Speakers:
Ian Lustick
Bess W. Heyman Chair Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; Author, "Trapped in the War on Terror"
Ivan Eland
Senior Fellow, Independent Institute
Rand Beers
Former Member, National Security Council (1988-1998)
Edward Luttwak
Senior Fellow, CSIS
Moderator/Discussant:
Chas. W. Freeman, Jr.
President, Middle East Policy Council
Heldref Publications Building
Washington, D.C.
November 3, 2006
Transcript by:
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.
CHAS W. FREEMAN, JR.: Good morning. I think it's about 9:30 Arab time, so time to get going. First of all, I'd like to thank the Independent Institute for offering the premises. As most of you probably know, the Middle East Policy Council is a small organization that does three things. We usually go up on Capitol Hill into the heart of darkness, rather than the center of enlightenment that we're now in, to raise some politically incorrect or neglected question for public discussion. A bit like Tom Lehrer's quotation of Werner von Braun - you know, "I just send the rockets up; I don't know where they come down" - we just raise questions; we don't take positions. We then take the results of the discussions and other material and we publish Middle East Policy, which is, I'm proud to say, the most widely cited publication of its kind. And finally, beyond the Beltway, in the real world throughout the country, we have trained about 18,000 high school teachers in how to teach enrichment courses on Arab civilization and Islam, thus exposing 1.4 million high school kids a year to a fact or two, which they otherwise would never encounter in the course of our splendid public education system.
So here we are, and we're here to talk about whether we are trapped in the war on terror. I'll make a few introductory remarks and then we will proceed to the panel. There is normally a strict rule that no one exceeds 10 to 12 minutes. However, Ian Lustick is the inspiration for the subject today, has just published a book, and promises to wax eloquent for no more than 18.5 minutes, so we'll make an exception for Ian.
Sunzi, the great Chinese military thinker, said - zhi ji zhi bi bai zhan bai sheng - know yourself and know your enemy, and you will win every war. Do we know ourselves? Do we know our enemies in the struggle we are now engaged in? Or do our enemies have a greater understanding both of themselves and of us? Five years into the war on terror, there are still, I think, more questions than answers.
We were cruelly struck on 9/11, five years ago. Our enemies saw their actions as a reprisal for our policies and sometimes lethal actions in their homelands. We were not aware that we had done anything to earn their ire. Is the problem of terrorism really just some sort of supply-side issue - all push from that side and no pull from ours? Or is it a product of the way in which we have imbued angry men with real or imagined grievances? Could we enhance our security by reducing the humiliations that create terrorists even as we kill those who have taken up arms against us?
Who struck us on 9/11? Was it the Taliban or other Afghans with whom we have ever since been engaged on the battlefield? Was it the Arabs or just some Arabs? Was it conservative Moslems or a few fanatics? Are we fighting the foes that we have, to paraphrase Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, or the enemies we have invented, or enemies that we are creating as we go along? Can military intervention make imagined enemies come to life? Were Iraqis in this fight before we took it to them? Are we making more enemies than we are killing?
What is the nature of this struggle? Is it best thought of as a war supported by intelligence and law enforcement or as a struggle led by intelligence and law enforcement backed up by the military? If the struggle is between ideologies and values, is it correct to say of our opponents, as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld did in introducing the Quadrennial Defense Review or QDR, that, and I quote, "compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life or we will succeed in changing theirs." If this struggle is indeed as existential as the secretary implies, are we changing them and their way of life for the better or are they catalyzing changes in our values and practices for the worse? Is this struggle best prosecuted by entering their territories and challenging them to defend themselves or by adopting a policy of live and let live?
Finally, the death of 3,000 of us on 9/11 did diminish our country, but it didn't threaten the existence of our nation as the Cold War did. Then, with the push of a button, tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of Americans and others would have perished within hours. Is the threat we now face really on a par with that in the Cold War or so much greater that it justifies a range of measures we never considered necessary when we were threatened with nuclear obliteration? Is a "loose nuke" in an American city a greater threat than thousands of warheads aimed at us? Does the situation now justify the militarization of our policy and the creation of a national security state? Is the threat to us really that much greater than similar threats long faced by our allies who have managed, by and large, to deal with them without sacrificing their civil liberties or compromising the vigor of their democratic debate?
And finally, when and how does this war end? We are told it will be a long one. What's the strategy for winning it? How should we define victory? What level of safety would we have to achieve to consider ourselves once again secure? Is it realistic to expect such a level of security? Or are we entering an era in which instead of zero risk, we must accept the task of risk management?
This is, after all, the Middle East Policy Council, so we'll be discussing our war with terrorists primarily in the context of the Middle East. Still, these questions that I've raised, I think, are some that we can bear in mind usefully as we proceed to the discussion.
We have, as you know, an absolutely splendid panel today to discuss these issues. I'm not going to recapitulate their biographies because you have them on the back of the program and they're all very well known. I will simply say that Ian Lustick, who will lead, is the author of a book called "Trapped in the War on Terror," which I believe he is going to mention in the course of his remarks. Randy Beers spent many years in a variety of roles, but most recently in government in the White House as the senior director dealing with the issue of terrorism. He has been assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs as well, and has a very distinguished career, most recently in politics, I think. So Ivan Eland - I should have mentioned even before Randy - comes out of an interesting background as well, the CATO Institute, Libertarian Perspectives, and is now in charge of the very institute or the activity that we are here to engage in, and is always a thoughtful and stimulating member of a panel. He is the author of "The Enemy has No Clothes," (sic) which is U.S. foreign policy exposed, which is quite an interesting read.
IVAN ELAND: Empire, not enemy.
MR. FREEMAN: The empire, yes, "The Empire has no Clothes." Sorry, the clothes have no emperor - sorry about that. And finally, Ed Luttwak. I was going to hold up his books, but there are too many of them - there are about 19 or 20. A very distinguished student of strategy, of political/military affairs in a wide variety of contexts, just back from sailing around the islands of Indonesia, and so it's quite appropriate to inflict on him a serious discussion after he's been goofing off in Bali and other places.
We will proceed now to the discussion. Again, with the exception of Ian who has asked for a bit more time at the outset, we'll go about 10 to 12 minutes. I've spent my whole life bulking up to the point where I can pitch people off the podium quite successfully -- as you can see. And so, if they exceed the limit, they will have to contend with a physical struggle. With these few words, let me invite Ian to the podium.
I should say, we don't have any microphones other than this one. When we come to the question and answer period, we'll have to ask that you use a microphone or if we can't do that we'll have to repeat the question. The transcript is important to us, and I'll have to ask the speakers to come to the podium rather than remain seated as they often do.
IAN LUSTICK: Well, thank you very much, Ambassador Freeman. It's my pleasure, and I'm honored to be on such a distinguished panel. And I think the Middle East Policy Council for organizing this symposium.
The war in Iraq has become politically radioactive. It's a burden to any politician associated with it. Not so the War on Terror. It continues to attract the allegiance of every politician in the country, whether as a justification from keeping U.S. troops in Iraq to win in a central front in the war on terror or as a justification for withdrawing those troops to win the really crucial battles in the war on the terror at home or in Afghanistan.
What accounts for the stupendous success of the war on terror as a political program, as a frame of reference for policy and as undisputed champion in the battle for increases in discretionary funding over the last five years? Certainly it is not the scale of the threat to the homeland. Since 9/11 there has been no evidence of any serious terrorist threat from Islamic extremists inside America - no sleeper cells, no attacks, no evidence of serious planning or preparation for an attack. This, despite red-teaming (?) analyses and monthly shootings in schools and shopping malls, that show how easy it is or would be for terrorists bent on killing Americans to do so.
This absence of evidence of a big domestic terror threat is even more instructive thanks to the un-precedentedly exhaustive, constant, unrestrained and heavily funding scrutiny of anyone and anything that law enforcement agencies have had even the vaguest reason to imagine might be suspect. For many the absence of attacks is truly puzzling.
What has puzzled me more, however, is how to explain a nearly universal allegiance of American interest groups to the war on terror - the steady polling numbers showing support for it, the often panicky concern that it is not being prosecuted successfully enough, it's dominance of the political landscape and the $650 billion that we have so far spent on it.
Answering this question means understanding how the war on terror was triggered and how it sustains itself. The official mantra is that we fight in Iraq because it is the central front in the war on terror. The exact opposite is the case. We are trapped in fighting an unwinnable and a centrally nonsensical war on terror because its invention was required in order to fight in Iraq.
When we were struck on September 11, 2001 the U.S. military budget was the equal of the military budgets of the next 24 most powerful countries. That structural fact of military unipolarity, by sharply reducing the perception of the costs of military adventures, made it likely that the United States would fight some kind of war abroad.
However, in the first eight months of the George W. Bush administration the State Department, the uniformed military and the intelligence community blocked efforts inspired by the project for the New American Century and led by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to launch a war in Iraq as the first stage of a radical transformation of U.S. foreign policy toward global hegemony and military unilateralism.
However, when 9/11 produced an immense amount of political capital for a president, peculiarly ready to accept the role offered him by that supremacist cabal of anointed Churchillian savior in a global, epochal war on terror, the cabal had exactly what it needed, for as they spun it the global war on terror divided the world into those with us and those against us. Coupled with the principal of preemption this radical division of the world into our camp and the enemy camp rendered automatically any country or group not with us as subject to attack by the United States at will.
In this way, although Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, the cabal was able to devise and implement the formula linking the September attacks to its long cherished goal - forcible regime change in Iraq as a model for a series of quick neo-imperialist wars to revolutionize American foreign policy and accomplish conservative political objectives at home. Thus the latent propensity of the U.S. to go to war born of immense military preponderance was exploited by the cabal, able to portray their long-sought invasion of Iraq as a requirement of a global war on terror.
After years of slaughter in Iraq, the neocon fantasy of a series of cheap fast imperial wars is dead. But the war on terror lives on stronger than ever. How did the war on terror take on a life of its own, and trap the entire political class and most Americans into public beliefs about the need to fight a global war on terror as our first priority, even when there is no evidence of an enemy present in the United States?
Consider how the Congress responded to the war on terror. In summer of 2003 a list of 160 potential targets for terrorists was drawn up to be protected, triggering intense efforts by representatives and senators in Congress and their constituents to find funding-related targets in their districts. The result? Widening definitions of potential targets and mushrooming increases in the number of infrastructure and other assets deemed worthy of protection - up to 1,849 such targets in late 2003, 28,360 in 2004, 7,769 in 2005 and up to an estimated 300,000 in our national assets database today, including the Sears Tower in Chicago but also the Indiana Apple and Pork Festival.
