On Thursday, Sept. 13, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz launched the most lethal rhetorical missile of our still-fledgling war. We’d already been informed, by both the president and the secretary of state, that our battle against terrorism will not end with the destruction of Osama bin Laden, that we mean to engage, in Colin Powell’s words, in “a global assault against terrorism in general.” Rousing words, to be sure, but pointing nowhere in particular, given the lack of any precedent with which to define just what such a global assault might entail.
Enter Wolfowitz, apparently the administration’s designated clarifier: “It’s not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism.”
The notion of “ending states” is sufficiently ambitious, not to say radical, to have formed the core of the lead headline in the New York Times of the next day, the same day on which the Congress authorized up to $40 billion for the anti-terrorism effort. Yet the citizen could legitimately cling to his or her confusion: Just what does it mean, what can it mean, to “end states”? Does it means that we might, for example, invade Afghanistan, set up a puppet government there to maintain control until such time as all actual or potential pro-terrorists have been identified and had their liberties appropriately restricted? Do we really want to take on responsibility for the functioning of civilian life in Afghanistan?
Does it mean only terrorism directed against the United States? How will the other members of the coalition we now seek to construct feel about that? What about places like Algeria, where the ongoing problem of terrorism is truly serious? Or do we mean only cross-border terrorism? Does it mean defining the behavior of the Sudanese government in the ongoing civil war in that country as “terrorism,” or shall the term be reserved for the regime’s opponents?
There are problems of definition, problems of logistics and problems of good sense. Enter Wolfowitz: Within a day, with nary a trace of embarrassment in his voice, he allowed as how he’d misspoken: “I meant to say ending state-supported terrorism.”
Given the wildness of his pre-corrected promise to “end states who sponsor terrorism,” one might have supposed he and his spokespeople would have been all over the media denying, correcting, clarifying: “No, not end states who sponsor terrorism, end state-supported terrorism. Relax, we are not crazy.” But the correction wassufficiently modest in presentation to suggest that it was merely a throw-away sop to the few people not yet caught up in the cowboy hysteria of the moment. Notwithstanding the “clarification,” that is, administration policy remains open-ended, hence also cryptic. The “clarification” enables us to move the policy from the column entitled “insane” to the column entitled “imprudent.”
Perhaps President Bush, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the others have some idea of how one goes about conducting a global assault against terrorism in general. Perhaps they even know how to do that without begetting still more terrorism. If so, bravo for them, and sincere apologies from me. The world would be a better place without terrorists and terrorism. But we, the citizens, may be forgiven our skepticism that the worthy goal is accompanied by a plausible strategy. It is exceedingly difficult to imagine America and/or NATO and/or any other broader coalition introducing ground forces into Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, perhaps even Pakistan. And it is still more difficult to imagine how, in the absence of such intrusions, we can mount a successful assault against “terrorism in general,” the kind of assault that will not merely hamper terrorism but, in Mr. Bush’s words, “whip” it.
All this is not to say that we shouldn’t fight a war against terrorism. It is merely to say that it is doubtful in the extreme that we know how to fight such a war or that victory in such a war, in any conventional meaning of the word, is available to us.
The current rush to retaliate is perfectly understandable, and perfectly foolish. Without any real sense of what effective retaliation is available to us, we may conclude that the gung-ho atmosphere in the Bush administration and in Congress are born in part out of frustration — i.e., “Don’t just stand there, do something”; in part out of old-fashioned American derring-do; and in part out of a cold calculation of the political benefits of a gung-ho policy. If Bush gets lucky — and, given his biography so far, who would dare say he does not lead a charmed life? — this new defining agenda of his presidency may well guarantee him a second term.
Yet there’s at least as great a chance that his effort will defeat the hopes he now raises rather than the terrorism he and all of us oppose. His promises are very, very large. Our prospects are very, very modest. The gap between the two is more likely to be filled by spin than by substance. And along the way, there is the likelihood of significant collateral damage: among others, intrusions on civil liberties, especially of Arab-Americans, and an excess of bipartisanship, meaning an atrophy of thoughtful opposition to such things as anti-missile defense, as well as an unhealthy inhibition of healthy debate.
Terrorism, for all its dangers, turns out not to be the only thing we need be on guard against.