Threat Confusion and its Penalties 51 Threat Confusion and its

Penalties

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Jeffrey Record

During the first half of the Cold War, the United States postulated a monolithic threat to its security in the form of a centrally directed, international communist conspiracy. The postulation conflated all communist states, Third World ‘wars of national liberation’ and the ideology of communism itself into an undifferentiated enemy. The postulation ignored critical national differences and antagonisms within the communist bloc, assuming, in fact, that communism and nationalism were incompatible. It also dismissed the influence and uniqueness of local circumstances as well as the inherent differences in the strategic significance of various parts of the non-communist world. Such reasoning propelled the United States into the Vietnam War, which was the product not of global conspiracy but of local circumstances. The Vietnamese communists were communist, to be sure, but they were Vietnamese first and foremost – a fiercely nationalistic people who were fighting to expel detested foreign power and influence from their homeland. They took orders from no one, not Moscow, not Beijing; on the contrary, they played the Soviets and Chinese off against one another with consummate skill, never permitting considerations of international communist solidarity to thwart pursuit of Vietnam’s national interest. After defeating the Americans, the Vietnamese communists went on to invade communist , and were in turn punished for doing so by a Chinese

communist invasion of Vietnam. So much for the communist monolith.

○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ Jeffrey Record is a former professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He is the author of twenty books and monographs on national security topics, including Bounding the Global War on Terrorism (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 2003), and the forthcoming Dark Victory, America’s Second War with Iraq (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, forthcoming). The views expressed in this paper are the author’s alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of any other person, agency, or institution.

Survival, vol. 46, no. 2, Summer 2004, pp. 51–72 © The International Institute for Strategic Studies 52 Jeffrey Record

Vietnamese communism in the 1960s posed no threat to the United States. Its ambitions never extended beyond Indochina, a poor, pre- industrial backwater of marginal strategic significance to the United States. A Vietnam unified even under communist auspices posed more of a threat to Chinese security interests in southeast than it did to US interests in the region. The Vietnamese not only overthrew the Chinese- backed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia but also entered into a formal military alliance with the Soviet Union (complete with a Soviet naval base at Cam Ranh Bay) that was designed, among other things, to contain Chinese expansionism in southeast Asia. Threat discrimination is essential to sound strategy, which is about making intelligent choices within the constraints of limited resources. Failure to discriminate between greater and lesser threats, and between immediate and distant threats, invites disastrous Threat miscalculation and even strategic exhaustion. It encourages entry into unnecessary wars of choice discrimination against lesser, distant threats at the expense of wars of necessity against manifestly deadly threats. This is is essential to what happened to the United States in the 1960s, when it mistook a local insurgent war in a small sound strategy southeast Asian country for a challenge to the architecture of its security interests worldwide. This is also what happened to the United States in 2003, when it mistook a vicious but deterred and contained rogue state for an extension of an undeterrable global terrorist threat and proceeded to invade and occupy Iraq. somehow morphed into , and the United States went after Iraq in the name of the war on terrorism. The result was a debilitating war-of-choice detour from the war of necessity against al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism. The story begins with the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001. In their wake, the George W. Bush administration declared a ‘war on terrorism of global reach’. Subsequently and repeatedly, the president and other administration officials used the terms ‘global war on terrorism’, ‘war on global terrorism’, ‘war on terrorism’, and, most commonly, the ‘war on terror’. The president defined all terrorism as evil and the war on terrorism as a Manichaean struggle between ‘civilisation and barbarism’, ‘freedom and fear’, ‘light and darkness’, ‘evil and good’, and ‘us versus them’.1 ‘It’s the calling of our time’, he said less than three months after 11 September, ‘to rid the world of terror’.2 In a series of presidential documents, speeches and press conferences stretching from 11 September through the end of major combat operations in Iraq, the administration also postulated the specifics of a broad Threat Confusion and its Penalties 53 international terrorist threat encompassing both terrorist organisations and so-called rogue states.3 According to the administration’s February 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, all terrorist organisations, be they national, regional, or global in scope, are threats to the United States because they are deemed to be components of a ‘flexible, transnational terrorist structure, enabled by modern technology and characterized by loose interconnectivity both within and between groups’.4 Interconnectivity of national, regional and global terrorists includes direct linkage through such operational cooperation as

sharing intelligence, personnel, expertise, resources, and safe havens’, and indirect linkage through ‘promot[ion of] the same ideological agenda and reinforce[ment] of each other’s efforts to cultivate a favorable international image for their ‘cause’.5

Accordingly, the United States

must pursue them across the geographic spectrum to ensure that all linkages between the strong and the weak organisations are broken, leaving each of them isolated, exposed, and vulnerable to defeat.6

In other words, the nexus of national, regional and global terrorism is such that terrorism of global reach – such as that practiced by al-Qaeda – cannot be defeated without simultaneous counter-terrorism operations against its regional and national supporting props. This judgement is emphasised in a schematic appearing in National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, which depicts the progressive severance of linkages between global and regional – and then between regional and national – organisations and the concomitant destruction or disappearance of all but a few mostly low-threat state-level terrorist organisations.7 Thus the war on terrorism is, at least conceptually, a war on any and all terrorist organisations regardless of whether they actually pose a threat to US interests. It is not only a war on al-Qaeda, but also, at least in principle, a war against the Middle Eastern Hamas, ’s Aum Shinrikyo, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Jewish Kahane Chai, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Sri Lankan Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Columbia’s National Liberation Army, the Real Irish Republican Army, Peru’s Sendero Luminoso and other US-designated terrorist organisations. To be sure, resource constraints will compel some measure of discrimination, but the official definition is dizzying in what it includes. A policy based on this view encourages the enlistment of new anti- American terrorist enemies and positively invites state repression of many diverse forms of internal resistance in the name of the war on terrorism. Take, for example, the US failure to draw a clear distinction 54 Jeffrey Record

