Expanding War, Contracting Meaning

Even as the Bush presidency wears down, the Global War on Terror only expands. Perhaps the word should be "metastasizes." Just this week, the US military, using SOFA-less Iraq as its launching pad, sent four helicopters with US special forces soldiers across the Syrian border in an operation in which a number of people were killed. (The Syrians claim the assault was on a farm and that "a father and his three children, the farm's guard and his wife, and a fisherman" all died; the US claims that its forces took out a key al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia operative.) After a several day delay, American officials told the Washington Post that the raid was "intended to send a warning to the Syrian government. 'You have to clean up the global threat that is in your backyard, and if you won't do that, we are left with no choice but to take these matters into our hands,' said a senior US official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the cross-border strike."

It was also an operation, according to Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker of the New York Times, that may have been meant as a warning to Iran. Perhaps the most important party being signaled, however, was the next administration. They were undoubtedly being reminded that Bush Rules should rule the future, that no sovereignty but American sovereignty is ever worth a hill of beans, and that a newly enunciated Bush Doctrine "principle" – "you can only claim sovereignty if you enforce it" – should not be abandoned. A gaggle of unnamed "senior American officials," whispering to Schmitt and Shanker, "expressed hope" that such a doctrine "would be embraced by the next president as well."

At the very least, they are ensuring that, when that next president enters the Oval Office, he will be embroiled in a wider war across an inflamed Middle East. As the ground war in Afghanistan has grown worse, for example, another border-crossing set of actions, a CIA-operated air war in the Pakistani borderlands, only increases in intensity. The Times recently offered the following figures on its front page: "at least 18 Predator [missile-armed drone] strikes since the beginning of August, some deep inside Pakistan's tribal areas, compared with 5 strikes during the first seven months of 2008."

In Afghanistan itself, an increasingly unpopular US air war, with all its "collateral damage," continues. Only last week, in a "friendly fire" incident, American planes leveled an Afghan Army checkpoint, killing nine Afghan soldiers and wounding three. (After its usual initial reluctance, the Pentagon magnanimously blamed those casualties on "a case of mistaken identity on both sides.") And southwest of Kabul, reports came in that another American air strike had killed at least 20 private security guards for a road construction project.

You can say one thing: To the bitter end the Bush administration clings to a fundamentalist belief that military power offers the royal path to all solutions. It's a conclusion that has already left an area from Somalia to Central Asia unsettled and increasingly aflame, and that seems only to draw more nations into the President's "global war" with, as Andrew Bacevich makes vividly clear, ever less of a rationale. You can listen to a podcast interview with Bacevich, whose bestselling book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism is a must for your post-election bookshelf, by clicking here. Tom

The Next President and the Global War on Terror
By Andrew J. Bacevich

A week ago, I had a long conversation with a four-star US military officer who, until his recent retirement, had played a central role in directing the global war on terror. I asked him: what exactly is the strategy that guides the Bush administration's conduct of this war? His dismaying, if not exactly surprising, answer: there is none.

President Bush will bequeath to his successor the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone. To defense contractors, lobbyists, think-tankers, ambitious military officers, the hosts of Sunday morning talk shows, and the Douglas Feith-like creatures who maneuver to become players in the ultimate power game, the Global War on Terror is a boon, an enterprise redolent with opportunity and promising to extend decades into the future.

Yet, to a considerable extent, that very enterprise has become a fiction, a gimmicky phrase employed to lend an appearance of cohesion to a panoply of activities that, in reality, are contradictory, counterproductive, or at the very least beside the point. In this sense, the global war on terror relates to terrorism precisely as the war on drugs relates to drug abuse and dependence: declaring a state of permanent "war" sustains the pretense of actually dealing with a serious problem, even as policymakers pay lip-service to the problem's actual sources. The war on drugs is a very expensive fraud. So, too, is the Global War on Terror.

Anyone intent on identifying some unifying idea that explains US actions, military and otherwise, across the Greater Middle East is in for a disappointment. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid down "Germany first" and then "unconditional surrender" as core principles. Early in the Cold War, the Truman administration devised the concept of containment, which for decades thereafter provided a conceptual framework to which policymakers adhered. Yet seven years into its Global War on Terror, the Bush administration is without a compass, wandering in the arid wilderness. To the extent that any inkling of a strategy once existed – the preposterous neoconservative vision of employing American power to "transform" the Islamic world – events have long since demolished the assumptions on which it was based.

Rather than one single war, the United States is presently engaged in several.