Across the country virtually every lobby and interest group cast their traditional objectives and funding proposals as more important than ever given the imperatives of the war on terror. According to the National Rifle Association, the war on terror means more Americans should own and carry firearms to defend the country and themselves against terrorists. According to the gun control lobby, fighting the war on terror means passing strict gun control laws to keep assault weapons out of the hands of terrorists. School of veterinary medicine called for quadrupling their funding. Who else would train veterinarians to defend the country against terrorists using hoof-and-mouth disease to decimate our - decimate our cattle herds. Pediatricians declared that more funding was required to train pediatricians as first responders to terrorist attacks, since treating children as victims is not the same as treating adults. Pharmacists advocated the creation of pharmaceutical SWAT teams to respond quickly with appropriate drugs to the victims of terrorist attacks.
Aside from the swarms of "beltway bandit" consulting firms and huge corporate investments in counterterrorism activities, universities across the country created graduate programs in homeland security, institutes on terrorism and counterterrorism, all raising huge catcher's mitts into the air for the billions of dollars of grants and contracts blowing in the wind. As these and other groups found counterterrorism slogans effective in raising revenue, they became even more committed to the war on terror, convincing those who had been slow to define themselves as part of the war to do so quickly or lose out.
The same imperative: translate your agenda into war on terror requirements or be starved of funds, and its spiraling consequences, surged across the government affecting all agencies. Bureaucrats unable to think of a way to describe their activities in the war on terror - in war on terror terms, were virtually disqualified from budget increases and probably doomed to cuts.
With billions of dollars a year in state and local funding the Department of Homeland security devised a list of 15 national planning scenarios to help guide its allocations. To qualify for homeland security funding state and local governments had to describe how they would use these funds to meet one of those chosen 15 scenarios.
What was the process that produced this list? It was in part deeply political, driven by competition among agencies, states and localities who knew that funding opportunities would depend on exactly which scenarios were included or excluded - with anthrax a chemical attack on a sports stadium and hoof-and-mouth disease included but attacks on liquid natural gas tankers and West Nile virus excluded.
Most instructive of all in this process was the unwillingness to define the enemy posing the terrorist threat. Why was there this unwillingness? Because if a particular enemy was identified certain scenarios profitable for some of the funding competitors would be disqualified; thus the enemy in these scenarios is officially referred to as, quote, the universal adversary, end quote; in other words, as Satan.
That is how the war on terror - that is how the war on terror drives the country from responding to threats to preparing for vulnerabilities, producing an irrational and doomed strategic posture which treats any bad thing that could happen as a national security imperative.
Of course this entire dynamic is accelerated by the hallowed principal of CYA - cover your ass. Each policy maker knows that if there is another attack no one will be able to predict where and when it will be, but after it occurs it will be easy to discover who it was who did not approve some project or level of funding that could have prevented it.
Finally apart from the merciless competition among politicians - think of the bizarre public posturing about Abu Dhabi control of our ports - there is no more important energy source for the war on terror than the media. I don't mean just the films and television shows thriving on exciting images of maniacal but brilliant Middle East terrorists ready to destroy the country if not for a few heroes operating to protect us in an otherwise incompetent government; I'm talking about the news media.
When a blizzard bears down on a large American city the local news media has a field day - ratings rise, announcers are barely able to contain their excitement, meteorologists become celebrities, they warn of the storm event of the century, viewers are glued to their sets. But the blizzard then dumps its snow and passes or fizzles and it's forgotten. Either way the blizzard story ends and ratings go back to normal and anchors shift their attention to murders, fires and abandoned babies.
But when it comes to the war on terror the blizzard of the century is always about to hit and never goes away. For the national media this is as good as it gets. Officially the terrorist threat level is always elevated. Absent any actual attacks or detectable threats government agencies manufacture pseudo-victories over alleged or sting-produced plots to justify hundreds of billions of dollars worth of mostly silly expenditures. With every lost soul captured by the FBI and presented as the latest incarnation of Muhammad Atta, the news media and the entertainment industry fairly exults, thriving on fears stoked by evocations of 9/11 and the ready availability of disaster scenarios too varied to be thwarted but too frightening to be ignored.
Compounded by media sensationalism these fears then provide irresistible opportunities for ambitious politicians to attack one another for failing to protect the terrorist target du jour - ports, border crossing, milk supply, cattle herds, et cetera.
The result of such sensationalist coverage, accompanied by advice from academic or corporate experts anxious to sell their counter terrorism schemes to a terrified public in a cover-your-ass-obsessed government bureaucracy, are more waves of support for increased funding for the war on terror. But every precaution against the terrorists quickly produces speculation about what grounds the terrorist could use, thereby fueling more cycles of anxiety, blame and expert counterterrorist advice and increased funding.
These are the vicious cycles, the self-powering dynamics that produce and reproduce widespread hysteria in America over non-existent sleeper cells, and over our real but unavoidable vulnerability to bad things happening - an hysteria not seen here since the anti-communist frenzy of the McCarthy era.
How humiliating. The country that was able, as Chaz suggested, to adjust psychologically, politically and militarily to the real capacity of the Soviet enemy to incinerate our cities has been reduced to moaning, wasting resources and spinning in circles all because of some ragged bands of Muslim fanatics.
We have been and are being suckered big time. Before the attacks al-Qaeda was a shattered remnant of a failed movement dropping into the dust bin of history, the equivalent of the Aryan Nations on the American political scene.
But the diabolical strikes against us saved the jihadis. Well, not really. What saved them from political oblivion and lifted them to protagonist declared as equivalent in potency and world historical importance to Nazi Germany was the American reaction to those attacks. Our invasion of Iraq, cast within a global war on terror, was for them the crusade that makes their world of jihad appear not just real but compellingly real to hundreds of millions of Muslims.
The Bush administration launched the world on terror but it was a war fought according to Osama's script. Now our army is broken and demoralized in an Iraq war that breeds al-Qaeda recruits and turns their propaganda into reality. Meanwhile, the very strength of American democracy and free enterprise, motivating every faction in America to turn the war on the terror to its own interest - that's our culture - is hijacked and turned against by our adversaries just as affectively as they hit us with our own airplanes in 9/11.
We want to arm wrestle with our enemies. Why not? We have more economic and political and military muscle than any state in history. But that is precisely why they fight us with judo using our strength against us - they hijack our planes to attack our buildings, they use our passionate patriotism to propel us into a reaction into a war in the Middle East that exactly serves their interests, and they hijack Madisonian democracy itself to create a vortex of a aggrandizing exploitation of the war on terror for self-interested agendas that spin our country out of control.
One of the things that the war on terror does to defend itself is prevent itself from being known. Consider what happened to John Kerry when he said something true about the war on terror in October 2004. He said that terrorism is the nuisance and something that we have to control through systematic law enforcement, kind of like organized crime and prostitution. The war on terror, whose requirements were defended by both republican and Kerry's democratic handlers, were - forced an immediate retraction. Kerry, beat a retreat, claimed to have been misquoted, reverted to an intensification of war-on-terror rhetoric. In a debate with the president his line was, I'm going to kill more terrorists, more viciously, more thoroughly than George Bush.
Indeed, in a whole host of ways the war on terror suppresses knowledge of itself, for if we knew and understood al-Qaeda properly we would understand that a war on terror is exactly not how we can combat that threat. For example, almost no one in America is aware of a passage at the end of the tape Osama bin Laden released on November 1st, 2004 right before the election. At the end of that long tape this is part of what he said: It is easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is send two mujaheddin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political loses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their companies.
So we are continuing this policy of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. That being said, when one scrutinizes the results one can't say that al-Qaeda is the sole factor in achieving these spectacular games; rather the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts, whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction, has helped al-Qaeda to achieve these enormous results.
And so it appears to some analysts that the White House and us are playing as one team toward the economic goals of the United States, even if the intentions differ. For example, al-Qaeda spent $500,000 on the events, the 9/11 attacks, while America in the incident and its aftermath lost - according to the lowest estimate - more than 500 billion (dollars), meaning that every dollar of al-Qaeda defeated $1 million by the permission of Allah. As Saif al-Adel put it - al-Qaeda security chief -- Americans took the bait and fell into our trap.
Until we know our current enemy, as we came to know the Soviet Union, and then use that knowledge to adopt, as we did then, an appropriate, long-term, sustainable, reality-based strategy, we will be unable to focus properly on security problems that do exist and instead remain trapped in the war on terror.
Thank you.
(Applause.)
MR FREEMAN: Thank you very much, Ian. I gather that you believe there is a certain pathology at work here. You've made a very powerful case for that I think; the case being that the war on terror has assumed the level of national ideology, even as it has set off the usual feeding frenzy at the political trough, something anyone who lives in this town is very familiar with. Unfortunately, including Ivan Eland who knows all about this phenomenon. Ivan, would you come to the podium please?
IVAN ELAND: Thank you, Chas., and thanks to the Middle East Policy Council for putting on this great program. As usual, they have put together a good program today, and I hope I'll be as good as the other speakers here.
I'm just going to take off from where Ian Lustick started. I have read his book, and it's an excellent book, and I recommend everyone buy it because you'll get a unique perspective, which I think is very - it's very true. Some of the things that Ian was mentioning - and I don't want to get into a theoretical economic discussion, but they fit nicely with the public choice theory of economics, which governs every type of public policy we have, from health policy, to employment policy, to foreign policy, to defense policy, and that is that benefits of government programs are concentrated, and the costs are dispersed among the taxpayers.
Therefore you get huge lobbying groups. They are very well organized, and they - of course, they usually control the policy until the policy is elevated to a sufficient level of public awareness that the public starts saying, wow, my taxes are really going up, et cetera, and why am I paying all of this money for this. And I think that Iraq, the cost of the Iraq war are getting up to that point. But most issues don't. So of course in most issues, the lobby groups control the policy. And I think in this particular case, we would hope that the lobbying groups wouldn't take advantage of an incident like 9/11, but of course in Washington, they take advantage of it even more because you do have this threat that is out there.
And the terrorism threat is a little like an airline crash compared to a car crash. An airline crash is a rare event, but statisticians call the irrational fear that people have of traveling on airplanes probability neglect because you look on your TV set, and you see this smoldering wreckage that killed 300-and-some people, and people are afraid to fly. But of course it's much more dangerous to drive your car; flying is very safe. And the most people who get killed from a plane crash are not the people who die in the planes, but the people who would have taken the plane and decided to drive because driving is very dangerous.
And the same thing is true with terrorism. It's a rare event, but it's spectacular. And also I think it differs from natural disasters in that there is a diabolical enemy. It's not just some random natural occurrence. And so this gives us focused press coverage, and as Ian mentioned, the press eats it up.
But of course, terrorism is very rare, especially in North America. And John Mueller, who just wrote an article in Foreign Affairs recently, went over some of the statistics. He says that the average American has a one-in-80,000 chance of getting killed by an international terrorist. And he says that is about the equivalent of the chances of getting hit by a meteorite or a comet.
