War on Terror is Over. We Need to Say So.
Wed Apr 30, 2008 at 07:42:39 AM PDT
In the September, 2006 issue of the Atlantic, James Fallows wrote what one is tempted to call a prescient article, entitled "Declaring Victory." It's been trapped, until recently, behind a subscription wall. It deserves wider distribution.
I say "one is tempted" to call it prescient because it's 18 months later, and there have been no attacks. But it wasn't particularly prescient; it was clear to anybody paying attention that the actions taken by then had stifled the small, weak terrorist organizations. Deprived of access to the resources of a state, al qaeda posed no serious threat to the US.
Fallows interviewed 60 people in the course of preparing the article, finding what he thought was a remarkable consensus.
For the past five years the United States has assumed itself to be locked in "asymmetric warfare," with the advantages on the other side. Any of the tens of millions of foreigners entering the country each year could, in theory, be an enemy operative—to say nothing of the millions of potential recruits already here. Any of the dozens of ports, the scores of natural-gas plants and nuclear facilities, the hundreds of important bridges and tunnels, or the thousands of shopping malls, office towers, or sporting facilities could be the next target of attack. It is impossible to protect them all, and even trying could ruin America’s social fabric and public finances. The worst part of the situation is helplessness, as America’s officials and its public wait for an attack they know they cannot prevent.
Viewing the world from al-Qaeda’s perspective, though, reveals the underappreciated advantage on America’s side. The struggle does remain asymmetric, but it may have evolved in a way that gives target countries, especially the United States, more leverage and control than we have assumed. Yes, there could be another attack tomorrow, and most authorities assume that some attempts to blow up trains, bridges, buildings, or airplanes in America will eventually succeed. No modern nation is immune to politically inspired violence, and even the best-executed antiterrorism strategy will not be airtight.
But the overall prospect looks better than many Americans believe, and better than nearly all political rhetoric asserts. The essence of the change is this: because of al-Qaeda’s own mistakes, and because of the things the United States and its allies have done right, al-Qaeda’s ability to inflict direct damage in America or on Americans has been sharply reduced. Its successor groups in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere will continue to pose dangers. But its hopes for fundamentally harming the United States now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or goad us into doing. Its destiny is no longer in its own hands.
He turns to David Kilcullen:
I think [al qaeda] does [represent a threat], but not for the obvious reasons," Kilcullen told me. He said the most useful analogy was the menace posed by European anarchists in the nineteenth century. "If you add up everyone they personally killed, it came to maybe 2,000 people, which is not an existential threat." But one of their number assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The act itself took the lives of two people. The unthinking response of European governments in effect started World War I. "So because of the reaction they provoked, they were able to kill millions of people and destroy a civilization.
"It is not the people al-Qaeda might kill that is the threat," he concluded. "Our reaction is what can cause the damage. It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger."
So Fallows says, it's time to declare victory. It was true then, and it is even more true now. In the article, he quotes Kilcullen and other experts who point out that al qaeda has been greatly weakened, forced into the wilderness and unable to use modern communication and financial tools to operate. They have to work on a face-to-face basis for transactions and conversations because they know they are under surveillance.
The effective responses have been made successfully. But the ineffective responses, what professionals call "security theater," are still in place. We currently spend 5 billion dollars making air travel slower and less pleasant, while gaining no significant increase in safety. Standing in line to mail a book instead of dropping it in a mailbox doesn't make anybody any safer. Keeping foreign artists and students out of the country violates American ideals, and may cause us to miss out, as one expert points out, on the next Andrew Grove or Sergey Brin. The tech boom was driven by the involvement of a large number of foreign-born entrepreneurs. It's silly and self-destructive to keep them out. Besides, our society integrates them well, which is itself a source of security, especially in comparison to Europe:
Something about the Arab and Muslim immigrants who have come to America, or about their absorption here, has made them basically similar to other well-assimilated American ethnic groups—and basically different from the estranged Muslim underclass of much of Europe. Sageman points out that western European countries, taken together, have slightly more than twice as large a Muslim population as does the United States.... But most measures of Muslim disaffection or upheaval in Europe—arrests, riots, violence based on religion—show it to be ten to fifty times worse than here.
The median income of Muslims in France, Germany, and Britain is lower than that of people in those countries as a whole. The median income of Arab Americans (many of whom are Christians originally from Lebanon) is actually higher than the overall American one. So are their business-ownership rate and their possession of college and graduate degrees. The same is true of most other groups who have been here for several generations, a fact that in turn underscores the normality of the Arab and Muslim experience. The difference between the European and American assimilation of Muslims becomes most apparent in the second generation, when American Muslims are culturally and economically Americanized and many European Muslims often develop a sharper sense of alienation. "If you ask a second-generation American Muslim," says Robert Leiken, author of Bearers of Global Jihad: Immigration and National Security After 9/11, "he will say, ‘I’m an American and a Muslim.’ A second-generation Turk in Germany is a Turk, and a French Moroccan doesn’t know what he is."
The effective measures are assimilation and full participation in society, not discrimination and exclusion. Measures like these feed fear, rather than assuage it, and feed demonization of the "other" that is so much a part of Republican divisive and distracting tactics.
Yet even while we are wasting resources on ineffective and even counter-productive efforts, al qaeda is also engaged in self-destructive attacks on fellow Muslims, ruining their brand and reducing membership, and, at least as important, passive acceptance of their presence. The enlistment of Sunni Arab Iraqis in the fight against the small al qaeda contingent in Iraq is a result, in part, of the Iraqis they have killed.
One of the most shameful and inexcusable acts of the US under Republican rule has been to build that brand right back up again, by exaggerating al qaeda's role in Iraq, exaggerate the threat to American citizens at home, and, most important, serving as an object of justifiable hatred.
Because, of course, the single biggest boost we've given to bin Laden is to get bogged down in an unwinnable occupation of a country with a Muslim population, confirming his propaganda. But it sure did win that 2004 election for the worst president ever.
Permalink | 10 comments