AGAINST ALL ODDS

Peter Huessy

The US has long sought a bi-partisan consensus on the direction of our foreign policy. During the early years of the Reagan administration, the proposed deployment of the Peacekeeper and Trident missiles and the acquisition of Pershing and Ground launched Cruise Missiles to be deployed by four of our European allies were highly controversial decisions. Massive demonstrations and the rise of the nuclear freeze movement, assisted by hundreds of millions in Soviet funding, fractured American and NATO public opinion.



In response, the appointment of the 1983 Scowcroft Commission report sought to create a consensus so that the critical elements of Reagan’s strategic modernization efforts could be supported. Through a series of votes in Congress, the Peacekeeper deployments were agreed to along with the initial production and then deployments of the INF missiles in Europe. The Reagan administration coordinated these efforts with proposals to significantly reduce nuclear weapons deployments as well, particularly eliminating the entire Soviet and American deployments of medium range missiles. The proposed dual track—modernization elements of our forces while significantly reducing our nuclear stockpiles brought together those seeking restraint and weapons reductions and those seeking to negotiate only through strength. In 1987, the INF treaty was signed, eliminating the threat of nearly 2000 Soviet warheads aimed at central Europe and East Asia. Eventually, a strategic arms reduction treaty, START, would be signed, which would for the first time ever cut strategic nuclear weapons arsenals, in this case by nearly half. Consensus created success.

With the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union, many foreign and defense policy thinkers apparently believed the search for a “consensus” on such matters was no longer necessary. With the threat “ended”, the US proceeded to weaken itself dramatically. Hundreds of billions were reduced from the DOD budget. The current House Speaker, then Congresswoman Pelosi and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, called for US spy satellites to be redirected and trained on environmental problems. Our intelligence community markedly curtailed its overseas networks. We went on what some have described as a procurement holiday on defense acquisition, cutting funding between 1993-2000 some 40% below the already reduced force levels.

To be sure, dangers did in fact grow, but the terror attacks witnessed first in New York in 1993 and in Yemen with the USS Cole in late 2000 were the work of disparate individual “jihadists” we were told, with law enforcement the preferred and better remedial response. The explosion of nuclear weapons by Pakistan and India, the North Korean development of nuclear weapons, and continued programs in Iraq, Iran and Libya, were either ignored or folded into stop-gap agreements. Even the director of homeland security policy in the White House told a Congressional committee investigating terrorism and homeland security in the summer of 2000 that developing a counter terrorism policy "would be silly" because "there were too many threats".

Eight years later, Americans are seeking to come together on a defense and foreign policy they can support. Unfortunately, without a clear vision of the threats we face, we cannot agreed on solutions, and thus confusion reigns. On the most visible of all issues, the liberation of Iraq, the political parties remain a chasm apart. The template with which we view that now clouds everything else.

The proposed deployments of missile defenses in Europe, the development of a reliable, safer and less expensive nuclear warhead, the addition of the Proliferation Security Initiative to our counter-proliferation policy, the extension of the Patriot Act and FISA procedures, all are now viewed not on the basis of whether they are actually needed—which they are—but viewed suspiciously as evidence of a darker agenda. Some see the extension of law enforcement and intelligence provisions available for taking down mobsters, drug dealers and pornographers as somehow suddenly unconstitutional when applied to terror groups and their terror masters. Missile defenses to defend US forces overseas—such as the Patriot and Aegis—are deemed acceptable, but suddenly the defense our NATO allies from Iranian rockets is deemed “aggressive” and “undermining”, of all things, Russia’s security.

Some, but not all, of this suspicion comes from the suddenness with which we were thrust into what has been misnamed the global war on terror. Here Americans were celebrating the end of the Cold War, some would say the end of history, and we were rudely awakened on the morning of 9/11 with airplanes flying into our skyscrapers.