Now, of course - it's - actually, I would disagree with him a little bit. It's actually lower than that because most - if you look back through the terrorism - patterns of global terrorism that the State Department used to put out, you'll find that North America of course was the continent that was by far the lowest in terrorism, simply because we are farther away from the centers of conflict, and of course we can - the terrorists have logistical problems getting over here.
Also, we don't have a community that will shelter them, as in other places like Europe, et cetera. So there are some of these factors. So if you live - most of the terrorist attacks on U.S. targets - and we are a target of terrorist attacks, the U.S., but it is mainly overseas, at our overseas embassies, government facilities, military bases, et cetera. So if you live in the United States, you have an even less of a chance of being killed by a terrorist, and if you don't live in Washington, D.C., or New York, you probably have an even less chance of being hit by a terrorist.
So terrorism is a rare event. So this is, as Ian was saying, the lobby groups have taken this and run with it. And of course we have all of these new bureaucracies, the Homeland Security Bureaucracies. We have a new director of National Intelligence. The FBI has converted itself into an anti-terrorism agency, et cetera. And of course the government has also undertaken draconian civil liberties constrictions, the latest one being of course suspending habeas corpus, that sort of thing.
And so one has to ask yourself, and I don't - you know, this is a very - this is a very radical thing to say, but I think you have to start asking yourself, do we have more to fear from the terrorists, or more to fear from the government, and the government's response - I'm talking about our government here. I mean, there is all of this effort, as Ian mentions - and it's not just money being spent. Civil liberties have been eroded, and in fact, the Cold War was very bad for civil liberties because it was a long war; it never stopped.
Civil liberties have been eroded in every single war we had, but the wars that we had before World War I and World War II, even the Civil War, they were short term and civil liberties sort of recovered. The problem with the Cold War is it created the imperial presidency, the necessary - this threat that was hanging over us created the imperial presidency, and distorted the Constitution from the legislative emphasis, which the founders had intended, and put all of the - or a lot of the authority in the presidency, et cetera.
And of course, all of these - both the civil liberties and the distortion of the checks-and-balances system go to the heart of our system. And so we really have to ask, you know, what the consequences of these actions are. And I think we also need to ask an important question: What is causing this terrorism? And almost nobody ever asks that question, at least in a public forum. And I think, as Ian - or I guess actually Chas. said this -- that the terrorists believe that they are retaliating for our actions. And most Americans don't realize what an interventionist foreign policy the United States has conducted since World War II. It's diametrically opposed to the traditional foreign policy throughout most of American history, which was policy of military restraint overseas.
And so we have this activist foreign policy, and all empires have experienced blowback. The problem now is that you have modern communication and transportation systems, which small groups can use to retaliate against you. So I think we really have to address this question, and say, do we really need to be doing some of the things that we are doing overseas? And it's a very important question. And I think we don't - it doesn't get addressed because it's very sensitive because people think, well, you're implying that the people that were killed on 9/11, it was their fault, and I'm saying, now, that is not true at all. I'm saying that perhaps their government had some complicity, non-intentionally.
I'm certainly not suggesting that the government had anything to do with the 9/11 attack, but in certain respects, the government is not protecting its citizens. The first objective of every government, no matter what kind of government it is, is to protect its citizens and its territory. But we certainly have got into this superpower, or if you want to call it, an informal empire around the world of military bases, alliances, military interventions.
I mean, if you look at the historical record, the U.S. has been by far the most interventionist country after World War II. And do we really need to do this for our security? We have always had the luxury of being away from the centers of conflict, and we have a nuclear arsenal now that the founders didn't have. The founders realized our advantage of being sort of isolated from the centers of conflict. Of course it said that nuclear weapons have made that obsolete, but of course they haven't, and if anything, we're more invulnerable from a conventional attack, or even a nuclear attack because we have the most potent nuclear arsenal in the world.
The real threat comes from terrorists, and I think that is the major threat that we face, but we have to keep it in perspective, as I mentioned before. It's still rare. We still do get advantages from being on the other side of the world from the terrorists. And so - and if we want to reduce our chances of being hit by a terrorist even more, we ought to tone down our foreign policy. And we have the luxury of doing that, but of course in Washington, that is a non-starter because you have a lot of these interest groups that have an interest in military intervention.
And of course that we have to ask - the public-choice question is does your government really have an interest in protecting you. And the answer is probably no because it's tied up with all of these other issues and reasons for intervention all over the world. So if we want to ask some of these hard questions, we really have to ask the government whether they haven't contributed to the problem.
Certainly bin Laden ought to be killed or taken out or captured, or whatever, and we probably should have devoted our resources to that instead of making the problem worse in Iraq by stirring up the hornets coming out of the nest. So we have to address the foreign policy issue.
Now, the only area I differed with in Ian's book was he likes the Cold War Kennan containment policy. And I think that is a better policy than the policy we're running, certainly. But I would say even during the Cold War, we could have run a more minimalist policy, and in this case, it's a little different than the Soviet Union. We are trying to prevent the - de-motivate the terrorists from attacking us. So I think the Cold War model is not really as applicable. Certainly containment is better than active provocation, as we are doing, but I would say we really need to find out what our vital interests are, and cut out the successive intervention that is causing the terrorism, by any poll that you take in the Islamic or Arabic world. That is what is driving it, so thank you.
(Applause.)
MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much, Ivan, and particularly for the point that we do have choices that we can make. We are a very fortunate country in our strength, in our two oceans, and we do have choices. There is nothing inevitable about the particular set of policies we have adopted.
I am surprised that neither you nor Ian before you mentioned Osama bin Laden's greatest achievement, which is that he is the largest creator of federal employment after Franklin Delano Roosevelt - (laughter) - and continues, as Ian was suggesting, to provide gainful employment for a very large and growing number of people, including, I was happy to learn, at the Indiana Apple and Pork Festival. (Laughter.)
We turn now to Randy Beers, and Randy, please.
RANDY BEERS: Thank you, Chas. It's a real pleasure to be here.
I'm going to come at this from a somewhat different but not dissimilar direction. Having served as assistant secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, I was always struck by the terminology that was used in the war on drugs, a phrase coined, I believe, by Richard Nixon as an effort to mobilize national activity to deal with the problem of drug addiction and drug use.
During the Clinton administration, Barry McCaffrey labored without success to try to change the terminology of that, and discovered that for all of his efforts to find analogies like cancer in things like that, he was unable to do so. But I was encouraged that in Spanish, the war on drugs does not translate as la guerra, but as la lucha, which is the struggle against drugs, which I always thought was a much more apt metaphor in terms of dealing with that particular problem.
As we moved into the war on terrorism, we were informed by Zbigniew Brzezinski that fighting - or having a war on terrorism was like having a war on blitzkrieg; we were focusing not on the enemy but a tactic that was used by that enemy and a number of other enemies. And I got involved, as John Kerry did, in the campaign, and was also blasted for using the word, "struggle," instead of war because the metaphor was deemed to be so apt and expressive, and a basis for mobilizing the population and our resources in order to deal with the problem.
But I think that the two previous discussants have raised what I think are very important questions. As the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Terrorism was published, or at least the key judgments, I should say, were published, I was struck by a conversation that I had -- had had earlier this year with my friend Graham Allison at the Kennedy School.
He had conducted a class in which he had asked his students to pretend that they were advisors to Osama bin Laden in the immediate aftermath of the dispersal of al Qaeda from Afghanistan. And the task was to write a strategy of, if you could control what the United States would do from here forward, that would allow us to recover from this defeat that we have suffered in Afghanistan, what would you suggest to Mr. bin Laden as his advisor that it would be nice to have happen. And Graham indicated that there were five general responses that he got from the class.
The first was attack a Muslim, especially Arab country, especially if it had holy places. Second, kill innocent civilians and commit human rights abuses. Third, associate some form of proselytization with this particular process. Fourth, support autocratic, secular, Muslim regimes, and fifth, and perhaps even most important, use language that evokes the notion of clashes of civilizations or the crusades.
The National Intelligence Estimate said that there were four advantages that al Qaeda had that on balance gave al Qaeda more advantages than they had vulnerabilities. They were entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness; the Iraq jihad; the slow pace of real and sustained social economic and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations; and pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among Muslims.
So in effect, the things that would allow bin Laden and al Qaeda to maintain and advance their particular cause seem to be the things that we are doing, rather than the other way around, or as Don Rumsfeld put it, are they able to recruit faster than we are able to capture and kill jihadists.
And so I think we are struck at this point in time of having to think about what kinds of actions should be undertaken that will reduce and limit the ability of a very adroit political master, bin Laden, to use events of our own making to advance his own activities in the Muslim world.
The good news is that if one can believe the polling that Pew and others have conducted, the amount of strongly supportive sentiment in the Muslim world for al Qaeda and bin Laden still remains a small minority judgment. The question is whether or not our continued actions can evoke that kind of advance on the part of bin Laden. And that is why I think what we have to begin to think about is programs and activities that are designed to reduce the sense that this is a war, that this is a clash of civilizations, and foster and support probably not with ourselves in the lead given the attitude of many Muslims toward the United States, foster programs that are going to reduce these advantages that al Qaeda is using to their benefit.
Let me stop there. I'm looking forward very much to the questions.
MR. FREEMAN: Thank you, Randy. (Applause.) I was struck at the outset, when you referred to the war on drugs, not only by the problems with the use of the word war that you and Zbigniew Brzezinski have referred to, but also by the analogy to the problem of addiction. Drugs are a supply-side problem; they are the fault of the Columbians and Peruvians, and Afghans. The fact that we use drugs and provide the largest market for them in the world has nothing to do with the problem. In fact, the definition of an addict is someone who can't do demand management. And perhaps we do need to do a bit of demand management on the issue of terrorism. That is a theme that all three of you have struck, which I'm sure Ed Luttwak will now contradict.
But I just want to note, as Ed pointed out before the session, that war is hell. You know, the Dow is up; employment is up; the price of oil is down, and everything is going to hell in a hand basket. But we do face some very serious problems if this is in fact the perpetual state of combined conflict and feeding frenzy that has been suggested. There are some issues. An, Ed, I'm sure you'll straighten us all out. Please come to the podium.
EDWARD LUTTWAK: I'll try.
MR. FREEMAN: I know you'll try.
MR. LUTTWAK: (Audio break) -- because in fact, I - on a functional basis, I disagree with almost - in fact, I disagree with nothing I have heard on a functional basis. But I really do disagree strongly about some of the premises, nonetheless, on which people have spoken so far.
First of all, it is a fact that this morning unemployment figures below - well below 5 percent. They are the envy of every industrialized country around the world. They represent substantial economic success by this administration. The Dow Jones - unemployment means basically the poor are doing okay, or at least better than they did in the past. They might still be poor. We might still have median income trends, which are disturbing in the long term, but the poor are doing better. The Dow is about 12,000, so the rich are doing better. Everybody should be happy, and that is part of the picture.