between its own war against al-Qaeda and Israel’s war against Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon claims is just another front in the global war on terrorism. Together with Israel’s employment of US military technologies to assassinate key Palestinian leaders, the result has been to encourage Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organisation and provider of de facto governmental services to many Palestinians, to expand its target list to include US interests in the Middle East and perhaps even to targets in the American homeland itself.8 Added to this conflation of all terrorist organisations worldwide is yet another component of the supposed generic terrorist threat: rogue states. These are defined as states that ‘brutalize their own people’, ‘threaten their neighbors’, ‘are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction … to be used offensively’, ‘sponsor terrorism around the globe’, and ‘reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands’.9 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, issued by the White House in September 2002, identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as rogue states and declared: ‘We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends’.10 And this means, ‘[g]iven the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past’.11 Because our enemies see WMD not as means of last resort, but rather ‘as weapons of choice …[as] tools of intimidation and military aggression’, the ‘United States will, if necessary, act preemptively’.12 The core of the terrorist threat is thus the potential marriage of political/religious extremism and WMD, or what President Bush has called ‘the crossroads of radicalism and technology’, and the threat is so grave that ‘America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed’.13 In his West Point speech of June 2002, the president elaborated: ‘When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology – when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great nations’.14 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld subsequently spoke of a ‘nexus between terrorist networks, terrorist states, and weapons of mass destruction … that can make mighty adversaries of small or impoverished states and even relatively small groups of individuals’.15 The Bush administration has correctly identified the combination of radicalism and technology, specifically terrorism and WMD, as a grave Threat Confusion and its Penalties 55 and unprecedented threat to the security of the United States. It certainly would be nothing less than criminally irresponsible to base a post-11 September security strategy on the assumption that al-Qaeda or any other suicidal terrorist organisation would hesitate to use WMD if they could get their hands on them. The United States must do everything in its power to prevent the intersection of terrorism and WMD from materialising. But it was a mistake to conflate all terrorist organisations into a general, undifferentiated mass, and another mistake to lump together Iraq, Iran and North Korea as a common enemy. Most terrorist organisations have local agendas and pose no threat to US security interests, and a strategy that gratuitously A strategy that picks fights where none exist is a recipe for endless and unnecessary conflict (what purpose would be gratuitously served by taking on, for example, the Basque ETA?). Terrorism as a method of violence may be morally picks fights is reprehensible, but not all terrorists threaten the United States. (In the realm of realpolitik, supposed a recipe for moral clarity is the enemy of strategic clarity. Pakistan, an essential ally in the war against al-Qaeda, endless conflict patronised the , provided critical assistance to North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, sponsored terrorism in Kashmir and still plays host to thousands of fundamentalist schools – madrassas – that brainwash and recruit young boys for Islamic terrorism worldwide.16) Critical differences also separate rogue states. Iran (and Syria) sponsor far more terrorism beyond their borders than North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq ever did, and rogue state political agendas are hardly in league with one another. Among other things, Iraq and Iran are historic enemies and fought each other in the longest major conventional war of the twentieth century, a war, it might be noted, in which the United States, for sound geopolitical reasons, became a de facto co-belligerent with Saddam Hussein. (The Reagan administration’s strategic courtship of Saddam Hussein was initiated in December 1983 by the dispatch of then-Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad for talks with the Iraqi dictator, after which Rumsfeld cabled Washington that his meeting ‘marked [a] positive milestone in development of US–Iraqi relations and will prove to be of wider benefit to US posture in the region’.)17 If, however, it was a mistake to conflate terrorist organisations with one another and rogue states with one another, it was a strategic error of the first order to conflate terrorist organisations and rogue states, especially al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. That the administration 56 Jeffrey Record

has done so is evident in both its rhetoric on the war on terrorism and its invasion and occupation of Iraq in the name of that war. Administration spokesmen have repeatedly used the term ‘terrorist states’ to describe rogue states and have used ‘terrorist states’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist groups’ more or less interchangeably. They have also lumped together rogue states and terrorist organisations as foes that share an immunity to traditional deterrence – thus the necessity for preventive war as a substitute. The National Security Strategy states:

In the Cold War, we faced a generally status-quo, risk-averse adversary. Deterrence was an effective defence. But deterrence based only on the threat of retaliation is less likely to work against leaders of rogue states more willing to take risks, gambling with the lives of their people, and the wealth of their nations.

Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of the innocents; whose so- called soldiers seek martyrdom in death and whose most potent protection is statelessness.18 As it approached war with Iraq, the administration insisted on co- conspiratorial links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda; repeatedly raised the spectre of the dictator’s transfer of WMD to al-Qaeda; and encouraged the view that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 11 September attacks. At war’s end, it hailed the regime’s destruction as a victory in the war on terrorism. Within days of the 11 September attacks, according to Bob Woodward’s undisputed account, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were pushing for military action against Iraq.19 Then-Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill recounts his reaction to Wolfowitz’s argument at a meeting of the National Security Council on 13 September 2001:

I thought what Wolfowitz was asserting about Iraq was a reach, and I think others in the room did, too. It was like changing the subject … I was mystified. It’s like a bookbinder accidentally dropping a chapter from one book into the middle of another one. The chapter is coherent, in its way, but it doesn’t seem to fit in this book.20 Indeed, there is substantial testimony that key administration officials were Iraq-obsessed and saw the terrorist attacks on the United States as an opportunity to mobilise support for forcible regime change in Iraq even absent evidence of Iraqi complicity in 11 September.21 As early as January 2002, President Bush declared:

