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| Volume XIV, Summer 2007, Number 1 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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Trapped in the War on Terror, by Ian S. Lustick. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 200 pages. $24.95, hardback.
Charles Peña
Senior fellow at the Independent Institute and author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism
Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen born in Syria, was returning home to Montreal from Tunis on September 26, 2002. During a stopover at New York’s JFK International Airport, he was questioned by U.S. officials. According to him, “I cooperated with them 100 percent. And they always kept telling me, ‘We’ll let you go on the next plane.’ They did not.” (Quoted in “His Year In Hell: Canadian Tells Vicki Mabrey That He Was Deported to Syria,” CBS News, 60 Minutes II, January 21, 2004, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/21/60II/main594974.shtml). After being interrogated for several hours, Arar was detained on suspicion of being an al-Qaeda terrorist. Two weeks later, he was deported to Syria via Jordan under the extraordinary rendition program, an extra-judicial procedure whereby suspected terrorists are sent to other countries for interrogation and imprisonment (presumably to avoid U.S. laws prescribing due process and prohibiting torture). Arar was held in Syria for ten months and ten days.
A Canadian Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar cleared him of all terrorism allegations. Associate Chief Justice of Ontario Dennis R. O’Connor, the commissioner of the inquiry, said at its conclusion, “I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada…” (http://www.ararcommission.ca/eng /ReleaseFinal_Sept18.pdf.).
Yet, despite the Syrians’ inability to connect him to al-Qaeda and the Canadians’ having exonerated him, Arar is still considered persona non grata in the United States and remains on the terrorist watch list (U.S. government officials claim that Arar is a threat based on separate, classified information but they have agreed to review his case). In a joint news conference with Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended U.S. treatment of Arar: “It needs to be understood that in a post-September 11 circumstance, we are determined to protect our borders; we’re determined to protect the American people on all our borders” (http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/78181.htm).
Unfortunately, the ongoing saga of Maher Arar is not unique. As University of Pennsylvania political science professor Ian Lustick writes in Trapped in the War on Terror, “The truth is that in the four-and-a-half years since 9/11, the government has assiduously investigated virtually any Middle Easterner in the United States who could in any way have been suspected of being associated with terrorism. As measured by the number of terrorists apprehended, the results have been meager” (p. 44). Indeed, the evidence cited is overwhelming: 80,000 Arabs and Muslim foreign nationals required to register after 9/11, 8,000 of them called in for FBI interviews, and 5,000 locked up in preventive detention — yet not one of them convicted of a terrorist crime.
One of Lustick’s main premises is that the terrorist threat to America has been exaggerated (an argument similar to the one made by Ohio State University professor John Mueller in Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them [Free Press, 2006]). Very early on, he points out that “during the Cold War, America adapted to the ever-present threat of nuclear incineration” (p. x). Although the Bush administration has portrayed the threat in apocalyptic terms — e.g., “a mortal danger to all humanity” (p.11), “a desperate struggle to save American cities from destruction” (p. 15), “not since World War II have our American values and our way of life been so threatened” (p. 103) — the reality is that terrorists, al-Qaeda or otherwise, are incapable of inflicting the same level of destruction and devastation as the former Soviet Union. Yet, Lustick observes, “Ironically, against far weaker enemies and a far less awesome threat, we may today find it much more difficult to achieve the level of security, or a comparable sense of safety, that we managed to establish during the Cold War” (p. x).
Like Mueller, Lustick points to the absence of terrorist attacks in the United States as evidence that the terrorist threat is overstated. Indeed, he claims that “there is no statistical evidence of a terrorist threat in the United States itself” (p. 36) and points out that “not one authentic sleeper cell has been found inside the United States since September 2001” (pp. 39-40). His conclusion is that “what we see is striking — the near total absence of evidence of al-Qaeda sleeper cells or of sophisticated groups of Muslim extremists planning or preparing for attacks of massive destruction inside the borders of the United States” (pp. 46-47). If that were the thrust of Trapped in the War on Terror, it would be easy to dismiss his work. But Lustick himself acknowledges that he is not “arguing that there is absolutely no terrorist threat present within the United States” (p. 46). Ultimately, his much-needed dispassionate assessment of the scale and magnitude of the terrorist threat is an important means to a more important end: “to establish the enormous scale of resources devoted to the search for domestic terrorists, the virtual nonexistence of constraints on the conduct of investigations and the gathering of evidence, and the disposition of authorities to err on the side of arresting and charging the innocent so as to maximize the probability of discovering the guilty” (p. 46) — the Maher Arar case being a prime example of the last.
According to Lustick, the war on terror has “come to enjoy a kind of immunity from criticism or rational assessment by politicians” (p. 118). As a result, “the logic of the War on Terror drives our country away from rationality, away from any attempt at triage in the face of too many possible threats, and toward a frantic and doomed attempt to make ourselves invulnerable to any conceivable attack” (p. 96). The result has been the creation of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that is like the Little Dutch Boy trying to plug all the holes in the dike with his fingers — unable to prioritize threats and allocate resources in a cost-effective manner. Lustick’s work speaks a truth that politicians and the public are reluctant to acknowledge: Providing an absolute and perfect defense against any and all possible terrorist attacks is impossible. Rather than trying to do everything and doing nothing well (or being good at doing things that don’t matter), a better approach would be to focus on those things that are realistically achievable and can make a difference in averting another large-scale terrorist attack. Perhaps more important, a rational approach must also recognize that some things can’t be done or are cost-prohibitive, either in dollars or in the erosion of civil liberties and fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution. That means being able to live with risk and understanding that a determined terrorist will eventually find a way around whatever barriers are erected.
