What It Takes
Our present situation resembles Korea.

By Andrew J. Bacevich, director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University
From the October 15, 2001, issue of National Review

he comparisons between the events of September 11 and the attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years ago have been as numerous as they have been apt. But to appreciate fully the challenge we face, a different historical comparison may be in order — for the situation confronting the U.S. today bears more than a passing resemblance to the situation created when Communist North Korea invaded the south in June 1950.

That attack, too, caught the United States sadly unprepared. Like this September's terror attacks, Pyongyang's aggression thrust Americans into a conflict unlike any they had known before. U.S. officials scrambled to devise a vocabulary suited to a situation without precedent. (The ridicule that President Truman endured for describing Korea as a "police action" serves as a reminder of the penalty for choosing unwisely.) In this new kind of war, it was said, traditional expectations of victory did not apply. Many Americans bridled at this notion. As the fighting dragged on, they became frustrated and impatient. They seized upon the first available national election to express their displeasure, turning out of office the party they held responsible for the war's unsatisfactory progress.

Even today, opinion remains divided on the Truman administration's conduct of the war. Among conservatives, the view expressed by Gen. MacArthur after Truman sacked him in 1951 — "there is no substitute for victory" — retains considerable allure.

But the Korean War — and this is a point MacArthur never accepted — was never just about defeating a Communist attempt to overrun the south; the conflict occurred within a larger strategic context. Unmistakable evidence of growing U.S. vulnerabilities, famously catalogued in the document NSC 68, had already begun to accumulate, but — prior to Korea — Truman had been unable to summon up the political will to reverse these trends. Once the war was joined, the president, to his enduring credit, used aggression on the periphery as an occasion to reinforce the center. He rebuilt U.S. military power, strengthened America's commitment to defending key regions (notably, Western Europe and Japan), and redoubled efforts to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent.

Similar considerations apply to how we should approach what President Bush has labeled "the first war of the twenty-first century." Administration officials have rightly proclaimed their determination to bring the attackers to justice, and the president has mortgaged his political future to the outcome of an all-out campaign to eliminate global terror. But the real test looms larger still. To define U.S. objectives too narrowly — as a war against Osama bin Laden and his ilk — is to exhibit a MacArthur-like shortsightedness. As a measure of strategic success, making an end of terrorists is necessary but not sufficient. As Truman did with Korea, we must prosecute the campaign against terror with one eye fixed on the larger game, namely shoring up and relegitimizing American global preeminence. In that sense, although the current crisis obliges Bush to deal with a danger to our security, it also presents him — as Korea did Truman — with a strategic opportunity.

To be sure, the obstacles to seizing this opportunity are formidable. Over the short term, the administration must focus on retaliation; but quick retaliatory strikes may well be in tension with efforts to make real progress toward uprooting terrorism. However great the public's eagerness to destroy our adversaries, the availability of intelligence — not martial fervor — should dictate the tempo of military operations; but, as the events of September 11 indicate, the capabilities of the U.S. government in this regard fall well short of adequate. The U.S. has plenty of guns, but we don't know where to point them or when to pull the trigger. Nor should we place much confidence in our ability to anticipate our adversary's next move. Correcting that gaping deficiency will require not only money and hard work but also time. In the near term, the best hope for compensating for the defects of our own apparatus may lie in securing assistance from states whose intelligence services are better situated to keep tabs on terror.

The cooperation of others — not only to gain intelligence, but also to secure access to bases and air space and to deny terrorists external support — is a prerequisite for the near-term success without which domestic support for the overall enterprise may fade. Pragmatic considerations, not deference to the mythical "international community," should caution us against any inclination to go it alone, and should mandate a degree of restraint in the use of force.

To the extent that the perpetrators of terror (as opposed to states that tolerate terror) remain the principal objects of attention, this war will bear scant resemblance to a traditional military campaign. Action will tend to be sporadic; it will vary greatly, from intense air strikes to commando-style raids to operations mounted by police authorities instead of soldiers; most of the operations will occur on a relatively small scale; and some may remain invisible to the public. But unlike episodes of the Clinton era, when the U.S. used force to make a show of resolve, these will have as their aim the step-by-step demolition of the enemy apparatus. Observers at home may have a difficult time discerning how the various activities add up to a coherent whole, and the Bush administration will be hard-pressed to explain how a clutch of seemingly disparate actions occurring over time signifies progress — but making that case will be essential.
Although the fight to root out terror will little resemble combat in Korea, it may well elicit comparable feelings of frustration and impatience. The administration is warning Americans to expect a long struggle, but the reliance on terms like "war" and "campaign" to drum up popular support conjures up images and builds expectations that, however inadvertently, create a potential for subsequent disappointment. The pressure on Bush to meet those expectations by showing signs of real progress is already considerable and will only increase as the weeks, months, or years go by.

Worse, the bin Laden organization and its supporters are unlikely to sit passively and allow the U.S. to conduct this campaign on its own terms. Nor, in a sense, do we want them to do so: If they resume their own campaign they will expose themselves and facilitate their own destruction. Yet as we have learned at far too great a cost, our opponents are not only without scruples, they can mount sophisticated, daring, and imaginative operations. The possibility of setbacks is real. As the U.S. experience in Mogadishu in 1993 reminds us, possessing an edge in firepower and technology is no guarantee against failure. Given an adversary with sufficient cunning or monstrousness, the level of violence could increase dramatically.

Yet if the administration succeeds in maintaining a modicum of international acquiescence or support, along with solid domestic backing, there is no reason the U.S. should not ultimately prevail. What will victory mean? Bush's more expansive claims notwithstanding, the U.S. cannot expect to eradicate evil. But it can make a recurrence of September 11 or anything like it highly unlikely. This alone will qualify as a formidable achievement; but even that will not be enough. The war against terror provides the occasion to pursue a thoroughgoing rejuvenation of national security policy.

Just as Korea focused our attention on the need to be prepared for aggression by the Red Army or its surrogates, the current crisis should increase our awareness of today's true dangers: not the prospect of invasion by mechanized armies, but regional disorders that undermine American-enforced stability. U.S. forces, still for the most part organized as they were during the Cold War, should be reconfigured accordingly. Truman built up U.S. power in a Europe exposed to Soviet intimidation; the current crisis is the moment to begin the long-overdue redistribution of U.S. forces away from a Europe fully capable of defending itself. Washington should reposition those troops to areas where U.S. interests are more likely to be at risk — e.g., Asia.

Finally, just as Korea triggered a major effort to increase U.S. nuclear-strike power, so today the Bush administration needs to expand our capabilities for long-range precision strikes using conventional weapons. These weapons have become America's trump card — a category in which the U.S. has, and must retain, undisputed superiority.

In June 1950, Kim Il Sung posed a large problem for the U.S. But he was not the problem. Stalin was, and Truman never lost sight of that fact. The problem today is not a scattering of global terrorists, but a whole raft of challenges to American economic, military, and political primacy; and now is the time to reconfigure the instruments of U.S. power to meet these challenges.