States like [Iraq], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them Threat Confusion and its Penalties 57

the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States.22 In a formal news conference on 6 March 2003, just days before he launched Operation Iraq Freedom, the president linked the case for war against Iraq to the 11 September attacks, implying that Saddam Hussein would replicate them once he got nuclear weapons. ‘Saddam is a threat. And we’re not going to wait until he does attack’, he declared. ‘Saddam Hussein and his weapons [of mass destruction] are a direct threat to this country’, he reiterated,

If the world fails to confront the threat posed by the Iraqi regime … free nations would assume immense and unacceptable risks. The attacks of September 11, 2001, showed what the enemies of America did with four airplanes. We will not wait to see what … terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction.23 Later in the same speech, he stated:

Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation. September 11 changed the … strategic thinking, at least as far as I was concerned, for how to protect the country … used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September 11 should say to the American people that we’re now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home.24 When asked about the possible human and financial costs of a war with Iraq, the president answered, ‘The price of doing nothing exceeds the price of taking action …The price of the attacks on America on September 11 [was] enormous … And I’m not willing to take that chance again’.25 On 1 May 2003, the president, in declaring an end to major combat operations in Iraq, stated that the ‘battle of Iraq is one victory in the war on terror that began on September 11, 2001 – and still goes on’. He added:

The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve removed an ally of al-Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more. In this 19 months [since the 11 September attacks] that changed the world, our actions have been focused and deliberate and proportionate to the offense … With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.26 As late as mid-September 2003, notwithstanding the absence of any disclosed evidence, at least one prominent administration spokesman was still attempting to link Saddam Hussein with the 11 September attacks. Vice-President Dick Cheney, appearing on NBC’s show Meet the Press on 58 Jeffrey Record

27 April 2003, called Iraq ‘the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for years, but most especially on 9/11’.27 Unfortunately, stapling together rogue states and terrorist organisations, including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda, ignores strategically critical differences between the two. It is true that terrorist organisations and rogue states both embrace violence Osama and and are hostile to the existing international order. Many share a common enemy in the United States Saddam were and, for most rogue states and terrorist organisations in the Middle East, a common enemy in Israel. As oil and water international pariahs they are often in contact with one another and at times even cooperate. But the scope and endurance of such cooperation is highly contingent on local circumstances. More to the point, terrorist organisations and rogue states are fundamentally different in character and vulnerability to deterrence and US military attack. Take Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda as examples. The former was a secular, neo-Stalinst police state with traditional imperial ambitions, whereas the latter remains a fanatically anti-secular, elusive non-state actor with secret cells in reportedly 60 countries. Osama and Saddam were oil and water. As two Middle East terrorism experts observed in the context of the National Security Council staff’s examination of who was behind the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa:

[Osama bin Laden] was deeply contemptuous of Saddam Hussein. For believers like bin Laden, Saddam was the second coming of Gamel Abdel Nasser, a secular pharaonic ruler who had destroyed the religion and oppressed the umma [the community of Muslim faithful]. There is little evidence that Saddam viewed bin Laden and his ilk any differently than Egypt’s secular rulers viewed [Islamist activists] Sayyid Qutb, Shuqri Mustafa, and their successors – as religious extremists who would enjoy nothing more than to see secular rule toppled. However attractive their anti-Americanism, they could only be handled with caution. There was nothing in the record to suggest that a central precept of the state sponsors had changed: never get in bed with a group you cannot control. Both the Iranians and the Iraqis appeared to be reluctant to cooperate with an organization that might commit some enormity that could be traced back to them. The NSC analysts found it difficult to accept that al- Qaeda acted alone, but no other conclusion was warranted.28 Indeed, for what it’s worth, two high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders in US custody, Abu Zubaydah and the reportedly very talkative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda chief of operations until his capture on 1 March 2003, told the CIA in separate interrogations that the terrorist Threat Confusion and its Penalties 59 organisation did not work with the Saddam Hussein regime. Though the idea had been discussed among al-Qaeda’s leadership, Osama bin Laden rejected it because he did not want to be indebted to Saddam Hussein.29 This testimony is certainly consistent with the judgement of experts on al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein30 as well as with the failure to date (April 2004) of US intelligence authorities to discover ‘smoking gun’ documentation of an operational relationship between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. The fact that it was al-Qaeda and not Iraq that attacked the United States on 11 September underscores the most obvious, albeit officially ignored, difference between the two: one was able and willing to attack the United States, whereas the other was neither. And the reason for this difference was simple: one was undeterred, while the other was deterred. Shadowy, fleeting non-state entities, terrorist organisations possess little in the way of assets that can be held hostage; as The National Security Strategy points out, a terrorist enemy’s ‘most potent protection is statelessness’.31 The strategy for dealing with terrorist organisations is thus essentially the strategy of the hunt, which places a premium on reliable intelligence and painstaking police work, and only occasionally on military power. In contrast, rogue states are sovereign entities defined by specific territories, populations, governmental infrastructures and other fixed assets; as such, they are much more exposed to decisive military attack. The United States knocked off Saddam Hussein’s regime in three weeks; the war against al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist organisations will last years, even decades. One does not for a moment doubt that al-Qaeda, had it possessed a deliverable nuclear weapon on 11 September, would have used it. But the record for rogue states – so far – is clear: none has ever used WMD against an adversary capable of inflicting unacceptable retaliatory damage. (Nor is there evidence of rogue state transfer of WMD to terrorist groups.)32 Saddam Hussein did use chemical weapons in the 1980s against helpless Kurds and Iranian infantry; however, he refrained from employing such weapons against either US forces or Israel during the of 1991, and he apparently abandoned even possession of such weapons sometime later in the decade.33 For its part, post-armistice North Korea, far better armed with WMD and ballistic missiles than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, has for decades repeatedly threatened war against South Korea, Japan and the United States, but has yet to initiate one. How is the inaction of Saddam Hussein and North Korea explained other than by successful deterrence? There is, of course, no way of proving this; the success of deterrence is measured by events that do not happen as opposed to those that do, and one can never be sure of the cause of a 60 Jeffrey Record

