is able and willing to resort to terrorism against America, the Clinton Administration acted as if the targets of its diplomacy of force had no means of retaliation. However, as history has shown, terrorism is the retaliatory weapon of choice among the weak. Yet the Clintonites never made the struggle against terrorism a real foreign policy priority—even after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was quickly determined to have had the same ultimate objective as the subsequent successful attack on the Twin Towers. The Clinton Administration did not make tolerance of and financial support for Wahhabi extremists a focal point in its discussions with Saudi Arabia or Egypt. With respect to Pakistan, the United States concentrated its efforts on trying to dissuade Islamabad from developing nuclear weapons—something virtually inevitable after its rival India had already done so. Instead, it should have been encouraging Pakistan to force Afghanistan’s Taliban regime to end its support for bin Laden, a goal that was more important even at that time, and certainly more achievable. The introduction of sanctions against Pakistan in 1998 further limited Washington’s ability to persuade Islamabad to put pressure on its Afghan clients.
During the 1990s, Moscow could also have been of help in dealing with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Russian troops were guarding the Tajik-Afghan border and the Kremlin saw the Taliban as a threat to the stability of Central Asia as a whole. The Russian government also claimed that a connection existed between bin Laden and at least some groups of Chechen rebels, and called for cooperation with the United States against Islamic extremism. All of this was contemptuously dismissed by the Clinton Administration, which was convinced that Moscow merely sought to persuade the United States to turn a blind eye to Russian brutality in Chechnya and its attempts to regain influence in the Caspian region. In 1999 and 2000, the United States went so far as to discourage Uzbek President Islam Karimov from working with Russia to help the Northern Alliance.
The Clinton Administration’s response to terrorist acts directed against others was deplorable both in its lack of understanding of terrorism as a strategy and its lack of sympathy for victimized societies. Despite an undeniable terrorist past, Yasir Arafat became a regular visitor to the White House, even as his Palestinian Authority systematically disregarded its commitments under the Oslo Accords. Similarly, Gerry Adams, leader of the Sinn Fein political wing of the murderous Irish Republican Army, was also received several times by President Clinton and treated as if his terrorist affiliations were no more than a minor blemish.
In the case of Chechnya, not only the Clinton Administration, but also much of the Congress and the American political establishment more broadly, had no sympathy whatsoever for Russia’s exposure to terrorism, even after bombings that leveled apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities. There were mitigating conditions: several Russian liberals and media commentators argued that the explosions were orchestrated by the Russian security services to justify the new intervention in Chechnya, and to create a climate in which Boris Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor—former KGB Lt. Colonel Vladimir Putin—would be more likely to be elected president. Strange circumstances surrounding the discovery of what seemed to be explosives in a Ryazan apartment complex only added to the uncertainty.
Yet Chechnya was for all practical purposes an independent country from 1996 to 1999. During that period, it became a lawless region ruled by warlords where the kidnapping and murder of civilians—including foreign aid workers—were common. What passed for a legal system was based on Taliban-style sharia courts. In 1999, Chechen rebels invaded the Russian region of Dagestan and occupied several villages. The group, which included Arab and Afghan volunteers, was led by the Jordanian "field commander" Ibn-ul Khattab, who did not hide his connections to Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.
Not only the Russian government, but also liberal politicians critical of the Chechnya operation—such as Yabloko leader Grigorii Yavlinskii—asked the United States to share intelligence on financial support to the Chechens and to apply pressure to Georgia to prevent the rebels from finding sanctuary across the mountainous border between Chechnya and Georgia. The United States refused these Russian pleas; serious cooperation against terrorism and Osama bin Laden was never given a chance.
Even if the United States had conducted a prudent foreign policy, acting assertively only on matters truly important to America’s fundamental interests and values, America’s role as the sole superpower would surely have generated some opposition. But the Clinton Administration’s arrogant intrusiveness in other countries’ affairs could not but strengthen the backlash while simultaneously weakening America’s ability to manage it. Despite this, and despite the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the August 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden harbor in October 2000, the administration continued to act as if the United States led a harmonious global village full of people eager to accept American guidance. To the extent that serious threats were recognized, the United States seemed to assume that they could be addressed by its superior military power. To genuine homeland security it threw some money and gave much lip service. It was not enough.
