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chief challenge of waging war on terrorism is that the enemy is
so poorly defined. Just as the "war on poverty" is doomed
to fail because the poor will always be with us, a war on anti-American
terrorism also threatens never to end because America-haters will
live in the world as long as there is an America. And terrorism
is simply a name for some of the methods by which they strike against
us.
Which isn't
to say the war is not worth fighting. It does, however, create a
problem: how to define success. Osama bin Laden in a body bag is
surely one measure. If President Bush fails to nab him dead or alive,
bin Laden becomes a one-man Iranian hostage crisis for his administration.
It is probably not an overstatement to say that getting bin Laden
is now a necessary if not sufficient condition for Bush's re-election.
Imagine the
consequences were bin Laden to be killed without anyone's being
able to produce a body. Just as Hitler's corpse apparently never
was found in his Berlin bunker, bin Laden could die beneath the
rubble of some unmapped cave hit by a cruise missile. If his death
remains unconfirmed, he becomes the Elvis Presley of terrorism.
For this and
other reasons, President Bush will want to outline concrete goals
by which the war against terrorism can be judged. Those goals must
go beyond taking out bin Laden or even his network. The ambitious
goal undersecretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz has announced —
"ending" the states that foster terrorism — has the
advantage of being clear-cut; we'll know if the governments of Iraq
and Iran are toppled. But if the administration adopts this long-term
goal, it will also need incremental achievements that demonstrate
the progress of the war.
Partly this
is because it will be a long time before Wolfowitz's goal is achieved;
partly it's because of the nature of that goal. Ending terrorist
states is obviously not something one achieves all at once. Diplomatic
realities will also force us to adopt incremental goals: Some countries
will support some aspects of our objective but not others. It will
therefore be necessary to build different coalitions for each step
we take. (The coalition for taking out bin Laden, for example, will
be broader than that for taking out the Ba'athist regime in Iraq.)
Both defensive
and offensive achievements will help keep morale up. The counterintelligence
services may want to announce foiled plots with more fanfare than
they have in the past. And just as drug warriors like to show off
warehouses full of narcotics as evidence of their accomplishments,
the FBI may want to call attention to the terrorist cells it has
busted up or the suspects it has arrested at the border.
Many recent
U.S. military actions have suffered from an impoverished definition
of success: in Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, etc. By its very nature,
a war on terrorism will evade V-day celebrations. Bush will have
to create an environment in which he can point to concrete steps
he has taken to keep anything like what happened on September 11
from ever happening again.
Worth
Reading
The National Post editorializes about "the
equivocators." . . . And Stephen Bates writes
about a book on the history of the Soviet Union — and of
terrorism — that can't be published in Britain or America.
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