non-event. But there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein ever intended to initiate hostilities with the United States once he acquired a nuclear weapon. Blackmail and aggression are not the only reasons rogue states seek WMD; they may also see in such weapons a means of deterring, or at least raising the price of, US military action against themselves. Condoleezza Rice, just a year before she became President Bush’s national security adviser, voiced confidence in deterrence as the best means of dealing with the Iraqi dictator. In January 2000 she published an article in Foreign Affairs in which she declared, with respect to rogue states, ‘the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence – if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration’. She added that rogue states ‘were living on borrowed time’ and that ‘there should be no sense of panic about them’.34 If statelessness is, as The National Security Strategy rightly points out, a terrorist enemy’s ‘most potent protection’, then is not ‘stateness’ a rogue state’s most potent strategic liability? To be sure, rogue states are inherently aggressive and threaten regional stability. Moreover, there can be no guarantee that rogue state leaders will not fall prone to recklessness, even madness, although in the case of Saddam Hussein, pre-war accusations of recklessness and certainly madness were considerably overstated.35 (Saddam Hussein always loved himself more than he hated the United States.) The point is that rogue state behaviour so far provides no convincing evidence of immunity to deterrence via the credible threat of unacceptable retaliation, and therefore no justification for preventive war. Rogue states may in fact be more risk-prone than governments of ‘normal’ states, but does that mean they do not value their own survival and are incapable of making rational calculations of ends and means? Philip Bobbitt, in his magisterial 2002 work, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, has questioned the argument that rogue states are not deterrable. Discussing the wisdom of ballistic missile defences, which have been sold, like preventive war, on the grounds of rogue state undeterrability (such defences are in fact designed to prevent rogues from deterring the United States)36, Bobbitt asks:

Is it really sensible to think that providing the great states of the West with ballistic missile defenses would actually discourage a ‘rogue state’ to a greater degree than the assurance of nuclear annihilation that would surely follow such an attack [which] already deters them today? To believe this assumes a psychological hypersensitivity to the mere possibility of failure on the part of the leaderships of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that seems incompatible with their characters … and an indifference to survival that these leaders, though they make seek it in their recruits, do not prominently display themselves.37 Threat Confusion and its Penalties 61

None of this is to argue that maintaining credible deterrence is easy or that deterrence is foolproof. It is simply to recognise that the record of deterrence of WMD use by rogue states has been impressive, and that deterrence is a far more attractive and less risky option than preventive war –a judgement vindicated by the American experience in Iraq. In conflating Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda as an undifferentiated threat, the administration needlessly expanded the fight against al-Qaeda by launching a preventive war38 against a state that was not at war with the United States and that posed no direct or imminent threat to the United States. Deterrence and containment of Iraq had been working effectively for 12 years when Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched in March 2003: Saddam Hussein was not preparing to attack the United States, and he was too weak militarily to credibly threaten his neighbours, all but one of which – Kuwait – opposed the US invasion of Iraq and two of which – Kuwait and Turkey – had US security guarantees. Observes Benjamin Barber:

To apply a national security doctrine developed for ‘stateless martyrs’, who have actually started a war through terrorist acts, to a territorial state otherwise innocent of an explicit aggressive act is more than just incoherent: it is defective, inefficacious, even perverse.39 Opponents of preventive war against Iraq, including former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, made a clear distinction between the character, aims and vulnerabilities of al-Qaeda and Iraq, arguing that the al-Qaeda threat was much more immediate, dangerous and difficult to defeat. They feared that a war of choice against Iraq would weaken the war of necessity against al-Qaeda by distracting America’s strategic attention to Iraq, gobbling up money and resources better applied to homeland defence. Also, given the profound, widespread unpopularity of an American war on Iraq – especially among Muslims – it could weaken the willingness of key countries to share intelligence information so vital to winning the war on al-Qaeda.40 They were right. What they did not foresee – few did – was the emergence, in the wake of the declared termination of major combat operations, of growing insurgent warfare against US occupation forces and Iraqi reconstruction targets, including sabotage of key infrastructure and assassination of Iraqis collaborating with US policy. Given the nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime and its manifest vulnerability to traditional deterrence, and given the failure to establish Iraqi complicity in the attacks of 11 September and to discover any WMD in Iraq, to say nothing of a reconstituted nuclear weapons programme, 62 Jeffrey Record

Operation Iraqi Freedom was a distraction from, not a victory in, the war on terrorism. And a very costly one at that, especially if the United States fails to establish order and to forge legitimate and competent governance in Iraq. By establishing an American military force presence in an Arab heartland, a force presence large enough to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime but arguably insufficient to impose order and stability and to control Iraq’s borders, the United States saddled itself with a strategic albatross that not only compromises the war on terrorism but also could undermine the credibility of American defence commitments elsewhere, notably in Korea. Worse still, the combination of a large US force presence and continuing disorder in Iraq, including the prospect of that country’s degeneration into civil war, creates a new target set and place of operations for terrorists seeking to spill American blood and transform the administration’s war on terrorism into a clash of civilisations. Retired US Army general and former presidential aspirant Wesley Clark believes that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has ‘re-energized al-Qaeda by attacking an Islamic state and presenting terrorists Iraq was a with ready access to vulnerable US forces’, that Operation Iraqi Freedom ‘serves as a rallying point for distraction anyone wishing to harm the United States and Americans’.41 In the wake of the August 2003 bombing from the war of the United Nations headquarters in Iraq, terrorism expert Jessica Stern warned that the bombing was ‘the on terrorism latest evidence that America had taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one’. How ironic it would be that a war initiated in the name of the war on terrorism may end up creating ‘precisely the situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its own borders or provide for its citizens’ rudimentary needs’.42 Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director of counter- terrorism operations and analysis, Vincent Cannistraro, agrees: ‘There was no substantive information linking Saddam to international terrorism before the war. Now we’ve created the conditions that have made Iraq the place to come to attack Americans’.43 The diversionary impact of Operation Iraqi Freedom and its post-war aftermath on the war on terrorism is evident in the fiscal competition between unexpectedly high Iraqi post-war outlays and the requirements for effective homeland defence – a competition critically exacerbated by exploding federal deficits, to which the US war and reconstruction effort in Iraq is a major contributor.44 Indeed, adequately funded homeland security is probably the greatest opportunity cost of the war on Iraq. Threat Confusion and its Penalties 63

