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Threat Confusion and Its Penalties 51 Threat Confusion and Its Threat Confusion and its Penalties 51 Threat Confusion and its Penalties ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ 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 Cambodia, 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 Asia 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. Osama bin Laden somehow morphed into Saddam Hussein, 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, Japan’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
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