Inflating perceptions of ‘threat’

I’ve just finished a quick scroll through strategic expert Jeffrey Record’s riveting and controversial study, “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism”. I found it meticulously written and carefully argued. It hit many nails exactly on the head.
As reported in many newspapers yesterday, Record’s conclusion is that:

The global war on terrorism as presently defined and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military and other resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security. The United States may be able to defeat, even destroy, al-Qaeda, but it cannot rid the world of terrorism, much less evil.

What’s as significant as these sobering conclusions are Record’s credentials as a professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and currently a visiting prof at the Army’s War College in Carlisle, PA– plus, the key fact that the study was published by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute.
(Actually, I’ve published with SSI myself– 1997, on Israel and Syria. Rather a level-headed bunch of folks there, I would say.)
Along the way, Record makes some very good points. He does a great job showing how the excessively heavy use of the discourse of “(anti-)terrorism” ends up obscuring vitally important distinctions, and creates traps of its own:

Perhaps inadvertently, the contemporary language on terrorism has become, as Conor Gearty puts it, “the rhetorical servant of the established order, whatever and however heinous its own activities are.” (p.7)

He is also careful to point out the distinction that the DoD’s own Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms draws between pre-emptive and preventive wars, and to label the US assault against Iraq as being clearly in the latter category. In footnote 51, where he deals with this issue, he notes that a preventive war, “traditionally has been indistinguishable from aggression.”
Among the other helpful things he does in the study, he provides a good compilation and analysis of the administration’s key statements on the whole issue of the GWOT, and a “record” of the increasing toll the Iraqi component of it has been taking on the US Army– which he describes as “near breaking point”–as well as on US government finances.
(In this latter regard, he surmises that the greatest ‘opportunity cost’ that has been foregone by the administration’s decision to launch the war last March has been a sound and sensible investment in homeland security. H’mmm… Not sure I would have wanted to give John Ashcroft that many extra dollars…)
Record argues from within the strongly “realist” tradition in US strategic thinking. From this point of view, it can be easy to criticize the war on Iraq and the attempt to re-make the Middle East — the whole world?– in the American image as hopelessly unrealistic and damaging. And he makes those arguments well.
What he doesn’t do to my satisfaction is look at the whole broader set of issues of the US relationship with the rest of the world that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.
He does, it is true, chart how the reluctance of most other nations to come forward and “help” the US run the occupatin in Iraq has left the burden on the US forces much higher than expected or desired. But nowhere does he seriously address the issue of the US confrontation with Al-Qaeda as one that cries out for deep-seated international cooperation and the restoration of truly strong US ties with the UN. That’s a real weakness in his report, which I regret…
I must note that I read his report after spending most of the day reading a great book about the Rhodesian- and South-African-initiated insurgency against the newly independent black government in Mozambique, in the 1970s and 1980s.
I couldn’t help noticing the many parallels.
Of course, for domestic consumption, the Rhodesians and the apartheid regime in SA always talked about their struggle against the blackfolks as being against the “terrs” (short for ‘terrorists’). Then as now, it was the shorthand way of ruling their opponents as being beyond the bounds of normal political-diplomatic interaction.
Beyond that, in the late 1970s the white South Africans developed a whole doctrine called the “Total Strategy”, that was designed to counter what they saw as the (Communist-backed) “Total Onslaught” against the lovely genteel, “Christian”, white way of life as those settler communities knew it…. Yes, the rhetoric there grew pretty heated.
Just like today. Just like when our leaders here in the US tell us that this is a fight against a massive force of “evil”; a fight in which there can be no negotiations; a global “war” that might indeed last for generations…
And a fight, may I add, that seems so righteous that almost anything is justified in the pursuit of it… Like rules of engagement for the forces in Iraq that apparently allow them to shoot to kill anyone whom they judge to be carrying a weapon– whether that weapon is judged to form an imminent threat to soldiers’ lives, or not….
(Well, that’s what happens when you take the rules of a “preventive war” down to street level.)
So the book I’ve been reading is by the careful Swedish researcher Anders Nilsson. It’s called (a little unfortunately, perhaps?) “Peace in our time”. It provides a great picture both of the mindset of the South Africans as they patiently backed the Renamo insurgents against independent Mozambique– and of the terrible, terrible conseuences of that insurgency. In 1988, US State Department Robert Gersony reported that “more than 100,000 Mozambicans” had been killed by Renamo.” The cover photo features one of the “lucky ones” Guressi Mlhanga. When the Renamo fighters came to her village “all” they did was cut off one of her ears. She looks gaunt and watchful, and hugs her baby close to her chest…
Ah, that was then and the US Army in Iraq is much less atrocious than the South Africans and their proxy forces, you may say… So far yes, that’s true. (Though even one incident of unjustified use of force by US troops against civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan, or elsewhere, is one too many– and we know there have been considerably more than one.)
But I think at the broader level, there’s a powerful analogy to be made. Just the apartheid regime in SA was back in the southern Africa of the 1970s and 1980s, so today the US at the global level sees itself as a righteous, embattled minority; and today’s US administration likewise judges that only unilateral acts of massive violence can stem its feelings of insecurity.
So the South Africans pursued their “Total Strategy”– which was launched against numerous societies in black Africa as well as against black nationalists at home–for some 12-13 years. (Did I mention that they, too, took lessons in tactics from the Israelis along the way?)
But where did it all get them? It got them to a total impasse, and to Frederik De Klerk’s historic, if very belated, opening of the negotiations with the ANC. Those negotiations, in the end, were the only thing that saved white South Africans from themselves. Now, they have much better, more appropriate relations with their black compatriots, with the people and governments of neighboring African countries, and with the world.
So how long will it take US society to generate a leader who will “negotiate” seriously, engage seriously, with the rest of the world? Where is our Frederik De Klerk?