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 hat
is that gurgling, sucking sound?
We are not
there yet. Despite his brave words, the president has still not
given a clear mission to his troops, and without that mission there
can be no concentrated effort. He will have to decide whether we
will be satisfied with the destruction of one or more terrorist
organizations, or whether, as so many of his men have said over
the last week, we are determined to destroy the terror states themselves.
This is no
small debate. If he is content to destroy bin Laden and his ragtag
allies, we are doomed to relive September 11th. If he seizes the
moment history has delivered him, we may yet assert the preeminence
of Western power and virtue.
The forces
in play are the same as they were during the Cold War, and they
are using the same arguments and the same methods as they did in
the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took office. At that time, both Reagan
and his newly appointed secretary of state, General Alexander Haig,
had proclaimed their intention to wage war against terrorism, and
specifically against the states that sponsored it, above all the
Soviet Union. The diplomats and the intelligence mavens were dead
set against it. The diplomats wanted arms control and a negotiated
detente with the Soviets, and the spooks told anyone who would listen
that there was no evidence of a Soviet connection to international
terrorism. A best-selling book, Claire Sterling's The Terror
Network, laid out considerable evidence of the Kremlin's terrorist
activities, and the CIA set out to discredit it, just as they did
everything possible to discredit those who had argued, just a couple
of years earlier, that the Ayatollah Khomeini was a Muslim fanatic
who hated everything Western.
The intelligence
analysts were wrong about Khomeini and wrong about the Soviet role
in terrorism, yet they are still at their game. Now they are insisting
that there is no evidence of state involvement in the activities
of Osama bin Laden, and they have apparently convinced the vice
president, who firmly told the nation on Sunday that we had no reason
to believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the bin Laden attacks
against us. In private conversations, analysts are suggesting that
anyone who believes that Iraq, or any of the other terror states,
are involved in the terror assault, are conspiracy nuts.
The diplomats
are moving in tandem, warning that the entire Arab world will rise
against us if we take on one of the terror states. They speak darkly
about "losing the Arab streets" (as if they were ever
ours to lose) and threatening the stability of our moderate Arab
allies, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. And so, inch-by-inch, they
are trying to roll back the president's proclamation that we will
undertake a long and difficult war to rid the world of terror and
those who support it. They have elevated bin Laden to the status
of a demigod, ascribing to him powers that no terrorist has ever
had before, and they are talking about an entirely new kind of terror
organization, unprecedented in its outreach and sophistication,
its diabolical planning abilities, and its technological savvy.
There is, indeed,
something new about terrorism these days, but it is not what the
government's experts think it is. The new thing is the ability to
maintain a sleeper network of kamikazes. Hitherto, the suicide terrorists
we knew about were indoctrinated, sometimes with the use of drugs,
and kept in a state of wild passion until they performed their missions.
The men who killed so many of us on September 11th seemed to live
normal lives in the United States — notably irreligious lives,
by the way, if the reports about their love for alcohol and carousing
are true — until the orders arrived. But even this is not entirely
new; indeed, it was best described in The Manchurian Candidate,
the famous movie of the 1950s starring Frank Sinatra about a brainwashed
American soldier programmed by the North Koreans to commit murder
when a coded message was given to him.
But the Manchurian
candidate was run by a foreign government, and we have long known
about sleeper networks of Arab terrorists within the United States,
which were also known to be in touch with Soviet intelligence officers
in North Africa. Why should we believe that bin Laden is any different
from the others? Indeed, what we know for sure about bin Laden does
not track with this picture. We have many stories about his organization
that show its incompetence, its internal divisions, its inability
even to maintain a small airplane. The "analysis" simply
doesn't track with the known facts.
Yet it serves
a purpose: It deflects our attention from the real problem, from
the real threat. For if you believe bin Laden is the whole story,
you will not persevere against Iraq, Iran, and the others. In fact,
you might even work with these terror regimes to catch bin Laden,
and don't think for a minute that Saddam and the Ayatollahs in Tehran
wouldn't be delighted to deliver his head to us. Saddam is so concerned
at this moment that he appears to have scattered his armed forces
all over Iraq, so that they cannot be attacked in one or two locations.
The president
should not be gulled by love letters from terrorist despots, and
he should not put much stock in the claims of our intelligence community,
the very same crowd that failed to give us timely warning before
September 11th. It is fine and dandy to have a great international
coalition to fight terror, but bringing Syria and Iran into the
coalition is like inviting Communist Bulgaria and Poland to join
NATO during the Cold War.
We are now
paying a terrible price for failing to pursue our legitimate interests
in the past decade. Some are now saying that it is all because of
our support for Israel, but those who say it do not understand either
America or the world at large. Our support for Israel is not a tactical
maneuver, subject to regular reconsideration. We support free democracies,
and since Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, our support
is automatic and obligatory. It is, indeed, the only Middle East
country that truly matters to us. If you want to find the foreign-policy
blunders that helped us reach the current crisis, look to our failure
to destroy the evil regime of Saddam Hussein when we had him at
our mercy; look to our failure to support the opposition to Saddam,
even though we had promised it; look to our failure to respond forcefully
enough to terrorism over the course of the past thirty years.
There is now
a great battle for the soul of the president, between those who
are willing to undertake a mission worthy of a superpower, and those
who insist on the unworthy and ultimately ineffective steps that
would limit us to a manhunt. It is a battle between those who talk
of "proportional response," and those who know that when
a superpower is attacked, the response must be utterly devastating,
so that our enemies are not tempted to try it again.
It is altogether
appropriate that George W. Bush be faced with this awesome decision,
since his father failed his historic test a decade ago. Now the
son can make amends.
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