Another part of the picture is that, as people have pointed out from different perspectives, evidently September 11 was not the beginning of a war, at least not the war by terrorists against us because there was - a war would mean there was September 12th. There would have been September 13, September 14. We would have lost, as in previous real wars, you lose 500 a day, a thousand a day.
That, by the way, never interfered with the advancement of European civilization, having wars that lasted for years in which a thousand people died every day. As a matter of fact, historians probably would come to the conclusion that the war springs out from the very breast of European civilization, that war is part of its dynamic, is part of its renewal, its growth; it becomes the excuse or the cause or the motive of structural change and advancement in different capacities. You know, it is a reality that women were brought into full citizenship through two world wars, and would not have been brought into citizenship without two world wars in the European context.
So all of these are realities. So the counter-terrorism war can be seen as follows: It is a - it is a war that has all of the defects which have been pointed out, including a fundamental lack of reality, but nevertheless, it is the only war we have, and one should not quickly dispose of it.
That is not a normal perspective on it because the conventional view is that war is only ever bad. But anybody who overviews the history of the United States or the history of Europe, or, if you like, the history of Israel, a country that grows 10 times in population and GMP, gets Nobel Prizes, has excellent restaurants in Tel Aviv, and none of it would have been possible without war. Without war, it would have been some kind of provincial backwater, a kind of a warm-up Birobijan.
So these are all realities that we must not rush to forget in this context. Other realities: the Iraq war. Well, I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning quite radically I'm sorry to say for rather perhaps nasty reasons. It is the first war I've opposed in 40 years. It is the first war I've opposed - not only our wars, but other people's wars I mostly support. I opposed it because I happen to know the protagonist rather intimately for a long period of time, and therefore I did really believe what they said among themselves, which is there was a war for democracy. The weapons-of-mass destruction bit came in when Colin Powell insisted to get U.N. sanction for it, which we didn't have in Kosovo war in 1999, just previously. But they really wanted to bring democracy.
And since I happened to be brought up in Sicily, where they have had 60 elections since Garibaldi landed there with no democracy at all. And since I happen to know something about the area, I thought that trying to fight a war to bring democracy to Iraq was a fantasy project that could only fail; the only question was how it would fail.
Similarly, I certainly supported the demolition of the Taliban, but I did not support staying in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a country that I happened to have visited on a fairly extensive basis, going as far back as before the original Soviet invasion, and the notion of the United States getting engaged in a project to bring - to create an Afghan state was in my view another fantasy project.
There was an op-ed some time ago, more than a year ago in The New York Times, written by somebody who complained that even though we're in Afghanistan, we are there, we have spent money, we've fought some; nevertheless, women's rights were still being suppressed, and the women, there was a lot of violence against women.
You know, the obvious rejoinder is of course this was terrible, and that we should station a Marine in Afghan family - (laughter) - so when the husband hits the wife, the Marine shoots the husband. The fact is that what is happening now - and we have now brought our NATO allies, or some of them into this project, is basically we are fighting the 13th century. We are fighting a period in human evolution. And it is really like landing in 13th-century France, let's say, and trying to get the 13th-century Frenchman to abide by contemporary 21st-century norms of behavior.
So obviously these are - if they are imperialist projects, they are not the sensible kind of imperialist projects where there was money to be made, of the sort that the Dutch did in the 18th century; they are more like the sort of late-19th century projects by that latecomers to imperialism, like the Italians who went to Somalia and Ethiopia, and spent a lot of money that should be spent in providing water systems for Western Sicily. They spent it in Somalia.
So what you heard - I don't disagree with anything you heard. So our counter-terrorism endeavor, misnamed a war, is a foolish waste of money; it is poorly conducted; it is ridiculous. And so the fact is that, A, we're doing very well economically at home; B, we have not had a terrorist attack in the United States since September 11th, and therefore it means that all of these counter-terrorism, lobbies groups, bureaucracies, agencies, and so on, they can all point to that and say, you know, it's me with my anti-elephant machine. You know, I have an anti-elephant machine. No wild elephants have been killing people in Chevy Chase ever since I installed it. (Laughter.)
The fact is that if people did believe that there was an elephant threat, I could do quite well with my machine. As a point of fact, I was just - I just worked - I was not in Indonesia sailing around. I used to be a weapon's instructor, and I run a small security operation, and somebody asked me to provide security for the - those of you who are in the sailing world know about this, the Blue Water Rally. There was one conspicuously large sailing boat in this. They wanted security, and instead of sending somebody, given that it was Darwin to Sawu, Sumba, Sumbawa and then Bali, I sent myself.
The fact is that, please note, that while no terrorist attack took place during this rather long journey, a long period, at the same time, every single day - (inaudible) - at sea, was bringing notices of violent actions all around us. There were in fact piratical attacks by Muslim pirates out of Mindanao, attacking ships in the Sulu Sea between Saba (sp) and Mindanao. This was slightly - it was not on our course, but definitely it was within our area.
There were about one attack a day by Muslim pirates out of Aceh - the survivors of the tsunami, I presume - operating in the Straits of Malaka. And there were attacks by Muslim pirates from Yala (sp) in the Straits of Singapore, and there were 33 attacks over a 28-day period in those areas.
This brings me to my first disagreement about premises. As I said, the war on terror is a misnomer. What we are doing has been counterproductive in Iraq and Afghanistan, if there were such a war, et cetera, et cetera. But I also disagree about premises. One of these premises is the very American belief that all religions are equally good. I regret to say they are not even equally bad, and the fact is that, quite removed from any action by the United States, wherever there are Muslims in contact with non-Muslims, whether it is Nigeria - Northern Nigeria, Central Nigeria these days - whether it is Southern Thailand, whether it is Mindanao, whether it is the Maluku Islands in Indonesia, that we did not sail past - our route was the Darwin route to Sumba and Sam (ph). Whether it is in Lombok, whether it is - these are all places which have nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy, with the Middle East, with Arabs, Israelis, Palestinians, and so on, and yet they are all places where Muslims attack non-Muslims.
In Maluku, they attack Christians. In Lombok and Bali, they attack Hindus, as they are described, as well as some Christians. And it has been a phenomenon, which as any historian knows, it is a story in which it's a specifically Muslim phenomenon.
The Buddhists, there was no reaction by Buddhists anywhere when two statues of the Shakyamuni, the Gautama were destroyed in Afghanistan. No Buddhist went out on a rampage. That was more than a cartoon, destroying two gigantic statues of Buddha as a specifically religious act authorized by the tax-exempt institution, the Dar al-Ulum, the school - the head school of some 14,000 Dar al-Ulum schools, some of which are not far from this room, which is tax-exempt in India, by the way, in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh, India.
So the fact is that not all religions are not equally bad, and we had to recognize. The premise that Islam is just like Buddhism or Christianity or whatever, it just isn't true. And I hope that nobody is teaching this in the name of political correctness - as I said, the very American belief that all religions are equally good. I would be in favor of a program that would teach that all religions are equally bad, but I certainly oppose something that would distort history to that degree.
Americans have been highhanded in all of that. In Latin America, we have never had Latin American terrorism. We rampaged across Latin America for a long period of time. We have done things all over the world that only doesn't lead to terrorism. We have to recognize this reality.
Finally - one minute left - as a taxpayer, I wish the CIA, somebody would cut their budget to 5 percent so they would stop employing people like Michael Scheuer, who doesn't spend three years in the bin Laden unit without knowing Arabic, without being asked to learn Arabic. I wish as a taxpayer that the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration, will be funded, and et cetera, et cetera, and recognize the fundamental realities.
But alas, I fear we are going to continue down this path because with unemployment this low and the Dow this high, it will be very difficult to persuade one's citizens of the truth of what you heard this morning.
(Applause.)
MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much.
I'm sorry to tell you that there is a TSA representative in the room who has quietly expressed interest in your anti-elephant machine - (laughter) - since there have been no rampages by elephants in Chevy Chase.
Thank you very much for that refreshing perspective and difference with premises.
We now turn to the most interesting part of the morning, always, to my way of thinking, and I'm not disparaging the presenters when I say this, and that is a discussion between those of you in the audience and the various gentlemen today up here. And we have one hand up already. What I will do is make notes about who is first, second, whatever, and then I will signal you before I call you. And since we only have - we don't have a microphone out there. I think I will have to repeat the question so that we get something in the transcript. And I have first here and then there, and then - please, Jeff.
Q: I agree with the central points made by all of the panelists, and therefore I'd like to ask for comments on what kind of course direction might be possible in the next two years because my big concern is that I see a very strong intention coming out of the administration and all the neo-con crowd that there is a couple of more wars left before they leave office. Iran is an obvious primary target. And I was late getting here this morning because I'm getting reports from people in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East that we're about to launch some covert operations in the West Bank and perhaps in Lebanon since the - (inaudible) - visit here.
So I see a lot more mischief. And if we've antagonized the entire Sunni world, it looks to me like we're about to do the same thing with the Shi'ites through various options for attacks on the Rune (ph). So what do we do now and over the next two years to prevent ourselves from being in a far, far worse predicament because of exactly this false concept of a global war on terror?
MR. FREEMAN: I knew someone was going to ask what we should do. (Laughter.) Oh, drat! I'm sure there are lots of ideas about both the other wars that we should fight and the other people we should offend. And I'd like to ask that maybe Ian, since you went first, you start the response, but I'm sure everyone will have something to say.
MR. LUSTICK: Edward noted that fact that there have been no attacks is pointed to by the terrorism industry as evidence that their elephant gun is working. But, of course, if the opposite would be true, if there would be an attack, that would be used to even greater effect to increase the price of elephant guns. So the fact is we're likely to have something happen, some shopping malls shot up by someone with a Muslim name, at least. We have to be prepared for this war on terror to get even more powerful, to be reinvigorated, and so your question is very apt.
What I think is in - before an election it is impossible to do anything very dramatic because politicians, by the very logic of the war on terror - and my argument is it's not a metaphor; this is a real thing. The war on terror exists as itself and protects itself. And it uses us - it uses politicians, universities, industries to do that. After an election in which there's an opportunity in at least perhaps one house of Congress for a culture of truth to emerge, where you start to talk about being suckered - the American public has been suckered for too long. We have to look things in the face. We have to look at reality and stop being suckered by Shi'a, by Kurds, by the Iranians, by the neo-cons. We're going to stop this. That kind of trope could have an effect.
I want to say one other thing, that I regret to say that the two elements in the American polity that have in a way the function, a privilege - on one end, professors have tenure, the press has certain immunities. Those are the two institutions that should have been on watch for what was actually going on with the war on terror - early on, not just the war in Iraq, but the war on terror - and they fell down on the job. They became part of it. And those two institutions have to begin to speak truthfully against the grain of what their audiences expect to hear or can even tolerate hearing.
MR. FREEMAN: Ivan.