In early September 2003, the White House informed congressional leaders that it was preparing a new budget request of $60–70 billion to cover mounting military and reconstruction costs in Iraq.45 President Bush shortly thereafter announced an $87bn request to cover Iraq and continuing US costs in Afghanistan, including $20.3bn for Iraq’s reconstruction.46 In early October, a World Bank team of economic specialists announced that the US-led reconstruction effort in Iraq would require an additional $36bn over the coming four years – that is, over and above the $20.3bn announced by the president.47 All of this came on top of an earlier appropriation of $79bn to cover the costs of the war and its immediate aftermath. In sum, as of April 2004, the and post- war outlays already authorised, requested and estimated totalled about $200bn – and this total did not include the costs of continued US military operations in Iraq beyond fiscal year 2004. The price tag of $200bn exceeds by over $100bn the estimated $98.4bn shortfall in federal funding of homeland security-critical emergency response agencies in the United States over the next five years. The estimate is the product of an independent task force study sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and completed in summer 2003. The study, titled Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared, concluded that almost two years after 11 September,

the United States remains dangerously ill-prepared to handle a catastrophic attack on American soil’ because of, among other things, ‘acute shortages of radios among firefighters, WMD protective gear for police departments, basic equipment and expertise in public health laboratories, and hazardous materials detection equipment in most cities.48 But the consequences of threat conflation extend beyond costly and unnecessary regime change in Iraq, strategic distraction from the war on al-Qaeda, and concomitant disinvestment in homeland security. They also include alienation of key friends and allies and the international political isolation of the United States. For over half a century, the United States laboured to create a network of international institutions – the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, the North American Free Trade Association and so on – that advanced its security, economic well- being and political values while at the same time reassuring friends and allies that they had nothing to fear from America’s unprecedented power because it would be employed with restraint. From Franklin D. Roosevelt through to Bill Clinton, American presidents, liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat, have understood that in an increasingly globalised world no power, not even the United States, can achieve security unilaterally. 64 Jeffrey Record

The doctrine of preventive war, however, proclaimed and exercised against Iraq in defiance of world opinion and in the absence of any international institutional legitimisation, undermines the very American- created world order that has served the United States so well. It leaves the United States politically isolated in Iraq, just as it was almost four decades ago in Vietnam. In both instances an arrogance of power was the cause of America’s strategic misfortune. John Ikenberry comments:

America’s nascent neo-imperial grand strategy threatens to rend the fabric of the international community and political partnerships precisely at a time when that community and those partnerships are urgently needed [to wage war on terrorist threats]. It is an approach fraught with peril and likely to fail. It is not only politically unsustainable but diplomatically harmful. And if history is any guide, it will trigger antagonism and resistance that will leave America in a more hostile and divided world.49

We have ‘a special obligation to rest our policies on principles that transcend the assertions of preponderant power’, wrote Henry Kissinger in September 2002. ‘World leadership requires the acceptance of some restraint even on one’s actions to ensure that others exercise comparable restraint. It cannot be in either our national or the world’s interest to develop principles that grant every nation an unfettered right of preemption against its own definitions of threats to its security’.50 Even more troubled by the embrace of unilateralism and preventive war was Brent Scowcroft, President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser. Before the war he said:

Part of the Bush administration believes that as a superpower, we must take advantage of this opportunity to change the world for the better, and we don’t need to go out of our way to accommodate alliances, partnerships, or friends in the process, because that would be too constraining. [But relying almost solely on ad hoc] coalitions of the willing is fundamentally, fatally flawed. As we have seen in the debate about Iraq, it’s already given us an image of arrogance and unilateralism, and we’re paying a very high price for that image. If we get to the point where everyone secretly hopes the United States gets a black eye because we’re so obnoxious, then we’ll be totally hamstrung in the war on terror. We’ll be like Gulliver with the Lilliputians.51

Ironically, presidential candidate George W. Bush took the same view in 2000. ‘Our nation stands alone right now in terms of world power. And that’s why we’ve got to be humble and project strength in a way that promotes freedom’, he said in his second formal debate with Democratic candidate Al Gore. ‘If we are an arrogant nation, they’ll view us that way, but if we’re a humble nation, they’ll respect us’.52 Threat Confusion and its Penalties 65

No less ironically, for the Bush administration at least, the unexpectedly onerous and open-ended military burden the United States has incurred in Iraq has significantly limited the very freedom of military action necessary to credibly threaten the overthrow of other rogue states seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. It is said that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. The penalty of threat conflation during the first half of the Cold War was disastrous US military intervention in Vietnam. Unfortunately, that lesson appears to have vanished from official consciousness in the wake of 11 September. Once again, a failure of threat discrimination has propelled the United States into an unnecessary military intervention overseas, an intervention whose course bears increasing comparison to key aspects of the American experience in Vietnam. 66 Jeffrey Record

