Wednesday, April 14, 2004

The power of a word

Commentary by ADAM TANOUS

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Drawing analogies between Iraq and Vietnam makes for punchy, dramatic sound bites for politicians. The comparison, however, seems a little flimsy.

Granted Vietnam was a messy, unpopular war against insurgents lurking in the jungles. Iraq is becoming a messy, less popular war against insurgents lurking in a dusty urban environment. But Vietnam was a pawn in a geopolitical game of chess, one that played out in numerous other situations during the Cold War.

What’s more, the situation in Iraq started out more complicated than the situation in Vietnam and is growing ever more so as the days go by.

From the beginning, the war in Iraq was a bit of a bastard child. Not quite a run-of-the-mill war with a sovereign state, not quite a preemptive attack on terrorists, the invasion was a conflation of the two. And in this composite beast we’ve created lies all of the uneasiness with this war—both within the United States and abroad.

When President Bush declared war on terrorism, it was dramatic, while at the same time a little fuzzy on meaning.

Immediately after 9/11, the words terrorism and terrorist took on such profound meaning they became almost unutterable. Anyone labeled a terrorist was considered so far down on the human chain that even the most basic of human considerations like fundamental legal rights and prisoner of war rights were denied them.

Defining a terrorist or terrorism is not as easy as it seems. And because of that difficulty, the words get thrown around all the time now. Or to put it another way, terrorism and terrorist have come to have very elastic meanings. All sorts of people have been called terrorists: everyone from teachers’ unions, to Ariel Sharon, to Yassir Arafat, to President Bush. It is an explosive slippery slope we’re on.

So turning back to Iraq. One of the reasons the war has become so contentious is that its premise was a bit fuzzy itself. There were a number of instances before the war when President Bush, Vice President Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice suggested that Saddam Hussein was a terrorist. There was a conscious effort to link Saddam to the terrorism of Al Qaeda.

It doesn’t seem that big of a sin—even if not true—seeing as Saddam was an oppressive and brutal dictator. The problem remains, however, that regardless of how bad a man he was, Saddam was still the leader of a sovereign nation. And that simple fact is at the root of our problems now.

The attacks of Sept. 11 were carried out, as everyone knows, by loosely connected people, with no official state to call home. There were, and are, just an amorphous band of people committed to violence and the creation of chaos wherever they see fit. Last Thursday during the 9/11 Commission’s hearings, Rice stated that soon after the attacks the administration decided that a war against terrorism had to be fought offensively, not defensively. In other words, we couldn’t just respond to attacks. We had to take the war to them first—sniff them out and kill them before they had a chance to wreak any havoc. She may be right about that as it applies to stateless, roving terrorists. Sophisticated intelligence and preemptive attacks may be the only solution, because, being stateless, terrorists have no traditional vulnerability vis-à-vis the international community.

A problem arises, however, when we take that same approach to real nations. When we loosely apply the term terrorist to Saddam and then invaded his nation on that basis, other nations, did, and still do, take pause. Saddam’s not particularly unique. There have been and still are dozens of despots running countries Kim Jong II in North Korea, Charles Taylor in Liberia, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Idi Amin, Pol Pot—the list goes on.

Blurring the definition of terrorist leads to a blurring of the standards for using force. We could very easily, and justifiably by this standard, preemptively invade a number of nations. The offensive policy Ms. Rice speaks of works especially well if we’re the ones being preemptive, and we’re deciding who is a terrorist and who isn’t. What if other nations decide to adopt our preemptive policy? Will their definition of a terrorist state match ours? Should they decide, say Israel is a terrorist state as many militant Arabs have asserted, what is our response to that? Using preemptive strikes on nation states is an unworkable construct for a community of nations.

Obviously Rice and others in the president’s inner circle disagree. They see no distinction between despotic national leaders and terrorists who exist outside of states.

And in that leap of faith lies the source for much of the animosity the United States is experiencing in the country. Remarkably, we have managed to unite the Sunni and Shiite Muslims to fight against us. The two sects had been mortal enemies for years prior to this war.

So what do we do now, given the flawed premise of our policy?

Unfortunately, there is no good solution.

Trying to internationalize the occupation at this point seems doomed. Who would send their troops there given what’s going on now?

Turning over power June 30 seems not only unrealistic but also wrong. There’s nothing to turn over. The country is in shambles, there are still no real provisions for establishing an elected government, no security, no leaders stepping forward. Turning over control in little over two months risks letting the country to descend into civil war, and eventually devolving into a stateless breeding ground for militants, not unlike Afghanistan was and is becoming again.

As awful as things are there, I think we need to stay the course until some semblance of order and civility is restored. I find it hard to believe that’s going to magically happen by June 30. Whenever that point is, it should be determined by the sitiuation on the ground in Iraq, not by calculations—political and others—in Washington

In the mean time, the president and Rice ought to rethink broadly applying their terrorism policy to nation states. It is an imprecise way of addressing a complex world.

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