Immediately, we asked what we did to make these jihadists “hate us”. One French periodical, while claiming: "We are all Americans now”, in the same article actually blamed American foreign policy failures, specifically our oppression of Middle Eastern folks, for the attacks. When it was determined the nineteen thugs who flew the planes had apparently been trained by Al Qaeda and were largely from Saudi Arabia, the erroneous “template” was reinforced. But where then should we go and fight? After all, the hijackers apparently lived and trained in both the United States and Germany. Largely because Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama Bin Laden, lived in sanctuary in Afghanistan, most Americans saw nothing wrong with taking down the government in Kabul as retribution for 9/11.

But consensus remained elusive. The New York Times, within just days of the beginning of our liberation, complained we were already bogged down in another Vietnam. Other leftists complained we were overreacting, that war was not the answer. One Democratic Senator, Joe Biden, the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, complained America was fighting too well and was in danger of being perceived as a bully in Afganistan.

Parallel to our effort in Afghanistan was the lingering problem of Iraq. The 1991 cease-fire was being regularly sabotaged by Saddam. The no-fly zones were being violated routinely. The UN inspectors had been kicked out of the country in 1998. Key European allies, as well as China and Russia, wanted the Iraqi sanctions eliminated, as they anticipated lucrative energy deals. And without connecting Iraq to either terrorism or 9/11, the administration faced a serious problem: what to do about Saddam?

We compounded the problem with an intelligence community wedded to the Clinton-era template that state sponsors of terror were not the problem because they largely didn’t exist. Terrorism was the problem of unconnected, shadowy groups, individuals with “grievances” against the “west”, specifically the United States, and particularly with respect to Israel and the Palestinians(even though, ironically, our State Department officially classified Iraq, Iran, Sudan, North Korea, Libya, Cuba all as state sponsors of terrorism.)

And Al Qaeda was the perfect “Shadowy Group”. Most Americans had never heard of the organization. The media were so ignorant they said it was the group that defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan. Even when they talked about the Taliban, now running Afghanistan, they failed to understand it was created some five years after the Soviets withdrew. As for Al Qaeda, it had little to do with the actual fighting there and had fled to the Sudan in the early 1990s.

Thus, in the template of the drive-by media and the US intelligence community, Al Qaeda became the enemy, even though their first attack on the United States wasn’t until 1998 and that was overseas in Kenya and Tanzania. The media romanticized these terrorists; much as they had done years previously with the black pajama clad Vietcong. The “grievances” template fit into this tendency as well—if we just gave the Palestinians a state, for example, all this would go away. Or better yet, if we simply threw Israel and the Jews into the sea, terrorism would stop. Unfortunately, the 9/11 Commission report reinforced these erroneous views.

You would have thought that with the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in 2001 we would have paid attention to who had attacked the same buildings nearly a decade before. But we didn’t. After the 1993 World Trade Center there was marked speculation as to who was responsible. The FBI, among others, was convinced Saddam Hussein was responsible. The bomb maker, Yousef, wasn’t arrested until 1995, and then in Pakistan, but trial transcripts revealed he was known as “Rashid the Iraqi”. But there was a push to indict the perpetrators arrested in New York shortly after the attack, get convictions and say to the American public: we took care of that problem.

In 1995, when the Morrow building was bombed, the drive-by media quickly concluded that American “militia’s”—running around the wood’s in their camouflage—were the nation’s premier threat, inspired by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and their “anti-government” rhetoric. So much for foreign terrorists and their terror masters.

Thus it is not surprising that our liberation of Iraq—while extraordinarily successful when measured in our ability to bring down the Iraqi regime---has engendered such suspicion, anger and political heat. It is true the original strategy was flawed—remaining in base camps from which convoys would proceed rather than being imbedded in Iraqi communities where our visible presence could provide security. But even as Petraeus’s changed strategy has now worked and in a historically unique brief period of time, nearly half the country still wants the US to lose this war and withdraw, including Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee for President.