Notes Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, 1 We Will Prevail: President George W. California, 1 May 2003. These and Bush on War, Terrorism, and Freedom, other presidential statements on the selected and edited by the National war on terrorism and Iraq are Review (New York: Continuum compiled in We Will Prevail: President International Publishing Group, Inc., George W. Bush on War, Terrorism, and 2003), pp. 17, 24, 32, 39, 62, 72, 85, 117, Freedom. 122. 4 National Strategy for Combating 2 Ibid., p. 78. Terrorism, p. 8. 3 The two most important documents 5 Ibid., p. 9. are George W. Bush, The National 6 Ibid. Security Strategy of the United States of 7 Ibid., p. 13. Also see p. 9. America (Washington DC: The White 8 See David R. Sands, ‘Israel’s Killing of House, September 2002), and National Yassin Puts US in Line of Fire’, Strategy for Combating Terrorism Washington Times, 23 March 2004; (Washington DC: The White House, James Bennet, ‘Palestinians Swear February 2003). Key presidential Vengeance for Killing of Cleric by statements include President Bush’s Israelis’, New York Times, 23 March Address to a Joint Session of 2004. To distinguish between the Congress, 23 September 2001; speech causes and political contexts of al- to the United Nations General Qaeda and Palestinian terrorism is not Assembly, New York, 10 November to condone terrorism as a means to 2001; speech to Citadel cadets, an end; it is simply to recognise that Charleston, South Carolina, 11 the US war against al-Qaeda and December 2001; State of the Union Israel’s war against Hamas are not be Address, 29 January 2002; speech to confused in terms of origins, US military personnel, Anchorage, legitimacy and efficacy of political Alaska, 16 February 2002; speech to solution. the Iowa Republican Party Victory 9 The National Security Strategy of the Luncheon, 1 March 2002; speech to United States of America, p. 14. the George C. Marshall ROTC Award 10 Ibid. Seminar on National Security at the 11 Ibid., p. 15. Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, 12 Ibid. Virginia, 17 April 2002; speech to the 13 Ibid., p. iii. Bundestag, Berlin, Germany, 23 May 14 Remarks by President Bush at the 2002; address to the graduating class 2002 Graduation Exercise of the of the US Military Academy at West United States Military Academy at Point, New York, 1 June 2002; speech West Point, http:// at the Massachusetts Victory 2002 www.whitehouse.gov/news/ reception, 4 October 2002; speech at releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html the Cincinnati Museum Center, 7 15 Donald Rumsfeld, ‘The Price of October 2002; campaign speech in Inaction Can be Truly Catastrophic’, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 3 Asahi Shimbun, Japan, 10 September November 2002; State of the Union 2002. Address, 28 January 2003; statement 16 See Tim McGirk and Massimo regarding the United Nations Security Calabresi, ‘Is Pakistan Friend of Foe?’, Council and Iraq, 6 February 2003; Time, 29 September 2003; Andrew radio address to the nation, 8 March Koch, ‘The Nuclear Network: 2003; address to the nation, 17 March Khanfessions of a Proliferator’, Jane’s 2003; and speech aboard the USS Defense Weekly, 3 March 2004; Arnaud Threat Confusion and its Penalties 67

de Borchgrave, ‘What Did Musharraf speech to Iowa Republican Party Know?’, Washington Times, 3 March Victory Luncheon, 1 March 2002, cited 2004; and Seymour M. Hersh, ‘The in ibid., p. 128; ‘A small number of Deal’, New Yorker, 8 March 2004. outlaw regimes today possess and are 17 Quoted in James Mann, Rise of the developing chemical and biological Vulcans, The History of Bush’s War weapons … and at the same time Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), p. [are] cultivating ties to terrorist 124. groups. In their threat to peace, in 18 The National Security Strategy of the their mad ambitions … these regimes United States of America, p. 15. constitute an axis of evil’, speech to 19 Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New the George C. Marshall ROTC Award York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), pp. Seminar in National Security at the 49, 83–85. Also see Kenneth M. Virginia Military Institute, 17 April Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The 2002, cited in ibid., p. 144; ‘The authors Case for Invading Iraq (New York: of terror are seeking nuclear, Random House, 2002), p. 105. chemical, and biological weapons. 20 Quoted in Ron Suskind, The Price of Regimes that sponsor terror are Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White developing these weapons and … [if] House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill these regimes and their terrorist allies (New York: Simon and Schuster, were to perfect these capabilities, no 2004), p. 188. inner voice of reason, no hint of 21 In addition to the Woodward and conscience would prevent their use’, O’Neill accounts, see Mann, Rise of the speech before the Bundestag, Berlin, Vulcans, The History of Bush’s War 23 May 2002, cited in ibid., p. 154; ‘You Cabinet, pp. 82–83, 190–191, 236–238, can’t distinguish between al-Qaeda 302–310, and 362–364; Richard A. and Saddam Hussein when you talk Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside about the war on terrorism. They’re America’s War on Terror (New York: both equally as bad, and equally as Free Press, 2004), pp. ix, 30–33, 227– evil, and equally as destructive … 228, 231–132, 237–238, 241–242, 264– [T]he danger is that al-Qaeda becomes 265, 268–270, 273, and 284; and an extension of Saddam’s madness Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening and his hatred and his capacity to Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New extend weapons of mass destruction York: Random House, 2002), p. 105. around the world’, response to 22 State of the Union Address, 29 questions from the press, 25 January 2002, cited in We Will Prevail: September 2002, quoted in Mike President George W. Bush on War, Allen, ‘Bush: Hussein, Al Qaeda Terrorism, and Freedom, p. 108. Linked’, Washington Post, 26 Presidential threat-conflation September 2003; ‘Terror cells and continued: ‘One of the most outlaw regimes … are different faces dangerous things that can happen in of the same evil … If the Iraqi regime the future is that these kinds of is able to produce, buy, or steal an terrorist organizations hook up with amount of highly enriched uranium a nations that develop weapons of mass little larger than a single softball, it destruction’, speech to US military could have a nuclear weapon in less personnel in Alaska, 16 February than a year … and be in position to 2002, cited in ibid., p. 121; ‘We cannot pass nuclear technology to terrorists’, let … terrorist organizations team up speech at the Cincinnati Museum with nations that want to develop Center, 7 October 2002, cited in We weapons [of mass destruction]’, Will Prevail: President George W. Bush 68 Jeffrey Record

