With Friends Like These...
Enlisting terrorists in the coalition.

Mr. Gaffney is also president of the Center for Security Policy.
September 19, 2001 12:15 p.m.

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.