The National Interest
Thanksgiving 2001

A Strange War

by Eliot A. Cohen

 

. . . In war it is often easier to know whom one is fighting than what one is fighting. Even World War II, seemingly a model of clarity in the matter of enemies, was more obscure than is commonly taught. That the Allies were fighting Germans and their proxies, everyone knew. But what was the enemy? Nazism? Hitlerism? Prussian militarism? A return in wrath of Germany’s Griff nach der Weltmacht, the drive for world power that had failed in 1914–18? Defining the enemy made a difference not only in terms of the peace the Allies would seek, but in understanding it so as to defeat it. In the United States and Great Britain there were many who believed that the Germans were rigid and orderly Teutonic masterminds, formidable in preparing and executing elaborate nefarious schemes, but thrown off balance when one disrupted their plans. The truth was just the reverse: Nazi Germany was a chaotic welter of competing organizations, and its generals excelled in spontaneous reaction to unforeseen events. The relationships between officers and enlisted men may well have been easier and more informal in the Wehrmacht than they were in the U.S. Army. The real nature of the enemy was unclear, in many respects, until after the war was over—and is even today a matter of scholarly dispute.

So, too, here. The who is, for the moment, clear: members of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network. But what is the United States fighting? Understandably, American political and military leaders feel a powerful urge to define the enemy as narrowly as possible. Thus, the enemy is "a fringe form of Islamic extremism", as President Bush and others have put it—an isolated, marginal and alien element in the Arab and Islamic worlds that is utterly at odds with their societies and the tenets of their religion. It is a belief reinforced by many voices in those worlds for a variety of reasons: genuine conviction, fear of the repercussions of a Kulturkampf between the West and Islam, or instinctive abhorrence when faced with the massacre of innocents.

A narrow definition of what we fight as an illegitimate, crackpot splintering from sane and healthy religious and national communities may soothe consciences, serve short-term political ends and provide reassuring boundaries to our fears. But it is incorrect. Al-Qaeda draws upon much larger movements in the Arab and Islamic worlds, tapping artesian rivers of hatred and resentment that rush beneath the surface of controlled societies. It is neither easily isolated nor taken to be illegitimate to all but a few fanatics. Even a cursory look at the Arab press reveals spontaneous expressions of delight at the humiliation of the United States. The studious avoidance by many Islamic clerics of unconditional condemnation of such techniques of struggle is revealing. Osama bin Laden is by no means a figure of execration and revulsion throughout the Arab or the Muslim world—and as inconvenient a fact as that may be, a fact it remains.

Normally, statesmen leave the sifting of the causes of war to historians—the wise do so because they know that they are too close to events to see them clearly, the more typical because they think they understand very well matters of which they often have but a superficial grip. In the current case, however, at least some kind of preliminary analysis is necessary. An understanding of causes may not tell us how to shape strategy, but it can help explain where a conflict may go, how long it may persist, and what turns it may take. So, for example, to know that World War II in Europe had a great deal to do with the psychopathology of Adolf Hitler on the one hand, and the sinister power of National Socialism as an ideology on the other, was not, perhaps, of much use in telling Winston Churchill whether to reinforce the Middle East in early 1941. But it surely shaped his view of how extensive the war might be, how long it might endure, and what kind of measures might be required to win it.

Like some of the great wars of the past, the current conflict may be understood at three levels. The deepest causes of this war, which are also the most intractable, have to do with the long encounter between Islam and the Arab world to the one side and the West to the other. As many historians have noted, for nearly three centuries that encounter has taken place to the disadvantage of Muslims in general, and the Arab world in particular—and in ways for which neither faith nor the political experience of the preceding thousand years had prepared the peoples of the Middle East. The repulse of the Turks from Vienna in 1683 marked the true beginning of the long retreat of Islam from Europe, and the penetration—military, economic, political and even ideological—of the Islamic world by the West. It has been three centuries of barely mitigated humiliation, punctuated most recently by the success of the Jews—a despised if not always a severely persecuted minority—in creating and maintaining a state in the face of armed hostility from nearly the entire Arab world. This sense of historical dislocation and injustice animates the views of many in the Arab world, and to some extent in the non-Arab Muslim domains beyond it.

The immediate cause of the war is, of course, the peculiar personality of Osama bin Laden and his associates, including fugitives from Egypt and Saudi Arabia who have helped him create a remarkably extensive and sophisticated coalition of terrorist networks. Bin Laden’s story is well-known and needs no repeating here. It reminds us, however, of the importance of decisive personalities in history—a matter mostly forgotten in the recent decades of political mediocrity that have characterized the leadership of the Western world. We have seen, in a small way, what unusual leaders can do—a Margaret Thatcher or a Ronald Reagan, for example, who, though neither a Winston Churchill nor a Franklin Roosevelt, nonetheless transformed the spirit and outlook of their respective countries. Lee Kuan Yew is, as Henry Kissinger has observed, a statesman too large for his country; in a very different vein Saddam Hussein has, despite evidence of titanic miscalculations, some qualities of an evil genius. On the whole, however, while Americans have demonized some leaders (Ayatollah Khomeini, for example), and have reveled in the personal peccadilloes of others (Bill Clinton springs to mind), we have tended to underrate the role of individuals as a factor of importance in international relations. Bin Laden may change that.