MR. ELAND: Yes, I'd like to make three points. First of all, I don't want to defend President Bush and the neo-cons but frankly, I think sometimes liberals forget that Clinton was a champion of intervention, too. For some, you know - I admit that Bush has really gotten us into a big quagmire and has put ground troops in - which Clinton, I think, learned his lesson after Somalia that you had to be very careful about putting ground troops anywhere.
But, I mean, Clinton was involved in many interventions. I think he might be the modern king of interventions. They were all small, but all this builds up. And I think the policy is not just the neo-cans. I mean, if we get Hilary Clinton as president in 2008 or some other Democrat, you're going to see the same basic policy. The neo-cans come at it from the right and they say they're - you know, they say they're taking a little more unilateralist position or a little bit more U.S. interest position, whereas the Democrats are soft-headed humanitarian intervention types.
But it all goes to the same place. I mean, they - you saw humanitarian and democracy rationale for intervening in Iraq when the weapons of mass destruction and the al Qaeda link fell through. So, you know, we just shop these rationales around and when one - you know, we put out there - it's like a prosecutor prosecuting somebody. You just put up all the reasons that you want to do these things and then when some of them fall away you just rely on the ones that - you say, oh, we talked about that all the time, right? And that's what they've done with the democracy thing.
But the media pretends like the democracy thing was their main reason for doing this in the first place. So I don't think it's a neo-con problem; I think it's a structural problem with U.S. foreign policy after WWII, the interventionist foreign policy. So I think we need to quit that.
The problem with terrorism is it's a low probability of threat but it's very difficult to deter and we have a big country with a lot of targets and open borders. And so Homeland Security can only do so much and probably can't do much at all if the terrorists - like why would you bring a nuclear bomb in in a container when they can go down to the gangplank marina down here and bring it in on a private yacht? There's nobody watching that. I mean, why would you put it in a container? So all the homeland security is directed towards that.
So really, the only thing that you have left - and if this broad global war on terror against every terrorist group, most of which don't attack the U.S. and countries like Iraq - if that gins up more terrorism, okay, that's kind of out. So the Homeland Security is only going to get you so far. So what do you do?
Well, I think the only thing that you can do is to the extent that you can reduce unnecessary interventions, which drives the terrorism - there's no doubt about that in my mind. I think that the empirical data show that. And the second thing is you do have to use the warfare - I'm not saying you have to go with law enforcement exclusively - I think law enforcement should lead - but if you do have to hit military targets, you need to run a quiet war against specific groups. The war on al Qaeda might be better, if you have to call it a war at all, but use Special Forces, CIA, and the shadows.
But, of course, this war on terrorists is primarily for domestic consumption, and it's counterproductive and it's not really providing us security because it's creating the terrorism that it's suppose to be doing away with.
MR. FREEMAN: I think I saw Ed Luttwak stirring, and so I'd like to invite him to the podium.
I just would note that there is fundamental question, as you point out Ivan, about whether Americans really understand how to employ power. There are moments in history when intervention is entirely appropriate and justified. Like Dr. Luttwak, I have encountered wars I thought were entirely justified. So the question is, when is it justified and when not and when is it efficacious and when is it not? And it probably has something to do with distinctions between interests and values. It's important to defend values; it's not terribly efficient or useful to try impose them on other people. It's very important to try advance and defend your interests, but we don't now make these distinctions very clearly in our thinking on either side of the political aisle.
Please, Ed.
MR. LUTTWAK: Interestingly, this question about values and interests was addressed by George Washington, who said, yes, interests we defend; values we can only proffer. Well, I think the remedies to the current situation have to be functional. We need to encourage and support actions that will restore our civil liberties, which have been compromised in the name of this phantom action against these phantom threats. To concede the loss of civil liberties for a bunch of fly-bitten losers is absurd. It was bad enough in the Cold War, and the Soviet enemy was a serious enemy.
So we need to do everything possible to, say, not engage in a general discussion, but just to say, you know, we're in favor of everything you want to do, et cetera, et cetera, but just give me back my civil liberties; the threat doesn't warrant the loss thereof. The other approach would be, again, to say, oh, we agree with everything. We are not controversial at all. We just want you to defund TSA because TSA is absurd. Anybody who goes through airports knows how ridiculous they are. They'll find a bomb if you attach it to a pair of nail clippers. (Laughter.) If you don't attach the bomb to a pair of nail clippers, they won't find the bomb. What they do is absurd. Every expert does it. Read the Aviation Week and Space Technology - have the detail on that. So we have to say, oh, we're not against anything; we just want you to defund TSA.
Somebody mentioned a yacht. Well, I happen to know something about sailing yachts, and I can guarantee you that you can enter any sensitive place in the United States that is not lost in the Midwest with a yacht - wipe it out and all that. We have to, again, take a functional attitude to all these things. But it doesn't mean that - because we are engaged in something hopeless in Afghanistan or something hopeless in Iraq, it doesn't mean that, as Chas. Freeman pointed out, we should become anti-interventionist. Interventionism has worked very well for us historically.
Iran might be a case in point. When you're going to Iran, you're not going to invade Iran. Iran has the advantage of being very large and discourages invasions. But you might want to destroy 72 buildings in four locations that would set them back four years in acquiring a nuclear weapon. That might be a very worthwhile investment to do. After all, in four years anything can happen. You know, their regime might change; our regime might change, you know, nuclear weapons might go out of fashion. Who knows?
And that brings us to the final point. Not only, as George Washington pointed out, we should fight to protect our interests and our liberties, but we should never fight to impose our values. But also, we have a limitation about tools. We don't have an effective global intelligence operation, we have very good diplomats, we have competent military, and we happen not to have a national talent for human intelligence; therefore we're not doing well. But we can destroy buildings. We know how to find them and destroy them. The 17 reasons we're failing in the struggle against terrorism itself is because we're not good at hitting things that are not high-contrast, stable targets. And that is an additional limitation that we should accept.
And so that would be my approach to these things. Thank you.
MR. FREEMAN: Randy, I want to ask you to the podium. I'm beginning to get the sense, however, that just as the errors or incapacities of American national security policy are bipartisan, so too are that answers and the objections. Left and right agree on doing some very stupid things, but they also seem to agree on doing some intelligent things.
MR. BEERS: Yes, I've got a few more thoughts but very much agree with most of what was said.
I think - and Ian has actually raised this issue at the beginning - we really need to both reduce the rhetoric associated with this effort, but also recognize in so doing that what we're really talking about is a risk management problem: to define what the risks are and then to manage them, recognizing that we are never going to be perfect or successful. Unfortunately, both of those notions require that we restore some degree of civility to the political process in this country, lest one side or the other simply seek to use their recommendations or notions as a way to obtain political advantage.
In addition, I think we obviously need to reduce our presence in Iraq, particularly our combat forces, in a way that is not entirely producing or expanding the level of chaos there, although it's difficult to contemplate how it could be made much worse. And lastly, I think we need, especially working with others, to offer additional opportunities in the Islamic world. And I couldn't agree more with Ed. Democracy may be a worthy goal, but it's certainly not near term, and it may not be possible in any reasonable timeframe, if at all. So the opportunities, then, are not, let's bring democracy immediately, but let's give opportunity immediately.
The Arab Human Development report talked about expanding education in the Islamic world. That's an opportunity. Expanding cyberspace in the Islamic world is another opportunity. Interestingly enough, both of them are undermining fundamental principles that al Qaeda would espouse. So we are using things that we can do and we can manage in order to reduce their ability to appeal.
MR. FREEMAN: Sir - and tell us who you are.
Q: I wish there were -
MR. FREEMAN: Could you tell us who you are.
Q: I'm Rick Lampert (sp) -
MR. FREEMAN: Okay.
Q: - affiliation, the University of Michigan.
MR. FREEMAN: Right.
Q: I wish there were a bona fide - (inaudible) - warrior on the panel so we could hear some opposing views. I think that's a real lack. I am not the best person to be that, since I agree with about 95 to 99 percent of what is said. But in one small way I'll try to do that, and I'll use my target Ian, in part because I thought he gave a marvelous talk - eloquent and just so on point in many ways but I do differ in one respect. And that is, I think you made too much of the statistical infrequency and unlikelihood of terrorist attacks.
Not only was there 9/11, there was a Spanish bombing, there London subway bombing. The liquid bomb threat appears to be real. The Toronto 17 was real and amidst all the psuedo arrests that we've had in this country and highly publicized empty arrests, there are probably one or two people that represented real threats. And when you have something like 9/11 - I mean, if you count the losses, the economic losses, they are beginning to pale next to Iraq.
Nonetheless, when you look at the emotional cost - for example, when you look at the people put in real genuine fear, whose lives were disrupted, and you look at the - (inaudible) - life, you see people within a hundred miles of New York City; many of them actually suffered. So these are real effects. There is a real, I think, ongoing effort to duplicate 9/11. There is a real necessity to be doing some things about it. I thought we heard an almost - (inaudible) - to downplay it. You are hurting the conversation that we have to have, that puts these real effects in perspective. It does not denigrate them because statistically there are unlikely - well, if we really count up the economic harm, and if we really count up all the lives lost, it's much less than the result of a reaction.
So the question - I can put it that way - is how do we balance the unreality as much in our response with the need to have a real response to what are real threats?
MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. I will say that I'm somewhat shocked that there is the level of agreement in the panel that there appears to be, and it shows I think, that there may be some meeting of the minds across the normal political barriers coalescing around the very issues that Ian raised at the outset. Your question of how we balance the unreality of some of our response with the reality of threats is a good one. Ian, please take the lead.
MR. LUSTICK: First let me echo what Chas. just said. I think it is instructive, and I find it instructive when I speak, to find how much agreement there is. It's an agreement that comes out of people with the idea that, gee, this is what I sort of thought but never actually said or heard anybody say. It's kind of what is called in social science a spiral of silence. It's the "Emperor's New Clothes" phenomenon; everybody believes something but nobody can actually say it or have the reason to say it.
But let me respond to Rick Lampert. Part of what I'm trying to do is to focus attention on the real threats. I deal in the book with the real possibility of al Qaeda and al Qaeda clones using weapons of mass destruction against us. If they do so, any chance we have had or will have to prevent it will be drastically reduced by the utter politicization, waste and diffusion of the energy and attention of our country. The way you deal with those threats is in deep cooperation with allies in South Asia, in the Middle East, in Europe who are put off or alienated, rendered incapable of cooperating with us because of our politicization of the war on terror. To the extent that the last threat - alleged plot from London was real, it's important to note that the British absolutely reject the idea of being in a war on terror.
The first thing the president said was, this validates that war on terror. As far as the - let's go into the specific example you gave, that there were real effects of 9/11. I'd be the last person to deny that. But I would still argue that what you interpret as the real effects of 9/11, hugely are a function of the American government's response to it. I was brought in to help organize a conference of social sciences - which I think Rick is familiar with - to help the FBI and the intelligence community, some months after 9/11, cope with the difficulty of making judgments in an atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty and great risk. What would social scientist say about this?