So we must look beyond trying to prevent and defend against terrorist attacks and understand why people would choose to attack America and Americans. According to Lustick, “Without a completely serious understanding of the motivations and predicaments of al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups, we are doomed to suffer self-inflicted wounds more devastating than anything we do to our foes. Yet a clear-eyed, politically sophisticated understanding of why al-Qaeda attacked us in 2001 has never played an important role in the determination of American counterterrorism policies” (p. 122). Instead, al-Qaeda terrorists have been described in simplistic terms: evildoers, murderers and Islamo-Facists, whose objective is to destroy America and kill as many Americans as possible. While such rhetoric makes for good political theater, it violates the military dictum “know your enemy” and does not help us understand the problem that confronts us. To escape being trapped in the war on terror requires recognition that American policies and actions- such as the war in Iraq- are part of the problem. According to Lustick:
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The war in Iraq served al-Qaeda’s purposes by bringing what it called a “crusader army” into the heart of the Muslim world, leading to tens of thousands of Muslim casualties, producing bitter feelings of humiliation and anger and creating a new training ground for jihadis as well as a vastly enlarged recruitment pool. Though polls in the Muslim world still show very little support for al-Qaeda’s long-run goal of a caliphate sovereign over all Muslim lands, the American reaction to 9/11 did convince large numbers of Muslims to sympathize with al-Qaeda in its battle with the United States and persuaded majorities of Muslims to adopt key elements of the jihadi worldview. In a sophisticated October 2005 poll of 3,900 respondents in six Arab countries, only 6 percent registered support for al-Qaeda’s aim of a renewed caliphate over all Muslim lands; 39 percent, however, said they sympathized with al-Qaeda’s desire to “confront the Untied States” (p. 126).
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Thus, Lustick concludes: “Neither law enforcement efforts or wars can reduce the fanaticism that produces Muslim terrorists unless we lower the temperature in the Muslim world that creates more jihadis for every one killed or imprisoned” (p. 140).
If there is one weakness in Lustick’s analysis, however, it is his contention that “the good news about reducing the temperature in the Muslim world is that official American policies need not change; they need only be implemented” (p. 140). In this regard, he has trapped himself in the war on terror. If U.S. policies are part of the problem, they must be re-evaluated and changed. For example, Lustick recognizes that al-Qaeda does not particularly care about the plight of the Palestinians, yet — like so many others — he calls on America to act in concert with European allies and moderate Arab countries to quickly orchestrate “a solution acceptable to the vast majority of Palestinians and Israelis” (p. 141). The problem is that Washington cannot be an honest broker (the United States provides over $2 billion in aid to Israel, and such aid is seen as coming at the expense of Palestinians) and has no way to force the Israeli government to accept a solution. Moreover, the blame for failure to produce peace would be laid squarely on the doorstep of the United States. While Israeli-Palestinian peace would certainly serve U.S. interests, ultimately only the Israelis and Palestinians themselves can achieve such a peace. Therefore, the United States would actually be better off being less involved in trying to arbitrate and impose a peace settlement.
In terms of U.S. foreign policy, Lustick seems to have fixated on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To be sure, Muslims around the world identify with the Palestinian situation. But fixing the Israeli-Palestinian problem does not fix the problems of U.S. foreign policy throughout the Muslim world. Other than Iraq, Lustick does not really address the effects of U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis the Muslim world, which is a much larger part of the problem. For example, after the Gulf War of 1990, the United States maintained military bases in Saudi Arabia based on the false belief that helping to secure the kingdom would ensure a continued flow of cheap Saudi oil. But this is an unnecessary alliance since the flow of oil is dictated by the world oil market. Besides, the relationship between America and the Saudi royal family has generated enormous ill-will toward the United States on the part of thousands of Saudis who despise their government. The same can be said for America’s relationship with Egypt’s President Husni Mubarak. It is no wonder, then, that al-Qaeda exploited that hostility to murderous ends: 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers on September 11, 2001, were Saudi nationals, and their ringleader, Mohammed Atta, was an Egyptian.
Where Lustick misses the mark is in failing to appreciate the role of U.S. interventionist foreign policy in raising the temperature that he correctly diagnoses as needing to be lowered in the Muslim world. He is almost dismissive of foreign-policy prescriptions because — in the case of Daniel Benjamin’s and Steven Simon’s The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (Times Books, 2005) — “the book is packaged so as to appear as a clarion call by a pair of counterterrorism experts that the War on Terror is not being waged well enough” (p. 119). Similarly, Robert Pape’s important finding in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005) — that suicide terrorists are motivated by foreign occupation and that the U.S. military presence should be removed from Arab and Muslim countries — is also shortchanged because “this analysis and recommendation is presented as a way to ‘win the war on terrorism’” (p. 170). Ultimately, Lustick seems so intent on defending his deconstruction of the logic of the War on Terror that he can’t see the forest for the trees.
Although Lustick comes up disappointingly short on the U.S. foreign-policy front, Trapped in the War on Terror is nonetheless an important book. He is willing to engage in critical examination and speak truths that politicians and pundits run from, including this observation: “No matter how wise our foreign policy may become or how greatly we may alleviate the hostility in Muslim countries toward the United States, we will never eradicate terrorism” (p. 142). Only by acknowledging this and other truths can we escape being trapped in the war on terror.
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