People are confused—if Iraq wasn’t responsible for 9/11 or other terror attacks on the US, why are we fighting there? Connecting Saddam to terrorism was a tough sell, especially in that the US Government, especially the Clinton administration, had tied terrorism for so long to individual jihadists and not state terror sponsors. Also absent was a lot of hard evidence—these guys didn’t exactly sign service agreements! In addition even when faced with stark evidence of terror groups’ connections to national governments, the excuses flourished as to why we shouldn’t take such evidence seriously. Thus it is while Hamas’s charter says Israel is to be destroyed, we still think they and their Hezbollah allies, and their Iranian masters, really can be talked into seeking peace with Israel or stopping their nuclear weapons program. Similarly, when an Iraqi embassy official is tied to the 9/11 hijackers in Malaysia, the ready made excuse appears that he was simply “acting alone”.

As the violence in Iraq escalated, we failed to explain its three primary sources: (1) Bathist elements in the former regime of Saddam Hussein were seeking to retake power and they were using Al Qaeda terrorists to do much of their dirty work, particularly running the torture chambers filled with blow torches, drills, saws and chains; (2) Iranian trained and funded militia’s killing Americans and Iraqi’s, especially with improvised explosive devices; and (3) Syria as a sanctuary for the remnants of Saddam’s regime, and as a ‘rat line’ of foreign jihadis flowing through Damascus on their way to Iraq.

But one looks in vain for a coherent explanation of this terror landscape from the media, and some of the war supporters' explanations were often lacking as well. Whenever there was a terror attack –say the London training bombing—the press speculation was immediately “Al Qaeda”, with scant reference to foreign intelligence services, for example, who could very well be using such attacks for their own purposes.

Whether Syria, Saddam’s remaining Bathists, or Iran, the United States has not yet been able to put together a coherent threat assessment and policy response that can secure the support of sufficient number of Americans to withstand the setbacks and problems any foreign and defense policy—however sound—has to endure. Perhaps two new reports which have begun to shed light on the terror threats we face, will help develop a consensus here in America.

For example, a recent Institute for Defense Analysis report reviewed a number of Iraqi documents and concluded Saddam Hussein was engaged in widespread support for terrorist groups, including providing funding, sanctuary and training, including elements of Al Qaeda and affiliated organizations. This report says repeatedly Saddam was aiming to attack Americans and American interests. In addition, the Jerusalem Post reports that a joint US and Israel study of the Syrian site destroyed by an Israel air strike in September 2007 provides new evidence that Saddam actually moved parts of his weapons of mass destruction program to Syria prior to the coalition invasion of 2003.

These two reports now can help us understand with better clarity the fight we are in. First, Saddam and other terror masters, as Mike Ledeen describes them, use terror groups for their own purposes and there is no political or ideological or religious divide. It is like the mob—you find the best button man for the job to carry out the hit. Second, Saddam never did give up his desire to keep his weapons of mass destruction, just as the Iraq Survey Group and experts such as David Kay warned us.

In Iraq, Sunni tribes allied with the US and other coalition forces, working with a Shia majority government, turned on Saddam’s Bathist’s thugs seeking to return to power, along with their Al Qaeda allies whom they trained to do their dirty torture work, and in roughly 18 months, defeated them. In the south, the Iranian puppet Sadr has seen his power seriously erode and that of his Iranian armed militias as the Iraqi government has done a credible job of rotting them out. Add to this the success of the Kurds of Iraq in building a stable and economically prosperous region, and you have the making of a startling success story in the Middle East. Perhaps when that emerges, Americans will find the consensus they have been looking for since the end of the Cold War. It would be better, however, to create that consensus so that a bitter defeat is not snatched from the jaws of such an important victory as that which our brave American servicemen, allied with their Iraqi compatriots-- have achieved against all odds. (Ths is an update of an earlier opinion-editorial of mine from last month)

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Peter R. Huessy is currently the president of GeoStrategic Analysis, a defense and national security consulting business. In addition to writing for OpinionEditorials.com, he is also a guest lecturer, appearing at such fine institutions as the School of Advanced International Affairs, Johns Hopkins University, The Institute of World Politics, and The National War College. Mr. Huessy has spent his career working in government organizations and committees, such as the United Nations, The Environmental Fund, Department of the Interior, and the National Defense University Foundation.

geostrategicanalysis@comcast.net