Diplomacy in the age of terror.
Author | Freeman, Chas W. |
Position | Editor's Note - Editorial |
Editor's Note:
We are pleased to offer our readers an analysis of the present condition of American foreign policy and diplomacy by one of America's most distinguished professional diplomats, Ambassador Chas Freeman. This assessment was presented in a talk on October 4, 2007, to the Pacific Council on International Policy and the American Academy of Diplomacy.
Ambassador Freeman describes a "diplomacy-free foreign policy that relies almost exclusively on military means," and concludes that it is "demonstrably not working." He decries what he sees as U.S. failure to articulate clear missions in either Iraq or Afghanistan and offers prerequisites for the sort of integrated strategy that must be developed in order to deal successfully with global terrorists and their ideological base in the Islamic world. He finds that "Americans are now without peer in the military arts; to prevail against our current enemies, we must attain equal excellence in diplomacy."
Nine years ago this August, President Clinton declared war on Al Qaeda, a terrorist movement that sees continued American friendship and cooperation with the world's 1.4 billion Muslims as the principal obstacle to the religious tyranny it hopes to impose on them. Three years later, on September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda cruelly struck our homeland.
The United States is the richest and most powerful nation in history. The terrorists who threaten us are a loose network of crazed fanatics inspired and sometimes directed by unkempt men living in caves in Waziristan. Remarkably, the cavemen think they're winning. Even more remarkably, they may be right. For the United States and the American people, the world is now an increasingly dangerous place.
A good part of the reason for this is that our enemies have a strategy and we do not. Their objective is to expel us from the Middle East so that they can overthrow Arab regimes they believe depend on us and end what they regard as the corruption of Islam by the ideas of the Western Enlightenment we have traditionally exemplified. Our objective remains unclear. And the means by which we have answered our terrorist foes--with a diplomacy-free foreign policy that relies almost exclusively on military means--is demonstrably not working. Worldwide, the production of anti-American fanatics is up.
Al Qaeda's leaders understand that this is a war of wits, not brawn. They will not be maneuvered onto a conventional battlefield; they are determined to select the ground on which they engage us. They are fighting for the minds of the Muslim faithful, whose attraction to Western ideas they condemn and wish to suffocate in their reactionary vision. Our armed forces are without question the world's most competent and lethal. No other military can defeat them. But they are not engaged in battle with another military. In these circumstances, our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are not the appropriate instruments of statecraft to lead our response to the mounting threat we face from Arab and other Muslim extremists. Armed forces specialize in killing and capturing the enemy. But killing, incarcerating, or otherwise humiliating Arabs and other Muslims who sympathize with Al Qaeda does not defeat the enemy; it aids him. Every instance of perceived injustice and humiliation creates a dozen new enemies, determined to kill Americans.
When he was asked in Australia a little while ago how we were doing in his administration's so-called "global war on terrorism," President Bush reportedly replied, with evident satisfaction, that "we are kicking ass." But, cathartic as this may be, it is not a strategy. Today, we know a lot about what we are not attempting to achieve in Iraq. Our continuing occupation of the place is not about eliminating weapons of mass destruction (WMD), or installing a secular democracy, or creating a model society to inspire revolutions in conservative Islamic nations hostile to Israel. Judging by results, it is also not about increasing the world's oil supply and lowering gasoline prices at the pump. But our president and our Congress have yet to discuss--let alone agree on--what our continuing military presence and operations in Iraq are intended to accomplish.
The plan seems to be for the occupation to soldier on until peace spontaneously breaks out among Iraqis. That is not a strategy. Our men and women in uniform and their equipment are being ground up in the strategic ambush of Iraq. No one can explain to us what they are there to do beyond avoiding making a terrible situation even worse and saving our leaders from having to admit they got things badly wrong.
In Afghanistan, we rapidly accomplished our objectives: first, bringing most, though unfortunately not all, of the masterminds of 9/11 to justice by capturing or killing them; and second, punishing those who had given these evil men safe haven so that others who might be tempted to do so in future would be deterred. We did this with a very cleverly conducted, limited intervention that tilted the balance in a civil war among Afghans and allied us with the victorious faction. Then we succumbed to the elation of victory and moved on to Iraq, cutting the resources we devote to...
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