on War, Terrorism, and Freedom, pp. and Bush quoted in Daniel Schorr, ‘A 195, 196; and ‘He [Saddam Hussein] War Still in Search of a Rationale’, would like nothing better than to Christian Science Monitor, 26 hook up with one of these shadowy September 2003, and Jimmy Breslin, terrorist networks like al-Qaeda, ‘They Told Lies and Many Brave provide some weapons and training Soldiers Died’, Long Island Newsday, 23 to them, let them come and do his September 2003. dirty work, and we wouldn’t be able 28 Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, to see his fingerprints on his action’, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: campaign speech in Sioux Falls, South Random House, 2002), p. 264. Dakota, 3 November 2002, cited in 29 James Risen, ‘Captives Deny Qaeda ibid., p. 203. Worked With Baghdad’, New York 23 State of the Union Address, 29 Times, 9 June 2003. January 2002, cited in We Will Prevail: 30 See, for example, Yossef Bodansky, President George W. Bush on War, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War Terrorism, and Freedom. on America (New York: Prima Press, 24 Ibid. 1999); Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al 25 All excerpts from President Bush’s Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New news conference of 6 March 2003, are York: Press, extracted from the transcript 2002); Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: Casting a reprinted in ‘’We’re Calling for a Shadow of Terror (New York: I. B. Vote’ at the UN, Says Bush’, Tauris, 2003); Jane Corbin, Al-Qaeda, Washington Post, 7 March 2003. In Search of the Terror Network That 26 Quoted in Dana Milbank and Claudia Threatens the World (New York: Dean, ‘Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003); Jerrold in Many Minds’, Washington Post, 6 M. Post and Amatzia Baram, Saddam September 2003. is Iraq: Iraq is Saddam (Maxwell AFB, 27 Quoted in Dana Priest and Glenn AL: US Air Force Kessler, ‘Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked by Counterproliferation Center, Cheney’, Washington Post, 29 November 2002); and Eric D. Shaw, September 2003. Only after Vice ‘Saddam Hussein: Political President Cheney’s remark, and for Psychological Profiling Results the first time since the 11 September Relevant to His Possession, Use, and attacks, did the administration admit Possible Transfer of Weapons of Mass there was no evidence to support a Destruction (WMD) to Terrorist Saddam-11 September link. On 16 Groups’, Studies in Conflict and September, Secretary of Defense Terrorism, vol. 26, no. 5, September/ Donald Rumsfeld stated, ‘I’ve not October 2003, pp. 347–364. seen any indication that would lead 31 The National Security Strategy of the me to believe that I could say that United States of America, p. 15. Saddam Hussein was involved in the 32 Pakistan and North Korea have September 11 attacks’. National shared WMD and supporting ballistic Security Adviser Condoleezza agreed: missile technologies with each other, ‘[W]e have never claimed that but neither has provided them to Saddam Hussein had either … non-state actors. Sharon A. Squassoni, direction or control of 9/11’. The next Weapons of Mass Destruction: Trade day, the president himself declared: Between North Korea and Pakistan, ‘We have no evidence that Saddam Congressional Research Service Hussein was involved with the Report for Congress, updated 11 September 11 attacks’. Rumsfeld, Rice March 2004, http://www.fas.org/ Threat Confusion and its Penalties 69

spp/starwars/crs/RL31900.pdf Saddam Hussein had little reason to 33 See Nancy Gibbs and Michael Ware, believe that the United States would ‘Chasing a Mirage’, Time, 6 October react the way it did; indeed, the 2003; Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, George H.W. Bush administration ‘Hussein’s Weapons May Have Been may have inadvertently given Bluff’, Washington Post, 1 October Saddam Hussein a green or at least an 2003; Rolf Ekeus, ‘Iraq’s Real ambiguous amber light. See the Weapons Threat’, Washington Post, 29 author’s Hollow Victory, A Contrary June 2003; Bob Drogin, ‘The View of the Gulf War (Washington DC: Vanishing’, New Republic, 21 July 2003; Brassey’s Inc., 1993), pp. 23–34; and John Barry and Michael Isikoff, Janice Gross Stein, ‘Deterrence and ‘Saddam’s Secrets’, Newsweek, 30 June Compellance in the Gulf, 1990–91’, 2003; Walter Pincus and Kevin International Security, Fall 1992) pp. Sullivan, ‘Scientists Still Deny Iraqi 147–179. Arms Programs’, Washington Post, 31 36 As stated by neo-conservatives July 2003; Michael R. Gordon, Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol, ‘Weapons of Mass Confusion’, New ‘The real rationale for missile defense York Times on the Web, 1 August 2003, is that without it, an adversary armed http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/ with long-range ballistic missiles can, 01/international/worldspecial3/ as Robert Joseph, President Bush’s 01CND-GORDON.html; David counterproliferation specialist at the Kelley, ‘Regime’s Priority Was National Security Council argues, Blueprints, Not Arsenal, Defector “hold American cities hostage and Told’, , 26 April 2003 thereby deter us from intervention”. ; and Joseph Curl, ‘Bush Believes In other words, missile defense is Saddam Destroyed Arms’, Washington about preserving America’s ability to Times, 26 April 2003. wield power abroad’. Lawrence F. 34 Condoleezza Rice, ‘Promoting the Kaplan and William Kristol, The War National Interest’, Foreign Affairs Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and (January/February 2000), p. 61, America’s Mission (San Francisco, CA: 35 See Richard K. Betts, ‘Suicide from Encounter Books, 2003), p. 124. Fear of Death?’, Foreign Affairs 37 Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: (January/February 2003), pp. 34–43; War, Peace, and the Course of History and John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. M Walt, ‘An Unnecessary War’, 685. Foreign Policy (January/February 38 Though Bush administration 2003), pp. 50–59. Mearsheimer and spokesmen have used the terms Walt point out that Saddam Hussein’s ‘preemption’ and ‘preemptive record on starting wars in the region military action’ to describe the war on was no worse than that of Israel or Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom was in Egypt, and that his invasion of Iran in fact a preventive war, which 1980 was in part a defensive response historically has been indistinguishable to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s from aggression. The Defense attempted fomentation of an Iraqi Department officially defines Shi’ite rebellion to overthrow the preventive war as ‘a war initiated in Iraqi dictator. He also had reason to the belief that military conflict, while believe that Iran, then in the throes of not imminent, is inevitable, and that revolutionary turmoil, was weak and to delay would involve greater risk’. vulnerable. In the case of Iraq’s In contrast, preemption is ‘an attack invasion of Kuwait a decade later, initiated on the basis of 70 Jeffrey Record