The first recommendation I made to the organizers, relatively high up in the FBI, was advise the media to stop showing, several times a day, the airplanes hitting the towers and destroying them because that is creating the false image, psychologically, that this has always happening and about to happen to me, and thereby distorting the American psyche in its expectation of what kind of a threat it faces and the trauma that it will feel and the distortion that that trauma will subsequently produce.
Well, the response I got to that, and that was in the fall of 2001 already, was that was the first thing we thought of - one of the first things - and we recommended it, and that recommendation was rejected as a result of intervention by very high political echelons who wanted to keep the political anxiety level in the country high. Why? They were headed for a war in Iraq and they needed that umbrella. So when we talk about the traumatization of Americans, whether it's psychological or economic, by 9/11, I consider that most of that trauma is the result of the American response to it.
And if I may just add one more note on what to do. The way our war on terror is organized, it is that we are as if submerged in a pot of water that is being heated, and our job as counterterrorists is to find the molecules that are about to burst into steam and get them before they do. No question some are about to burst into steam, but they all look the same and it's driving us nuts trying to decide which one is about to burst. There's an obvious answer to what to do in a situation like that: reduce the heat under the pot.
Those policies of intervention - but not necessarily the kinds of intervention that come to mind, the kinds of political intervention and economic intervention that sustains Muslim grievances - all we need to do to make a much bigger contribution to lowering the threat of terrorism in the world is to move quickly and effectively on the Palestinian-Israeli issue. That's the single most important thing that can drain the oxygen out of the rooms that al Qaeda operates in. It's not because al Qaeda cares particularly about the Palestinians, but that's the way politics in the Middle East works.
So, again, if you want to worry not about the war on terror, which is what I'm mainly worried about, but on terrorism itself, which I'm also worried about, lower the temperature under the pot.
MR. FREEMAN: Ivan.
MR. ELAND: Yes, I'll just be quick here. I just want to reinforce what Ian just said. I think that it's the duty of analysts and social scientists to deal with statistics, and if - you know, you say, well, we deal with the real effect; yes, we had 3,000 people killed or almost, and we had some economic dislocation, but the problem is there are greater issues here with civil liberties and that sort of thing, which can be dredged up by this media frenzy, and of course the politicians and the bureaucracies get involved too. So I think we - you know, I give these statistics out of the 1 in 80,000 - and there are some others I have - that it's a very rare phenomenon.
But, you know, then the discussion just keeps going because terrorism is such a sexy issue that everybody wants to talk about it because there's a diabolical enemy. We need to pay attention to statistics and people need to - the average citizen needs to be aware, especially if they live in North Dakota or Missouri and they live in a rural area, that they have probably absolutely no chance of being ever killed by a terrorist. And people have to react on the basis of facts and not what we see in the media because, you know - and the government should apply this not only to terrorism but everything else.
I mean, if you want to live a long life, don't worry about getting killed by terrorists or AIDS; what you should do is eat right, don't smoke, wear your safety belt, and, you know, whatever. You know, I mean those are things that kill people. And so that's what we need to do. And we do need to pay attention to statistics and a rational analysis, I think.
MR. FREEMAN: And drink lots of red wine. Please. (Laughter.)
MR. ELAND: Absolutely. I don't think that we're necessarily saying that we should cease all of the kinetic efforts to go after terrorists. I think what we're trying to say collectively is that terrorism is a tactic in asymmetric warfare or conflict, and that it is not likely to disappear. That said, we have a strategy for dealing with a similar problem and it's called crime, which is we have responses and we have prevention tactics, and we try to use them in a way that, as Ed said, doesn't totally disrupt our society. And the question here is the question of balance, not to cease doing one thing and start doing something else, and I think that that's what we're saying.
And lastly, and something we didn't talk about that really does need to be attended to, and that is the very real threat of weapons of mass destruction, particularly fissile material that's lying around the world that could be use by terrorists and make them much more capable. We need to be paying a lot more attention to making sure that that material is far more secure than it is today.
MR. FREEMAN: Ed.
MR. LUTTWAK: I'm very glad for your intervention. Let me just mention a few things that have been very effective and are being very effective. The Italians organized a southeast Europe consortium to block the transits from Tunisia to Sicily, from Albania to southeast Italy, from Sarajevo and south Bosnia to northeast Italy, with the Slovenians, the Swiss, and the Austrians. They intercepted 328 people who were seriously dangerous as direct operators, or supporters - physical supporters who provided their skills.
That was a very nice thing, and until they stop coming because they all went to Iraq instead, they intercepted them. The Italians were very exposed because Berlusconi sided strongly with the United States and very strongly with Israel, and there was no terrorist attack. The Spanish took a rather silly attitude in that regard because they were warned one year before, 2004 - they were warned by the Italians specifically to go and arrest certain people, and they wouldn't. And they were the very people arrested the day after, and so the Italians did get the right guys.
The United States is now doing something very effective. It's being ineffective in 17 different ways but, for example, very effective thing is the FBI people visiting mosques all over the United States, leaving their visiting cards with a phone number. Everybody in these places has a brother or cousin who needs help with immigration authorities so they call the FBI whenever anybody comes near being a threat.
The Canadians were very slack, and two years ago started getting serious, implementing a similar program, of just distributing visiting cards with phone numbers. The immigrant community likes to feel close to the authorities so they will denounce people who are real threats or potential threats and of course their personal enemies, but it all kind of helps.
So what it all means is the threat to terrorism is very real and there are real responses and those real responses have nothing to do with invading Iraq or occupying Afghanistan or acquiring ballistic-missile, nuclear-powered submarines that launch nuclear ballistic missiles and justifying it under the counterterrorism budget.
Q: All right. Thanks Brian. I think that's really interesting, important work.
MR. FREEMAN: Oh, could you tell us who you are please?
Q: I'm Diane Pearlman.
MR. FREEMAN: Okay.
Q: I'm a clinical, political psychologist. (Audio break) - talk about the lie and that U.N. documentation and you both have had statistics about correlations and that instead of focusing on the inside, that we could - I - (inaudible) - speech. We use counterterrorism and terror reduction, that we can't - (inaudible) - but you can drastically reduce it.
MR. FREEMAN: So the question for Ian is whether he would say a few more words about terror reduction versus the suppression of terror -- dealing with the demand side rather than the supply side. I think it's fair to note there are some very interesting statistics from places like Iraq. About one percent of our deaths are from suicide bombers; two percent are from the drivers of suicide vehicles; that's three percent. The rest of the deaths are not from these causes.
Suicide bombing remains a very limited phenomenon -- most common, actually, in Sri Lanka. It's not perpetrated by Muslims there but by Hindus, the Tamil Elam. And interestingly, 10 percent of the French casualties against the Viet Minh were from suicide bombers. So this is nothing about suicide bombing that's particularly related to Islam or to anything else. Having said that, I do hope someone will comment and I will make a brief comment, probably to stimulate discussion.
Anent Luttwak's illusions to the pattern of conflicts between Muslim populations and neighbors, which is quite ubiquitious at present, I think I would say that Islam is having a bad century, just as Christianity has had several bad centuries. Ask any of the inhabitants of the West Indies who survived or the people in Mexico, in Peru about that. If you want verification, there's nobody left in North America since we did a very thorough ethnic cleansing -- Nobody left but us. And I would say that people like Avigdor Lieberman in Israel are not exactly exemplars of the sort of Judaism that I admire.
So everybody is having a bit of a bad time and we probably all need to think and reach within ourselves to find answers to some of the pathologies that we all, to one extent or another suffer from and perhaps, some more than others, as Ed suggest. Hang on. Ian.
MR. LUSTICK: On those points and the very provocative and interesting comments that Ed made about Islam. He also talked about the fact that we've essentially invaded the 13th century in France, which is to say that it's a space, time continuum we should be operating on and if you do that, then it 's just insupportable to say that Islam, as a religion, has an affinity with aggression against others compared to other religions. Whether it's their having a bad century or it's the circumstances that many Muslims have found themselves in throughout the world and the aftermath of imperialism. And the in other context, this happens to be driving in that direction is a very good question. Certainly if you went back to the 15th century, it would be Christian Catholicism that looked as if it were intrinsically warlike and vicious even if now Catholic Latin America is not producing lots of terrorists.
I agree that most of the terrorism and most of the violence is not suicide violence and I don't draw the distinction and I'm not so interested in the distinction between suicide versus other non-suicide bombs. If you train people to drop behind enemy lines from an airplane in a night, in Nazi-Germany, and there's a 95 percent chance of being killed, is that a suicide mission? Well, not technically.
But if Sampson says, I'm pulling down the temple of the Philistines, I want to die with my enemies and kills thousands of Philistines; men, women, and children worshipers, is that suicide bombing or is that - I'm not really so interested in that but I do think that if you are interested in, there's a historical fact that as a technique, it diffused out of Hezbollah's use. Successfully it appeared in Lebanon, went into the West Bank in Gaza, and then we've seen, though, many, many, many, I think 10 times as many Iraqis have been killed by suicide bombers than have been killed in Israel.
In the last few years in Iraq, compared to all of the years in Israel, so now I don't believe that the terrorism that Al Qaeda is involved in is tied to occupation per se. No. Occupations give them leverage with their audiences for whom occupation and re-spun as continued imperialism or Zionist crusader oppression, gives them what they need in a very affective way to blend Islamic appeal, Jihadi appeals with nationalist appeals.
So I don't believe that there's any particular water that these Jihadis carry for the Palestinians whatsoever. But there has been no issue that they have concentrated on more in their propaganda than that one and for good reason, from their own political point of view. If you're going to make people - if you're going to try to get people to side with you, connect with what they feel angry about. And masses of Muslims all over the world are furious and have been furious at the images they see of Israeli brutality against Palestinians and the identification of the United States with those policies.
So whether you - if you're Al Qaeda, care very much about the Palestinians or not, you'd be idiotic, and they aren't as we heard, they're very politically savvy not to exploit that issue. There's an excellent book - the best one that I know on Al Qaeda, "The Far Enemy", which I recommend and that would give you the analysis of the relationship between the appeals on the Arab-Israeli issue and Al Qaeda's rise to power.
MR. LUTTWAK: Well, I mean, I do understand why everybody talks about these things, but since we have an appeal here about numbers, the principal - as far as terrorist actions in the real world out there, we have the Dao Boundy (sp) movement, which is of course as you know, interestingly enough an Urdu-speaking movement, which emphasizes the teaching of Urdu in the Dar al-Ulum school, NUP, and the 14,000 or so Dar al-Ulum schools around the world. Their focus of course is Kashmir. It has nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli issue; Kashmir is the focus. They have been maintaining a lively level of violence. You know, in all of the Arab-Israeli wars since 1898, about 50,000 people have died. Those numbers are trivial numbers compared to the - you know, the subcontinents in -
MR. FREEMAN: Partition.
