|
 resident
Bush is being encouraged by his State Department and some allies
to make an extraordinary mistake: In the interest of creating the
impression of worldwide solidarity in the war against international
terrorists and their sponsors, they want the U.S. to enlist —
incredible as it may seem — international terrorists and their
sponsors in the cause.
The latter include nations with long histories of giving terrorist
organizations material and financial support, safe havens, training
and logistic and intelligence assistance. Among the most egregious
of such states now reportedly being consulted, if not courted, by
Secretary of State Colin Powell and his minions are: Syria, Iran,
Cuba, Sudan, Pakistan, and Yasser Arafat's proto-state, the Palestinian
Authority.
The United States is also exploring the willingness of others with
long ties to terrorism, like Russia and China, to make common cause.
Moscow and Beijing apparently are saying they are willing to be
on our side, but only conditionally so. For example, the PRC is
making absurd demands, including that it wants proof that any U.S.-led
military action is warranted, consistent with international law
(as defined by their U.N. Security Council veto), will not incur
the loss of innocent civilians' lives and — worst of all —
will be accompanied by American support for China's efforts to suppress
its own "terrorists" and "separatists," (read,
Taiwan and Tibet).
At the very best, these initiatives will utterly compromise the
nature of the war Mr. Bush has correctly said we must now wage.
It is simply impossible, not to say incoherent, to pretend such
"allies" can possibly be part of the solution when they
are so manifestly part of the problem. Legitimating odious, terrorist-embracing
regimes like Iran's and Syria's as members in good standing of the
civilized world would be strategically disastrous and morally abhorrent
— a point made lucidly by former Assistant Secretary of Defense
Richard Perle in today's Daily Telegraph.
At worst, fair-weather friendships with such states will come at
an unacceptably high price: They may catastrophically compromise
counterterrorist military and intelligence operations, or simply
impede such operations sufficiently as to preclude them from being
successful.
Even if we could reliably manage the risks of such ties to our
servicemen and women and intelligence operatives — and to the
accomplishment of the dangerous missions immediately at hand in
Afghanistan and elsewhere, we will have done relatively little to
diminish international terrorism if, in the end, most of its sponsors
remain unscathed, to say nothing of their being politically and
morally rehabilitated by the United States.
An infinitely better, and far more realistic, approach would be
to make up the antiterrorist coalition of fellow democracies who
share our commitment to freedom. In particular, it should rest on
those nations who have also been the victims of terrorism at the
hands of Islamic supremacists. Tunku Varadarajan argues persuasively
in today's Wall Street Journal for relying in particular
on Turkey, India and Israel to get the job done. Such nations have
few illusions about the nature of the war violently thrust upon
us last week and are likely still to be there when the going gets
tough.
At the end of the day, the Bush administration's integrity —
as well as its stewardship of an enormously complex, difficult,
and costly war — requires that the president resist the temptation
to forge a coalition whose ranks may give the appearance of being
formidable, but whose effectiveness and cohesiveness will be fatally
undermined by the inclusion of those who are every bit as much this
nation's enemies as those we must now fight.
|