Since September 11, there has been much justifiable criticism of U.S. domestic security practices—and, clearly, it goes well beyond the frailties of the Clinton Administration. It has been known for some time that visas are issued at American consulates by the most junior, and often least promising, Foreign Service officers. Moreover, because consular officers are overworked, foreign nationals employed by U.S. embassies in their home countries conduct most interviews of visa seekers. Within America, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol have been widely viewed as over-stretched and underfunded for many years.
Airport and airline security was also known to be weak. Numerous commission reports, spot inspections, and television exposés pointed out long before September 11 that airport security was easily breached, that underpaid and poorly trained security screeners are frequently not American citizens, and that many screeners do not even have proper documentation to work in the United States. Particularly in the wake of the foiled plot to crash an airliner into the Eiffel Tower, it should have been evident that airlines needed better on-board security procedures, stronger cockpit doors and more air marshals to complicate the plans of potential hijackers.
At the broadest level, too, coordination and information sharing among U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies was also known to be insufficient. Many reviews of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and other studies had concluded as much, and offered practicable recommendations for improvement.
Ultimately, most of these individual problems can be traced to one fundamental source: lax administration of security efforts, abetted by societal attitudes that have downplayed its importance. Everyone knew that America’s borders were porous. But few were willing to call for heightened scrutiny of those entering the United States, either as immigrants or visitors, in the prevailing climate of political correctness and the undifferentiated celebration of ethnic diversity. None of these problems could be properly addressed in a context where any important ethnic constituency could complain that its members had been unfairly singled out. Criticism of profiling by police and other security agencies became so intense that it became impossible for U.S. government agencies to approach particular groups of visitors or immigrants with special vigilance. Such constraints remained essentially unchanged even after investigations into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing made clear that Islamic extremists driven out of the Middle East had begun to seek asylum in the United States in fairly large numbers. Our permissiveness allowed some of them to use our territory to conspire not only against America’s moderate friends in the Middle East but against the United States itself.
Win the War
At this fateful juncture, evaluating our past shortcomings should help us to take purposeful action, some immediately, some in due course. The first order of business now, however, is to win the war. Taking into account that our enemies have demonstrated both brutality and effectiveness—and that they are not a conventional power with which compromise might be possible if we desired it—they must be destroyed. Further, time is of the essence. While there are obviously advantages to proceeding carefully, to building a coalition, and to avoiding collateral damage, these considerations must be measured against the overriding need to eliminate as quickly as possible a foe that has demonstrated the capability and the willingness to kill thousands of Americans.
Similarly, these considerations must also be weighed against the danger of appearing irresolute to not only our foes, but also our friends. There is little doubt that displays of strength will have a greater impact on our enemy—and in much of the Arab world, where sympathy for America is limited and unlikely to increase—than displays of humanity. To some extent, the same is also true of friendly governments in the region, to whom the sense that America will follow through and do what is necessary to destroy its enemies is at least as important as the visibility of our efforts to protect the innocent.
There are, of course, both moral and practical reasons for the United States to make efforts to limit civilian casualties. But we should not make the mistake of guaranteeing to our enemies that we will pursue our objectives in a strictly calibrated fashion. The United States should not be motivated by lust for revenge, but no less should we forget what has been done to us in striving to ensure that it can never happen again. A visit to Ground Zero in New York makes clear what is at stake.
The first principle of the American response to September 11 must be to recognize that we are at war, and to adopt a war-fighting mentality. The scale of the loss of life and destruction surely justifies this, as does the knowledge that our opponents declared "holy war" on the United States years ago. Clearly, adopting a war-fighting mentality bears several implications. Unlike criminal investigations, for example, war requires no evidence that a particular bullet from a particular gun killed a particular individual. It is difficult not to wonder whether the United States might now be better off if it had struck immediately at Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and Taliban headquarters and residences before they were evacuated.
