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Long on rhetoric, short on policy - -

By Amir Taheri

LONG ON RHETORIC, SHORT ON POLICY
by Amir Taheri
Gulf News
August 2, 2004

Special to Gulf News

Foreign policy, the Cinderella of American presidential politics, was expected to be at the centre of this year's duel between President George W Bush and the Democratic Party challenger Senator John F. Kerry.

The Democratic Party's platform had anticipated this by devoting almost half of its space to foreign policy. Kerry, in his acceptance speech on Thursday at the party's convention in Boston, raised the expectation by admitting that America was "a nation at war."

Nevertheless, Kerry's speech paid cursory attention to foreign policy. A text of over 5200 words devoted around 500 words to foreign policy issues in general and the war against terrorism in particular. Even then, Kerry used those words for sloganeering.

It is hard to guess what a Kerry administration might do on any of the key issues facing the US in the international arena. Kerry's speech revealed a man who, though vaguely conscious that the world has changed, prefers to assume that it has not.

"The world tonight is very different from the world of four years ago," Kerry told the convention. He added: "We are a nation at war – a global war on terror against an enemy unlike any we have known before."

And, yet, Kerry did not say in what ways the world was different. And when it came to dealing with this different world, he had little to offer but pre-9/11 the solutions. Nor was the Democratic nominee willing to define the nature of this war and point out why this "enemy" was unlike any that the US has known.

Involves more than a mood

Kerry's use of the phrase "the war on terror" instead of "the war against terrorism" was not accidental..

In "the war on terror" one is fighting against a mood, a perception, and an environment which need not have a particular author. In some circumstances, one does not need to face a terrorist to feel terrorised. The phrase "the war against terrorism", however is transitive. It is based on the assumption that there are real terrorists that have to be found, captured or killed.

It is important for the American to understand that what they face is a war that involves more than a mood. It involves real people, command structures, states that offer safe haven, global networks of finance and propaganda, and fifth columnists of various faiths and ideologies in many countries including the United States.

At the same time, however, this is a new type of war because it is not about territory, control of natural resources, access to markets, and/or other classical causes of trans-national conflict. This is an asymmetrical war in which old tactics of low intensity conflict have been redefined to allow the use of modern technologies.

How will a putative President Kerry fight this war? His answer is simple: "As president, I will wage this war with the lessons I learned in [the Vietnam] war," the senator told the convention. This is precisely the problem.

The lessons of Vietnam could be misleading in fighting the war against terrorism. In Vietnam the war was over territory: the Communists who had seized control of North Vietnam wanted to annex the south.

The US had intervened to prevent that and enable the South Vietnamese to choose a different future. That war was fought in Indochina, thousands of miles away from the US. The Vietcong would not send death-squads to kill Americans in New York and Washington. Nor did it dream of conquering the world for its ideology, whatever it might have been, or to force the entire humanity to adopt its beliefs.

At the same time the Vietcong enjoyed significant levels of support and sympathy inside the US, which is presumably not the case in the current war against terrorism. One of the things the Americans need to do in the war against terrorism is to unlearn the lessons of Vietnam.

The Kerry speech was dominated by one powerful image: that of himself in "that gunboat in the Mekong delta." But that was the image of 1967. The image of 2004 is that of hijacked jetliners running into the twin towers in New York. US strategy in this war must be built around that image.

The choice the United States has is not between war and peace. The enemy it faces does not understand peace. As a statement attributed to Osama bin Laden and addressed to the Europeans, said recently, there can be no peace with the "infidel". The choice here is between war and endless war. This is not an enemy that could be drawn into Paris "peace talks" to win Nobel Prizes for the participants.

Kerry says "We need to be looked up to, and not just feared." While it is always pleasant to be looked up to, what is needed now is that the terrorists, and their allies and patrons, should fear the United States. The Bin Ladens and Saddam Hussains of this world are unlikely to look up to the United States. But they can be made to fear it, to the point of running to hide in caves and holes.

Kerry says he would wage "a smarter, more effective war on terror." [sic.] Ok, but how?
First, he would "ask hard questions and demand hard evidence."

Hard questions

Any lawyer, including vice-presidential running-mate Senator John Edwards, would know that when it comes to terrorism, hard questions do not necessarily produce hard evidence. Often, such evidence becomes available after an attack, not before.

Anyway, once "President" Kerry has asked his hard questions and obtained his hard evidence, he would only be at the beginning of a long way leading to a policy.

He would then have to persuade other nations, variously described in the speech as "allies", "erstwhile allies" and simply "others", to accept the "hard evidence" he has and side with the US. Next, the whole matter would have to be taken to unspecified "international institutions", supposedly for approval.

Well, what will happen next? Here is Kerry's answer: "Only then with confidence and determination we will be able to tell the terrorists: you will lose, we will win!" Will such a warning make the Bin Ladens and Saddam Hussains of this world tremble?

Kerry also says: "We need to build our alliances, so that we can get the terrorists before they get us." At the same time, however, he says: "I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security."

Well that is what President George W. Bush did when he led the war to liberate Iraq. And this is what President Bill Clinton had done when he sent troops to break the Serbian fascists in Bosnia and, later, in Kosovo. In both cases, the United Nations' Security Council had indicated its unwillingness to back the American position.

Kerry, however, has made his strategy conditional to support from unidentified allies. But who are these allies?

A majority of Nato members



    
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