[ALBSA-Info] Eliot Cohen:This is WW IV

[Bejko, Kreshnik]

This is from the editorial section of today's edition of the Wall Street
Journal
By Eliot A. Cohen. Mr. Cohen is professor of strategic studies at the Nitze
School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
Political people often dislike calling things by their names. Truth,
particularly in wartime, is so unpleasant that we drape it in a veil of
evasions, and the right naming of things is far from a simple task.

Take the matter of this war. It is most assuredly something other than the
"Afghan War," as the press sometimes calls it. After all, the biggest
engagement took place on American soil, and the administration promises to
wage the conflict globally, and not, primarily, against Afghans.
The "9/11 War," perhaps? But the war began well before Sept. 11, and its
casualties include, at the very least, the dead and wounded in our embassies
in Africa, on the USS Cole, and, possibly, in Somalia and the Khobar Towers.
"Osama Bin Laden's War"? There are precedents for this in history (King
Philip's War, Pontiac's War, or even The War of Jenkins' Ear), but the war
did not begin with bin Laden and will not end with his death, which may come
sooner than anyone had anticipated -- including, one hopes, the man himself.
Global Conflicts
A less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV. The Cold War was
World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the
movement of multimillion-man armies, or conventional front lines on a map.
The analogy with the Cold War does, however, suggest some key features of
that conflict: that it is, in fact, global; that it will involve a mixture
of violent and nonviolent efforts; that it will require mobilization of
skill, expertise and resources, if not of vast numbers of soldiers; that it
may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological roots.
Americans still tiptoe around this last fact. The enemy in this war is not
"terrorism" -- a distilled essence of evil, conducted by the real-world
equivalents of J. K. Rowling's Lord Voldemort, Tolkien's Sauron, or C. S.
Lewis' White Witch -- but militant Islam. The enemy has an ideology, and an
hour spent surfing the Web will give the average citizen at least the kind
of insights that he or she might have found during World Wars II and III by
reading "Mein Kampf" or the writings of Lenin, Stalin or Mao. Those
insights, of course, eluded those in the West who preferred --
understandably, but dangerously -- to define the problem as something more
manageable, such as German resentment about the Versailles Treaty, an
exaggerated form of Russian national interest, or peasant resentment of
landlords taken a bit too far. In the reported words of one survivor of the
Holocaust, when asked what lesson he had taken from his experience of the
1940s, "If someone tells you that he intends to kill you, believe him."
Al Qaeda and its many affiliates consist of Muslim fanatics. They will, no
doubt, find almost as many enemies among moderate Muslims as among infidels,
and show them, if anything, less mercy. One hopes for a wave of revulsion
among Muslims who abhor this rendition of their faith, understand the
calamities of all-out war waged to erect a theocratic dystopia, and will
fight these movements with no less vigor, and no more reservations, than do
Christians, Jews, Hindus, and, for that matter, atheists.
Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles
there just one campaign. The U.S. is within range of gaining two important
objectives there: smashing al Qaeda (including the elimination of its
leadership), and teaching the lesson that governments that shelter such
organizations will themselves perish. But what next? Three ideas come to
mind.
First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate
governance in the Muslim world, the U.S. should throw its weight behind
pro-Western and anti-clerical forces there. The immediate choice lies before
the U.S. government in regard to Iran. We can either make tactical
accommodations with the regime there in return for modest (or illusory)
sharing of intelligence, reduced support for some terrorist groups and the
like, or do everything in our power to support a civil society that loathes
the mullahs and yearns to overturn their rule. It will be wise, moral, and
unpopular (among some of our allies) to choose the latter course. The
overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state, however, and
its replacement by a moderate or secular government would be no less
important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden.
Second, the U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism.
Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al Qaeda, but attacked
Americans directly (to include an assassination attempt against the last
President Bush), and developed weapons of mass destruction. Again, American
allies will flinch, and the military may shake its head at the prospect of
revisiting the aborted Gulf War victory, but the costs of failing to do so,
and the opportunities for success make it good sense. The Iraqi military is
weak, and the consequences of finishing off America's arch-enemy in the Arab
world would reinforce the awe so badly damaged by a decade of cruise
missiles flung at empty buildings.
Third, the U.S. must mobilize in earnest. The Afghan achievement is
remarkable -- within two months to have radically altered the balance of
power there, to have effectively destroyed the Taliban state and smashed
part of the al Qaeda -- is testimony to what the American military and
intelligence communities can do when turned on to a problem. But the Taliban
were not the hardest case, and the airplanes dropping bombs on the enemy in
Kunduz and Kandahar are in some cases older than their pilots, and suffering
for lack of spare parts.
The combination of precision weapons, Special Operations forces, and
sophisticated intelligence-gathering systems indicates the beginning of a
desperately needed "transformation" of the American military. But this will
require something more than the $20 billion a year in defense spending
increases over the budget now in the offing.
Government Reluctance
Similarly, the creation of a homeland security office without real powers,
the reluctance of the government to open comprehensive, formal inquiries
into the disaster of Sept. 11, and the absence of big, imaginative programs
-- mass scholarships for public health programs, for example, or, more
ambitious yet, a really substantial program of scientific research to
emancipate the West from dependence upon Persian Gulf oil -- tell us that
Washington is somewhere between a war footing and business as usual.
It is, of course, early yet, and many of the signs -- from the B-52s
pounding Taliban front lines to CIA teams scouring the Afghan hills, from
enhanced spending on vaccines and the Centers for Disease Control to the
creation of military tribunals for foreign terrorists -- indicate that the
government is truly serious. But much remains to be done, beginning with
acknowledging the scope of the task, and acting accordingly. Yet if after
the Afghan campaign ends, the government lapses into a covert war of
intelligence-gathering, arrests, and the odd explosion in a terrorist
training camp, it will be a sign that it would rather avoid calling things
by their true name.