Another element of a war-fighting mentality is the fact that in war, victory is the paramount objective. This applies both to conventional military attacks and to whatever response the United States may take if it is determined that the wave of anthrax-laden letters directed at prominent individuals and institutions originated abroad. In the latter case, it has always been the U.S. position that we would rule out nothing, including nuclear weapons, in responding to an attack on America with chemical or biological agents. While nuclear weapons should obviously be used as weapons of last resort, and only against those whom we are convinced are our enemies, we should be ready to deploy them if we reach an informed conclusion that a state has sponsored chemical or biological attacks against the United States, or provided chemical or biological weapons to terrorists who have done so. Governments facilitating such attacks should not be allowed to hide behind their civilian populations any more than Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were allowed to do so. While the United States should strive to limit innocent deaths to the extent possible, our war-fighting strategy must be defined primarily by the need to prevail.
There is, however, another side to the coin of being prepared to be severe, and even ruthless, in dealing with adversaries. The United States also needs to be flexible, creative and realistic in establishing its priorities and addressing seriously the unpleasant but inevitable trade-offs that arise among conflicting policy objectives. In a certain sense, it is fortunate the United States was in this instance attacked for doing important things, such as protecting Kuwait and Israel, rather than as a result of one or another of the Clinton Administration’s capricious military escapades. September 11 should be a powerful reminder to policymakers to avoid exposing Americans to another major terrorist attack on account of secondary or tertiary goals.
Similarly, given the priority of the present campaign against international terrorism, it would be unwise to be too particular about the motives of those ready to support America in this struggle. We ourselves have not been above hypocrisy in dealing with terrorism; Presidents Clinton and Bush each coached Israel not to "overreact" to terrorism and to make deals with the Palestinian Authority, which has harbored the terrorists attacking Israel. Though some such hypocrisy may be necessary if we are to include moderate Arab states in a U.S. coalition against Islamic extremism, we should at a minimum avoid sounding too pure in passing judgment on the motives and priorities of others.
If anything, the fact that leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf have been much more willing to support the United States than their respective populations should call into question another pillar of conventional wisdom: that democracies are invariably America’s best friends. Mature and stable Western democracies that share our values are surely among those closest to the United States. But new and unstable democracies with different historical traditions, virtually no middle class and an underdeveloped or maimed civil society can easily be subverted or captured by nationalists or extremists with dangerous consequences for themselves and others.
Russia is a case in point. It goes without saying that President Putin has self-serving motives in supporting the U.S. campaign against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, including encouraging a more understanding U.S. attitude toward Russian policy aims in Chechnya. Yet, at no small political risk to himself, Mr. Putin seems to have made a strategic decision to join the war on terrorism as America’s junior partner.1 It is in America’s interest to demonstrate to President Putin and to the Russian people that helping the United States is the right choice. This does not mean assisting Russian forces in Chechnya or abandoning the commitment to missile defense. What is required is a new understanding of Russia’s concerns and priorities—an understanding not so different from that which we are typically prepared to offer to other important states, not least, say, Saudi Arabia. Those who demand immediate improvements in Russian human rights practices should ask themselves why they have not made the same demands of Turkey, which has often dealt harshly with its Kurdish minority and has suppressed some religious freedoms. Encouraging another state to act as a friend requires, at a minimum, not treating it as an adversary.
It has yet to be established whether the outcome of the war inflicted upon us will be a tougher and stricter America, more realistic, more focused and more prepared to put an end to its security permissiveness at home and its exhibitionist posturing abroad. America has reached a new moment of truth. While finding terrorist cells may be difficult, no nation that harbors them is outside America’s reach now that the end of the Cold War has deprived them of a superpower protector. Responding selectively but resolutely to September 11 will likely allow us to destroy our enemies, enhance our global leadership and preserve the fundamentals of our way of life. America should not settle for less.
Dimitri K. Simes is president of The Nixon Center and associate publisher of The National Interest.
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1 Russian public opinion polls show that only ten percent of respondents express full support for U.S. operations in Afghanistan, while some 70 percent oppose Russian cooperation in providing America with access to bases in Tajikistan. This poll was conducted on October 10.