MR. LUTTWAK: Well, yeah, partition everything else, which is all there. And the other thing is, please don't talk about the 15th century because missionary religions that believe that saving others from the eternal fires of hell is much more important than their corporal existence. You know, have - we know who they are. I am the head of the little-known World League Against Missionary Religions - (laughter) - which has at least one member.
But the fact is, you know, as a professor at the university, you cannot ignore the fact that we have seventh-century record about Islam, and an eight-century record, a ninth-century record, and so it goes before 1948 and all of that.
The other thing is, I am influenced by the last job I just did. I happen to work in this field, you see. My contempt for what is going on is because I have been working in this very field, with people really doing real things against real threats. I have interrogated many of these people that have been locked up, you know. And the fact is that right now the violence is in Maluku, and it is in these places which have nothing to do with the Middle East.
So harping on the Middle East, and talking about as if this is - is just wrong historically and factually. Let's be - adhere to the truth whatever else we do. And, you know, we have to recognize that there is a reality. The missionary religions believe that your eternal life is more important than your temporal brief life, or have been the source of great violence. And as it happens, the Christians are quiescent right now, and the Muslims are very active right now. And I agree - as I say, I functionally agree with everybody including the dominant thought you have, professor, which is to reduce the temperature instead of trying to trap the individual molecules.
I have been in a business of trapping the individual molecules. I wish somebody would reduce the temperature in the boiling part. The fact is that their motivation have nothing - nothing to do with any of this. You know, they really don't have anything to do with it. If a bad foreign policy were to cause terrorism, we would have had terrorism from any other direction. There is a real problem there. It cannot be just ignored in the name of this American belief that all religions are equally good. As I say, they are not even equally bad, and that is part of the reality we must confront.
MR. FREEMAN: Randy, do you want to come in?
MR. BEERS: Just a short comment. As I appreciate bin Laden and his world view, it is that he began his campaign initially focused on the apostate rulers of Saudi Arabia who he felt were unworthy of being the guardians of the holy places of Islam, and came to appreciate that the United States was as a principal backer of the Saudis, some force that he had to take of in order to deal with the Saudi rules. This is the near-enemy-far-enemy thesis, and that in that original formulation, the Arab-Israeli dispute was not a central issue. But I think as we have discussed have become a useful tactic in terms of expanding the capability to mobilize Muslims around the world because it is a issue that is often in front of them through the various media that they see. I don't think that solving the Arab-Israeli dispute would make al Qaeda go away. It might have some effect, but I don't think it would make it go away.
MR. FREEMAN: Ivan?
MR. ELAND: Yeah, I agree with that last point. The problem that you have I think with getting involved in the Arab - Israeli-Palestinian is that it might lower the boiling - lower the temperature of the pot, but it may inflame some of the molecules because if this is perceived as a U.S. coerced, or U.S. - well, I should say Israeli-friendly settlement that the U.S. has pushed the parties together, and of course the U.S. is perceived as pro-Israel in the Arab world.
But to me, it's better to stay out of it. I don't think - I think it's an intractable problem. We keep banging our heads against the wall trying to solve it. And very frankly, if the agreement that we would get could inflame other sectors because they thought, oh, to sell out - or they have sold out to the Israelis and the U.S. pressured them, et cetera.
And I think - another point is I think, as far as the terrorism goes, Islam - the effect of this being a problem with Muslims has been overstated. As Chas. mentioned, suicide bombing was invented in Sri Lanka. And also Payte (sp) makes a very convincing argument using statistical analysis and a database of suicide bombings, that this is more about occupation. They use - it's a very sophisticated technique. They use suicide bombing - the occupied use it against the occupiers, and the occupiers are usually democracies, and they feel that suicide bombing can have the effect of pulling out the troops. So it has less to do with an Islamic factor than a nationalist reaction to occupation.
And also, there is this idea that bin Laden is trying to create this caliphate, bring back the caliphate, whatever. But only 6 percent of Muslims and Arabs when polled would support this. And also, these people are poor compared to the Soviet Union and other threats that we faced in the past. So I think this idea that some of the hawks bring up a bad well, this is like, you know, some sort of -Islamo-fascism is the word they like to use. But, I mean, only 6 percent of Muslims support this, and also, it would be a very poor caliphate indeed compared to threats that we faced in the past.
Finally, I would like to know - and I always have to interject this in. We talk about all of these threats, Muslim against non-Muslims or whatever, but I always want to know, if I'm a U.S. citizen, what are our U.S. interests in some of these places if Muslims are attacking non-Muslims. What are our interests, and why do we need to be involved in that place. Let's concentrate - I think we would be all better off if we concentrated on the threats that are attacking the United States, concentrate on neutralizing al Qaeda, not attacking other - most of the groups or acting against most of the other groups on the terrorism list, which don't even attack U.S. targets - are making more enemies.
And I want to find a link to U.S. interests and U.S. security. And most of the places after the Cold War really don't affect U.S. security. And our foreign policy establishment here in Washington tries to find reasons to go into places that we really don't need to. And there is pressure from various groups to go into Darfur and other places, and I just don't - you know, I just don't see the need for that unless U.S. Security is threatened.
MR. FREEMAN: Ivan advised that we should stay out of the Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab conflict. I'm not quite sure you meant what you said because we are heavily involved. We subsidize the state of Israel heavily. We provide its weaponry. We support it in the U.N. and protect it from its detractors.
MR. ELAND: No, I was advocating getting out.
MR. FREEMAN: I see. Well, I know you have the courage of your convictions, but I just want to point out that we are heavily involved. And the one thing we are not doing at the moment is assessing our own interests and trying to persuade the Israelis to take account of them. And I think we have been running a vast experiment, letting the Israelis do whatever they want to do, and offering carte blanche for that. And the results of that experiment have not been very encouraging, to say the least.
The second point I would make is that it's a very odd situation when we have to invent an ideology for our enemies. The concept of Islamo-fascism exists only in our minds. (Laughter.) This is a sad commentary on the nature of the struggle we have been talking about. We are unable, apparently, to understand that there are real enemies out there with real grievances. We have to come up with some sort of parody of communism or nazism to energize our opposition to them.
Finally I want to go back to Dr. Perlman's (sp) earlier comment. By the way, anyone who wishes to ask a question is welcome to do so, but I would note that you referred to weapons of mass destruction, the loose-nukes problem, this sort of issue. One of the most instructive elements about 9/11 was that it came at the end of a great national discussion and commitment to a missile defense program.
We were focusing on the problem of, you name it, North Korea, or perhaps North Korea was a surrogate for China, attacking us with a nuclear weapon on an ICBM. But it turned out that clever people hiding in the caves of Afghanistan and practicing - planning in Germany and practicing on airfields in the United States could take a Boeing aircraft and turn it into a cruise missile. So it's not that the bomb would be attached to the toenail clippers, but that someone might figure out a way to use toenail clippers to our disadvantage. And at some point, there will be someone who uses his hands on an aircraft, and then we will all have to board the aircraft manacled - (laughter) - because hands will be forbidden.
So we have a problem, which is clearly not going to be solved by the technical means that have proven so good for the military-industrial complex, and now the terror-industrial complex that Ian described. We have a problem which embraces the fire under the pot. One element that is fueling that pot, but not by any means the only one, is the Arab-Israeli dispute. I think I agree with Randy; if the Arab-Israeli dispute were to disappear, there are many other issues that disturb people, with which we are intimately involved, that would leave us still subject to threat of action against our homeland.
Ed, please, come to the -
MR. LUTTWAK: As far as - Islamo-fascism is - I don't think it is very useful. But I think we should do something about - I think the idea of attacking them ideologically is a good one. Islamo-fascism might be a particularly bad way of doing it. I would favor Islamo-Puritanism. (Laughter.) Islamo-Puritanism may also not be a good phrase, but there should be some other way of evoking this because in my work, I have been primarily working of course with Muslim, you know, Muslims of all kinds that have been supporting the operations I have been doing - Muslim policemen, Muslim security men, Muslims citizens, drivers, people who are very happy to be so, because of course I do think Islam is a big problem, but I - most Muslims - of course, like, 99.9 percent of them do not participate in terrorism. Some of them support it verbally, particularly people like the Palestinians because they have - they never miss an opportunity to vote for the wrong party, so to speak.
But the fact is that what drives people against al Qaeda and all of its clones and copies, and so on, is the Puritanism, is the fact that the moment they say support our struggle for Kashmir or for Nigeria in imposing shari'a, and stuff. And people say, yes, I support that, because people like the idea of fighting and jihad and so on.
But then these guys turn around to say, don't listen to cassettes of Indonesian pop music, which is particularly good pop music, by the way. Or they tell them don't have cassettes - music cassettes at your weddings, and otherwise we'll slit your throats. You know, thousands of Nigerians have died at weddings because these Islamo-Puritans, whatever we call them, came in and interrupted Kabul (?) because music is an integral part of the Berber Kabul wedding, and so on.
Many more Algerians have died because of terrorism - what is it, 37 times more than Americans, attacked by other - by the GIA people whose political agenda, many people, though not the Kabuls would support. So they - so we have an enemy that is I think very vulnerable and should be attacked ideologically on that ground, and it is the reason why of course Muslims who may be inclined to support in a general way warfare against non-Muslims because it's legitimized by jihad, and it is legitimized by jihad, and let's not pretend it isn't, nevertheless are against these guys partly because they have no solutions to any of their real-life problems, but largely because they want to impose their completely synthetic, and imagined, and historically untrue version of life in seventh century, a Hejaz on the way of life of real existing Muslims around the world.
So all of these things I think we should exploit. So I think we can do more than reduce the temperature by being less interventionist; we can also be posited by attacking them ideologically.
MR. FREEMAN: Let me invite others to comment on that. But I would like to embrace your point and redirect it slightly. I think it is very clear that this struggle does require a heavy element of ideology to be successfully prosecuting in either direction. And as the descendent of puritans, by the way, referring to the space-time continuum that Ian mentioned, I stand before you as an example of how gluttony and lust can overcome Puritanism - (laughter) - if given sufficient opportunity. So there is hope.
But I would say specifically on the issue of ideological counters to extremism, that Americans are not the best spokespersons for this. And to say what you have said is to make a very important appeal for the importance of allies in the Muslim world and in the Muslim community because this is a struggle within Islam, as you have suggested. It is not that these people plan to convert the heathen in Iowa to their version of religion, but that they plan to convert their fellow Muslims to this version of religion.
And here I want to say a kind word for a country that never receives a kind word, which is Saudi Arabia, which is winning its struggle with terrorists, because it is attacking this problem on three levels. It has driven the extremists from the pulpits in the mosques, sometimes in rather unpleasant ways, but nonetheless, it has discredited the ideology that they had been preaching. It has amnestied, co-opted, bribed, if you wish, whatever, a fair number of people, or intimidated a fair number of people who were on the path who were on the path becoming terrorists, to step off that path and to integrate themselves in society. And it is killing anybody who actually does become a terrorist, and doing so very ruthlessly and efficiently.