It is, however, the intermediate causes of this war that deserve closest scrutiny. They are, in no order of importance, the irruption of American power into the Arabian peninsula in 1990, the collapse of some states in the Middle East and South Asia, the failure of many others to provide decent governance, and the heightened visibility of the prolonged and increasingly bitter struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. The resulting frustration and embitterment of domestic politics and the mobilizing effects of new mass media (best exemplified by Al-Jazeera, the satellite broadcast system based in Qatar) mean that the other side is guaranteed a continuous supply of recruits and enthusiasts. It means, as well, that the sudden apprehension or killing of Osama bin Laden will not bring this war to an end.

In the rush to respond to the attacks of September 11, members of the U.S. government were, understandably, in no mood to reflect dispassionately upon some of their own decisions that brought us to this pass. But it would be well to do so, if only because these events have resulted from two broad failures of policy and judgment in which Republicans and Democrats alike have shared. The first was the radically incomplete victory of the Gulf War, including the deliberate choice not to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein, and the second a pervasive indifference to the forces of liberalism and modernity in the Arab world. Without facing up to these mistakes—which, though explicable, were grave indeed—the U.S. government can understand neither its current predicament nor find an adequate strategy for dealing with it.

The failure to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s regime when it was possible to do so—when the Iraqi military had crumbled and millions of Iraqis hoped for liberation from a brutal and catastrophic tyranny—bred a number of ills. One of these, of course, was Saddam’s survival, and with it Iraq’s sponsorship of terrorism and persistent efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. The inconclusive finish to the Gulf War had three other equally troubling outcomes. It led to the permanent stationing of large, visible and obtrusive American forces in the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia; it brought about enormous additional Iraqi suffering through the brutal suppression of the Kurds and Shi‘a, as well as the combined effects of the Ba‘athi regime and a prolonged economic embargo; and it undid, in some measure, the deterrent effects of the demonstration of American power. The failure to clinch the victory, even over the feeble protests of Arab allies, testified to the unwillingness of the Americans to see a job through to the end. That apparent softness encouraged others to see if they could find ways of outlasting or hurting the Americans enough to keep them out of their way. In Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic misjudged his own weaknesses and failed; in Somalia, Mohammed Farah Aideed got it right. From the remarks of Osama bin Laden since September 11, it is clear that he thinks he has got it right, too.

The United States thus left Saddam’s exceptionally dangerous regime in power—exceptionally dangerous because its leader has cunning, persistence and ruthlessness far beyond the normal lot—and at the same time planted itself in a region bound to resent the mere presence of American soldiers, especially its (by local lights) immodest women in the unnatural and even humiliating role of warriors. Perhaps worst of all, it played a visible role in prolonging the suffering of the Iraqi people who were, after all, Saddam’s first victims. We may yet find the hand of Iraqi intelligence in the planning of the attacks of September 11, and the subsequent use of sophisticated varieties of anthrax in attacks upon governmental and media targets in October. If, as it now appears, a leader of the September 11 plot met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, one must wonder why. But in any event, failure to finish off the Iraqi regime in 1991 has left a potent source of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of an exceptionally ruthless regime.

The error of leaving Saddam Hussein in power has persisted for one decade only; the other error—neglecting our natural allies in the Middle East—has lasted much longer. One could make the argument that moderate monarchy is the most decent available alternative in much of the Arab world. One could point to the phenomenon of "one man, one vote, one time", and suspect the consequences of introducing democratic forms into societies not inured to democratic habits of the heart. One could argue, as well, that (as in the case of the Iran-Iraq War) there has been little to choose politically between the two sides. By and large, however, American statesmen, and those who have advised them, have inclined rather to ignore the issue or dismiss it. Perhaps in Europe or even Asia the development of clean and reasonably free political institutions was a goal of American policy. In the Middle East, however, a combination of clientilitis, realpolitik and cultural condescension meant that there was no interest in (to take just one example) the courage of a Naguib Mahfouz as a spokesman for values that Americans share.

The height, or rather the depth, of this short-sightedness can be found in the eagerness of both Republican and Democratic administrations to deal with a Palestinian Authority dominated by a corrupt and brutal clique. After thirty years of Israeli occupation, and in part because of it, Palestinian society has evolved a relatively well-educated civil society and an awareness of what democratic norms mean. Yet in all the negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel neither the Americans nor the Israelis have much cared what that civil society could and should become. Yasir Arafat was the man who could deliver his people and state-in-making, and there was no point in being squeamish about his methods. Indeed, most American and Israeli politicians and bureaucrats preferred having a corrupt thug on the other side of the negotiating table because they were more concerned about his capacity to "deliver" than they were about what he could, or would, deliver. Israel is now paying a price for its lack of interest in the health of Palestinian civil society. To the extent that American leaders close their eyes to the realities of the sick and thwarted societies of the Arab and, in parts, of the larger Muslim world, they will fail to understand the essential nature of the war in which they find themselves engaged. . . .