Ranking first in importance is the war for Bush's legacy, better known as Iraq. The President himself will never back away from his insistence that here lies the "central front" of the conflict he initiated after 9/11. Hunkered down in their bunker, Bush and his few remaining supporters would have us believe that the "surge" has, at long last, brought victory in sight and with it some prospect of redeeming this otherwise misbegotten and mismanaged endeavor. If the President can leave office spouting assurances that light is finally visible somewhere at the far end of a very long, very dark Mesopotamian tunnel, he will claim at least partial vindication. And if actual developments subsequent to January 20 don't turn out well, he can always blame the outcome on his successor.

Next comes the orphan war. This is Afghanistan, a conflict now in its eighth year with no signs of ending anytime soon. Given the attention lavished on Iraq, developments in Afghanistan have until recently attracted only intermittent notice. Lately, however, US officials have awakened to the fact that things are going poorly, both politically and militarily. Al Qaeda persists. The Taliban is reasserting itself. Expectations that NATO might ride to the rescue have proven illusory. Apart from enabling Afghanistan to reclaim its status as the world's number one producer of opium, US efforts to pacify that nation and nudge it toward modernity have produced little.

The Pentagon calls its intervention in Afghanistan Operation Enduring Freedom. The emphasis was supposed to be on the noun. Unfortunately, the adjective conveys the campaign's defining characteristic: enduring as in endless. Barring a radical redefinition of purpose, this is an enterprise which promises to continue, consuming lives and treasure, for a long, long time.

In neighboring Pakistan, meanwhile, there is the war-hidden-in-plain-sight. Reports of US military action in Pakistan have now become everyday fare. Air strikes, typically launched from missile-carrying drones, are commonplace, and US ground forces have also conducted at least one cross-border raid from inside Afghanistan. Although the White House doesn't call this a war, it is – a gradually escalating war of attrition in which we are killing both terrorists and noncombatants. Unfortunately, we are killing too few of the former to make a difference and more than enough of the latter to facilitate the recruitment of new terrorists to replace those we eliminate.

Finally – skipping past the wars-in-waiting, which are Syria and Iran – there is Condi's war. This clash, which does not directly involve US forces, may actually be the most important of all. The war that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has made her own is the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Having for years dismissed the insistence of Muslims, Arabs and non-Arabs alike, that the plight of the Palestinians constitutes a problem of paramount importance, Rice now embraces that view. With the fervor of a convert, she has vowed to broker an end to that conflict prior to leaving office in January 2009.

Given that Rice brings little – perhaps nothing – to the effort in the way of fresh ideas, her prospects of making good as a peacemaker appear slight. Yet, as with Bush and Iraq, so too with Rice and the Palestinian problem: she has a lot riding on the effort. If she flops, history will remember her as America's least effective secretary of state since Cordell Hull spent World War II being ignored, bypassed, and humiliated by Franklin Roosevelt. She will depart Foggy Bottom having accomplished nothing.

There's nothing inherently wrong in fighting simultaneously on several fronts, as long as actions on front A are compatible with those on front B, and together contribute to overall success. Unfortunately, that is not the case with the Global War on Terror. We have instead an illustration of what Winston Churchill once referred to as a pudding without a theme: a war devoid of strategic purpose.

This absence of cohesion – by now a hallmark of the Bush administration – is both a disaster and an opportunity. It is a disaster in the sense that we have, over the past seven years, expended enormous resources, while gaining precious little in return.

Bush's supporters beg to differ, of course. They credit the president with having averted a recurrence of 9/11, doubtless a commendable achievement but one primarily attributable to the fact that the United States no longer neglects airport security. To argue that, say, the invasion and occupation of Iraq have prevented terrorist attacks against the United States is the equivalent of contending that Israel's occupation of the West Bank since in 1967 has prevented terrorist attacks against the state of Israel.

Yet the existing strategic vacuum is also an opportunity. When it comes to national security at least, the agenda of the next administration all but sets itself. There is no need to waste time arguing about which issues demand priority action.

First-order questions are begging for attention. How should we gauge the threat? What are the principles that should inform our response? What forms of power are most relevant to implementing that response? Are the means at hand adequate to the task? If not, how should national priorities be adjusted to provide the means required? Given the challenges ahead, how should the government organize itself? Who – both agencies and individuals – will lead?

To each and every one of these questions, the Bush administration devised answers that turned out to be dead wrong. The next administration needs to do better. The place to begin is with the candid recognition that the Global War on Terror has effectively ceased to exist. When it comes to national security strategy, we need to start over from scratch.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His bestselling new book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books). To listen to a podcast in which he discusses issues relevant to this article, click here.