And as part of the process - and I think this illustrates the importance of Ed's point, the Saudi prison system, which contains a fair number of people who were detained for cooperation with terrorists, relies heavily on religious instruction of the inmates to persuade them that they are morally incorrect to take the position that they do, and that in fact they are not behaving in a manner consistent with Islam but against it.
This program has been so successful that the United Kingdom has imported people from Saudi Arabia to do the same in British prisons where the problem has been everywhere the opposite, that in a prison environment the extremist versions of religion tend to prosper.
So I think the question is can we find allies, can we demonstrate tact and the empathy and understanding necessary to enlist others to make the very points that we would like to make but probably are disqualified from making.
And I'm sorry, there was somebody out here - yes.
Q: I'd like to ask a kind of historically specific question because the panel has so much experience dealing with this question. I remember back in the 1980s being up on Capitol Hill and very frequently seeing people like Hekmatyar and others who paraded around, and heralded as freedom fighters for democracy. And at that time, we were I think rather cynically talking about the idea of playing the Islamic card against the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union, and, in fact, seeing Islamic fundamentalism rather naively and as a potential asset in the war that we were fighting at the time.
And in having looked at many of these very distant terrorist Islamic phenomenon that have emerged in the last decade, it was noteworthy to me, whether you look at Malaysia, Indonesia, Algeria, that - and of course al Qaeda with the Egyptian Islamic jihad group, that it seems that there was a common denominator in almost both of these phenomenon, that they all together in Algeria - or I'm sorry, in Afghanistan.
And I can't help wondering whether it's sort of a lessons-learned in trying to come up with improve strategies in this struggle against terrorism, whether it's not appropriate for us to look back and see that we made some really strategic boneheaded assumptions about being able to mess with fire, and then some of these problems may have been substantially worsened by our own, and some of our ally's enthusiasm for this weapon against the Soviets back then.
Is that still a factor that we are paying the price of, or was that something that is history and it's no longer relevant?
MR. FREEMAN: I guess the question really is whether the use of religion as an instrument of political warfare, which is something that we and others have attempted in the past, is still a factor in any sense, and this has a long history going back millennia. But, you know, Frederick the Great had some things to say about this, which are very instructive. Shin Bet had something to do with the formation of Hamas as a firebreak against the determinedly secular PLO, and the United States had a good deal to do, as you suggest, with fostering Islamic extremism and arming it in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union -- with notable success, by the way. We brought down the Soviet Union.
But no good deed does go unpunished, and now we are dealing with the consequences in many places of misguided efforts to use religion for political purposes. I think probably several of the panelists will want to comment. And I don't know; who wants to start? Ed?
MR. LUTTWAK: Well, thought Randy here might -
MR. BEERS: Oh, I will.
MR. LUTTWAK: (Cross talk, laughter.)
In 1981, Lally Weymouth, who is a very talented journalist, handicapped by being the daughter of the owner of the paper she used to write for - a very talented journalists interviewed Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in 1981 and said in the - anybody who read the interview - it was an interview, not an editorial - made it already clear that Soviet rule over Afghanistan will be less injurious to human rights than Gulbuddin's victory. However, as it happens, that was the time when fueled by the greatest intelligence blunder in history committed by the Soviet side, the Soviets believed that Ronald Reagan was out to wage nuclear war against them at the very time when Ronald Reagan had just - was the first American president who flatly said he would never use the nuclear weapon, even if the United States was attacked with nuclear weapons.
Because of that context, we were fighting a Cold War. That was the imperative of the time. Many people recognized - anybody who went to Afghanistan, as I did, recognized that Lally was totally correct, but we had an imperative, and it seemed much more important to defeat the Soviet Union by using whatever means were available, even though we knew exactly who our allies were, and how terrible they were. And by the way, the hero, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was the one that was particularly insistent on women being treated as domestic animals, incidentally, even though he wasn't as vicious as Gobodin (ph) in regards to attacking fellow Muslims in this struggle, and so on and so forth.
But, however, as I say, the problem goes back to the 7th century. We didn't start any of this stuff, and where most victims have occurred, such as Algeria and so on, this story had very little to do - the Algerian authorities keep saying that the group is Lamik Allme (ph), and the face, and so on, were all the product of Afghanistan. The fact of the matter is that the product of a government that insisted on Islamizing Algeria, and shutting down French Algeria and all of that stuff - I don't mean the French or the Imperialist French; I mean, French-speaking Algerian Arabs, while sending their own children only to American universities.
They were forcing Algerians to go to only Arabic school and not French school, while their own kids did not even know Arabic, and don't know Arabic. That was the regime that provoked that reaction. And the fact that a handful of them had been to Afghanistan really was not the driving factor, you know. So let us not fall into this notion, this typical American imperialist idea that we are the cause of all evil.
Now, a lot of evil has nothing to do with us, let me assure you, even though in Afghanistan, we most certainly play - consciously and knowingly supported people who were fanatics because finding non-fanatical people in Afghanistan was really an even more hopeless enterprise than to bring democracy in Iraq. Fanaticism was integral to the personality because, as you know, most of them are recent converts to Islam. Most Afghans, at least were converted to Islam within a century-and-a-half. That is not long religiously. They have the ardor of new converts.
In Nuristan, the first time I was there, there were still many people who were not Muslim, who have been Muslim since the time I was there, and I'm terribly old, but I'm not secular, you know, multi-secular.
MR. BEERS: A couple of points. One, I think that if you look at this kind of a situation from both a Clauswitzian or a realist perspective, and accept that war is an extension of politics by other means. The mixture of politics in religion always represents a level of conflict that you had better appreciate before you in fact begin to mix them. But if you really come from the realist school, you would also say that in some cases you may have to take politically expedient acts in order to achieve ends that you want, and accept the risk involved in that.
I remember sitting in the State Department at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and I can tell you that there was a great deal of serious concern in the U.S. government at that time about what the implication of that meant. And so as people tried to figure out how to respond during the Reagan administration, it was not surprising that that particular choice was made. But, Ed, you're absolutely right about Hekmatyar. He would have been much worse than the Soviets ever were in Afghanistan.
MR. FREEMAN: He is still there of course.
MR. BEERS: Yeah, I know, and we haven't been able to capture him.
MR. FREEMAN: I would just remark that sometimes, unlike what Clausewitz said, war is the entrenchment of policy failure by other means. (Laughter.)
Ivan.
MR. ELAND: Well, I think that the response - U.S. response in Afghanistan was a classic case of unintended consequences of your actions. We felt that we needed to battle the Soviet Union everywhere and anywhere. I mean, Afghanistan was an area that, in my view, wouldn't have been - shouldn't have been messing around in. And of course, after the Soviet Union has fallen, we have all of these people who say, well, you know, their invasion of Afghanistan really toppled the regime, but then of course we have the missile defense advocates who say, well, no, it was missile defense. This - which I think is pretty close to a preposterous claim since missile defense of strategic weapons are a very small portion of the budget.
So we get these ideas that we - the Soviet Union was somehow vanquished by Afghanistan or missile defense or whatever. And frankly, their economic system was just non-viable, and that is the main reason they collapsed. And I think - I'm sort of a realist minimalist, and what I would have done during the Cold War was make sure you safeguard Western Europe and Japan; let the Soviet Union have Vietnam, Korea, all of these places that were basket cases. If you want to over-extend them, which was the purpose of - the original objective of Kennan, let them have these places; let them pump billion of dollars into the economies to prop up these places, and let them have Afghanistan. And you would have had a lot less unintended consequences.
I think we're creating unintended consequences in Iraq as well, maybe along the same lines. It's a little difference obviously. We're trying to hold the country together instead of overthrow the government, but nonetheless, war has all of these unintended consequences, and when you start the ball rolling, you can't - you don't know where it's going to end up.
And so I think you really have to be careful in these situations, and I think that is the lesson, that it's something that sounded like a great idea at the time in a backwater area like Afghanistan has caused actually down the road, which would be very difficult to see, that one of the few threats to the American homeland that we have ever had. I guess Pearl Harbor and the War of 1812 would be the two others, or you count Pancho Villa, and Smalley (?), but we have had very few - we have had very few threats to the homeland over the period.
And so I think you want to avoid creating threats like that. And so, you know, there is an option to do nothing, and we don't take that option very often. We always - there is also a pressure to do this or that, and we just have to be careful that when we get involved in these things, they can spin out of control and have unintended consequences.
MR. FREEMAN: We began this section with Ian Lustick. I think we are probably coming to the end now. So I will ask Ian to close it. We began the session with Ian basically making the case that the trauma of 9/11 and the political advantage that it offered allowed a large number of special interests to hurl their pet rocks up on Capitol Hill and get money back. And I support there are a lot of pet rocks being hurled at the demise of the Soviet Union also, and we can never know exactly why things turned out the way they did, except we know that it was very irresponsible of them to drop dead -(laughter) - and we miss them greatly - and keep trying to invent somebody else to take their place.
So on that happy note, I will let Ian have the last word.
MR. LUSTICK: I want us to notice just briefly what has happened at this event about being trapped in the war on terror, or are we. We went from that topic more or less into how to fight terrorism, and from there we talked about, well, should we use ideology to fight terrorism? Yes, that is a good idea. Which ideology should we use? Islamo-Fascism; Islamo-Puritanism? It led us to the question of whether we could use Muslims to fight the Muslim terrorists, but then what trouble did we get in when we use Muslims to fight Muslim terrorists in Afghanistan, or to fight our wars there?
My point is that that the war on terror creates a discourse about the threat of terrorism so powerful, that it forces even this kind of symposium, this kind of a conversation toward an image of terrorism as a very, very central problem, when it's not. It is a problem, but it's not one that ought to be high on our list of priorities. We are forced into that. Really, the biggest problem we face with respect to this issue is that the war on terror is in trouble and needs evidence; it needs terrorist attacks. And the logic of my argument is that it will produce those attacks.
And in my book, I conclude with the discussion of the most likely way to do that, and that is to use - that the war on terror discourse will provide the opportunity for that supremacist cabal that had not yet laid down its fantasies to attack Iran. An attack on Iran will actually produce real terrorist attacks on our American homeland because they, contrary to the Iraqis and many others, actually know how to do it. And their representatives such as Hezbollah know how to do it.
One attack from the Middle East on the homeland, again, will, as I say, give another decade of life to the war on terror. So my point of view, we can both learn from the trajectory of this discussion interestingly about the war on terror itself and how it operates, and enliven our concern with the war on terror will move toward what it needs in order to sustain itself, not just more resources, but more evidence of the requirement that it exists.
MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. And I would like to ask everybody to join me in thanking the panelists.
(Applause.)
(END)
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