Iran, the rainmaker.

• Author: Berman, Ilan
• Position: Clear and Present Dangers - Essay

EVER SINCE its start six years ago, the United States has been waging the War on Terror chiefly on the Sunni side of the religious divide within Islam. The principal targets have been Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. As recently as September 2006, the White House's counter-terrorism strategy was still focused overwhelmingly on the Bin Laden network and its offshoots, which were seen as the vanguard of "a transnational movement of extremist organizations, networks, and individuals" threatening the United States.

By contrast, the vision articulated by the president in his 2007 State of the Union Address is substantially broader. It encompasses not only Sunni extremists, but their Shi'a counterparts as well. And, for the first time, it clearly and unambiguously identifies not just "terrorism" but a specific state sponsor--the Islamic Republic of Iran--as a threat to U.S. interests and objectives in the greater Middle East.

So far, however, this shift is still more rhetoric than reality. "Our strategy to combat terrorism is really only a strategy to combat Al-Qaeda", Congressman Jim Saxton (R-NJ) pointed out in these pages not long ago. "We are not prepared to deal--in the event hostilities occur--with terrorist organizations that are built differently, like Hizballah."

Examples of this disconnect abound. The Bush Administration's original September 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) refers generically and without distinction to the threat posed by "global terrorism." The updated version of the NSS, released by the White House last spring, does nothing to correct this deficiency. Likewise, the Bush Administration's National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction warns that "terrorist groups are seeking to acquire WMD with the stated purpose of killing large numbers of our people and those of friends and allies", but fails to identify whether some groups may be closer to this goal--or more capable of achieving it--than others. The National Military Strategy of the United States of America issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2004, meanwhile, simply commits the U.S. military to the generic task of confronting "terrorist forces, terrorist collaborators and those governments harboring terrorists", leaving U.S. troops to draw their own distinctions among the foes that they are fighting.

These ambiguous mission statements poorly serve soldiers in the field, who require clarity when defining their enemy--a crucial element to forming any effective strategy. They also disadvantage America's diplomats, many of whom are locked in acrimonious turf battles with allied nations about the exact scope of the War on Terror. By lumping together insurgents and guerillas, Sunnis and Shi'a, and state and non-state actors under the generic moniker of "terrorist forces", the United States has put itself at a disadvantage in differentiating, and adapting to, enemies that are anything but homogeneous.

SIX YEARS into the...