The Long and Short of It
The Washington Post
The War on Terrorism Began So Well. Then the Focus Changed. What Is the Bush Administration Aiming to Do Now?
By Robert G. Kaiser
Amid the hoopla surrounding the anniversary of Sept. 11, three questions seem apt: Why did the Bush administration veer off the course it set for itself a year ago, when President Bush promised to "rally the world" to fight a war against terrorism and then did so magnificently -- but only for a while?
Why has the administration now chosen to neglect its friends as it pursues its enemies -- or rather, the enemy most easily targeted, Saddam Hussein?
Why is the United States flirting with a new doctrine of preemptive war so radical it has no precedent in international law or American history -- and why hasn't this flirtation provoked our politicians to conduct a serious national debate, first of all in Congress?
We're still too close to these events to see them all clearly, but it's not too soon to see that the Bush administration's initial sure-footedness has given way to a stumbling clumsiness. This has been a bad summer for American diplomacy. It isn't easy for the world's leading power to alarm all of its allies in a matter of months, but this is what the United States has done, for purposes that remain mysterious.
The administration has accomplished this despite the successful beginning to the military campaign set off by the attacks on New York and Washington a year ago. Not only did President Bush rally allies on every continent to join an elaborate, efficient international coalition, but the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, used Sept. 11 to finally abandon the pretense that Russia and America could revive their Cold War rivalry. He allied his country firmly with the United States, then with the NATO alliance. Two Central Asian republics, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, former parts of the Soviet Union, welcomed U.S. bases on their territory, creating a new geopolitical reality. No government on Earth openly took the side of al Qaeda.
That first phase was triumphant. The anxiety of last fall that somehow America and its allies would be stymied in Afghanistan, as the Soviets were two decades earlier, now seems silly. Routing al Qaeda and its protector, the Taliban regime in Kabul, proved remarkably easy. Watching joyful Afghans dancing in the streets was a joyful experience.
The first phase has cost more than $30 billion and 51 American lives, but the initial mission was accomplished: no more Taliban, no more safe haven for al Qaeda. But the campaign stalled in early December, when American commanders decided not to send U.S. troops into the mountains around Tora Bora, and Osama bin Laden escaped -- at least that was the conclusion of American intelligence.
Since then the war hasn't gone very well. Key al Qaeda leaders remain at large, presumably including bin Laden, though he may be dead. With or without him, our enemy can still operate. A new U.N. study concludes that "al Qaeda is by all accounts 'fit and well' and poised to strike again at its leisure." It is sobering to consider how much we still don't know about al Qaeda. German investigators have apparently established that the Sept. 11 plot was hatched in Hamburg in a cell led by Mohammed Atta, pilot of one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center. Who was Atta's superior? Unknown. Who in al Qaeda's hierarchy helped plan the attack, or approved it? Unknown. What was bin Laden's personal role? Unknown. What did the plot's authors hope would be its result -- what are their strategic goals, if any? Unknown, though bin Laden's past comments suggest some answers, such as pushing the United States out of Saudi Arabia.
"Know your enemy," soldiers like to say, but we've still got a lot to learn about al Qaeda.
The U.S. government has repeatedly advertised its own inability to penetrate or understand al Qaeda by issuing any number of brightly colored alerts and warnings that a new attack was imminent. Those wrong predictions suggest grave deficiencies in American intelligence, a subject our public figures have generally avoided.
Multilateralism was critical to the administration's early successes in the war on terrorism, which makes it all the more surprising that the Bush administration abandoned it so quickly. Beginning with the December decision to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a succession of policy choices revived the administration's reputation for unilateralism and infuriated old allies. Why did this happen?
The answer begins with the White House itself. If we know remarkably little about al Qaeda, we should also acknowledge ignorance about many of the inner workings of the administration. This is a secretive American government. In its eight months in office before Sept. 11, it took, out of public view, a series of decisions that made allies wonder if it cared about their concerns. One of those, shortly before Sept. 11, was to scuttle the long-negotiated enforcement protocol of the international convention on biological weapons -- ironically, now a dead letter as the world gets increasingly antsy about biological weapons.
The ABM Treaty decision particularly upset the French and Germans, who considered the pact the foundation of nuclear arms control. It was followed in January by Bush's announcement in his State of the Union speech that Iran, Iraq and North Korea constituted an "axis of evil." This infuriated Europeans trying to build bridges to Iran, and South Koreans and Japanese trying to work with North Korea. The administration stuck by the term, although it never explained how these three unconnected nations constituted an axis -- "an alliance of two or more countries to coordinate their foreign and military policies," according to one dictionary definition.
But the most important decision that fed our allies' anxiety about revived American unilateralism was last June's change of course on the Middle East. For many years the United States and its allies have differed on how best to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace; the United States has long been more sympathetic to Israeli governments than many Europeans have. But there was a qualitative change during the last year. The context for it was the war on terrorism.
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