incontrovertible evidence that an Medicare prescription drug benefit enemy attack is imminent’. Clearly, and reformed alternative minimum there was no such evidence because tax legislation. Altogether, these three Iraq was not poised to attack. measures, according to a Washington Preemption has sanction under Post budget analysis, will add an international law; preventive war estimated $1.93 trillion to the total does not. See Joint Publication 1-02, 2004–13 deficit. The CBO also assumes DOD Dictionary of Military and that discretionary spending would Associated Terms (Washington DC: grow only at the rate of inflation, Department of Defense, 12 April projected to average 2.7% during the 2001), pp. 333, 336. next decade, when in fact it has risen 39 Benjamin R. Barber, Fear’s Empire: by an annual 7.7% over the past five War, Terrorism, and Democracy (New years. According to the Post analysis, York: W.W. Norton and Company, the sum of all these additions, plus the 2003), p. 107 additional interest on the debt, could 40 See, for example, Brent Scowcroft, produce an estimated total 2004–13 ‘Don’t Invade Iraq’, Wall Street deficit of $4.33 trillion, or almost four Journal, 15 August 2002; and times larger than the CBO projection. Madeleine K. Albright, ‘Where Iraq An assessment by the Center on Fits In on the War on Terror’, New Budget and Policy Priorities projected York Times, 13 September 2002. an even greater deficit, $5.1 trillion. 41 Wesley K. Clark, Winning Modern See The Budget and Economic Outlook: Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and American An Update August 2003 (Washington Empire (New York: Public Affairs, DC: Congressional Budget Office, 2003), pp. xv, 159. August 2003, http://www.cbo.gov/ 42 Jessica Stern, ‘How America Created a showdoc.cfm?index=4493&sequence=0; Terrorist Haven’, New York Times, 20 and ‘Deficit Delusions’, Washington August 2003. Post, 29 August 2003. Also see 43 Quoted in John Walcott, ‘Some in Edmund Andrews, ‘Congressional Administration Uneasy Over Bush Deficit Estimate May Exceed a Half- Speech’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 Trillion’, New York Times, 26 August September 2003. 2003; Walter Shapiro, ‘Fiscal 44 In August 2003 the Congressional Recklessness Means More Danger Budget Office (CBO) projected a Ahead’, USA Today, 27 August 2003; $480bn deficit for fiscal year 2004 and Jonathan Weisman, ‘2004 Deficit to a total cumulative deficit for the Reach $480 Billion, Report Forecasts’, decade of 2004–13 of $1.40 trillion. Washington Post, 27 August 2003; and These numbers minimise the David Firestone, ‘Dizzying Dive to problem, however, because the CBO Red Ink Poses Stark Choices for is legally required to base its Washington’, Washington Post, 14 projections only on existing laws. September 2003. Thus, the CBO projection assumes the 45 Glenn Kessler and Mike Allen, ‘Bush scheduled expiration of the huge 2001 to Seek $60 Billion or More for Iraq’, and 2003 tax cuts, although most Washington Post, 4 September 2003. observers believe they will be Also see Richard W. Stevenson, ‘78% extended. (Both the White House and of Bush’s Postwar Spending Plan is the Republican congressional for the Military’, New York Times, 9 leadership favour making the cuts September 2003; and Warren Vieth permanent.) The CBO projection also and Ester Schrader, ‘Iraqi Estimates ignored the subsequent passage of Were Too Low, US Admits’, Los Threat Confusion and its Penalties 71

Angeles Times, 9 September 2003. 46 President Bush’s Address to the Nation, 7 September 2003, reprinted in ‘Bush: “We Will Do What Is Necessary”’, Washington Post, 8 September 2003, 47 Michael M. Phillips and David Rogers, ‘Price of Rebuilding Iraq Is Put at $56 Billion Over Four Years’, Wall Street Journal, 2 October 2003; and Steven R. Weisman, ‘AID Assessments Say Iraq Needs $55 Billion for Rebuilding’, New York Times, 2 October 2003. 48 Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2003), p. 1. 49 G. John Ikenberry, ‘America’s Imperial Ambition’, Foreign Affairs, September–October 2002, p. 45. Also see Joseph S. Nye, Jr, The Paradox of Power, Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 50 Henry Kissinger, ‘The Custodians of the World?’, San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 September 2002. 51 Quoted in James Kitfield, ‘Fractured Alliances’, National Journal, 8 March 2003, p. 721. 52 ‘2nd Presidential Debate Between Gov. Bush and Vice President Gore’, New York Times, 12 October 2000.