Thinking outside the tank.

• Author: Simon, Steven

THE AGE OF sacred terror dawned on September 11, 2001. (1) Yet the United States still has no satisfactory grand strategy for neutralizing a stateless, religiously inspired network of militants who seek to bring down great powers by acts of apocalyptic destruction. Instead, current policy thinking cleaves towards two extreme positions--one morally and politically unpalatable and the other risky and destructive.

The first, premised on the belief that it is too late to fine-tune the policies that have alienated Muslims, involves the abject capitulation of the United States to the implicit demands of Bin Ladenism. The United States would abandon Israel, jettison its strategic relationships with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and forsake its leverage and standing in the Arab world. The second envisages a full-scale Western mobilization against transnational Islamist terrorism--a total war on terror. Under this scenario, the West's intelligence, law-enforcement and military assets would be brought to bear against any actual or potential terrorist strongholds or supporters. Meanwhile, Muslim governments would bandwagon operationally and politically behind a hegemonic America. The former would amount to negotiating with terrorists, and indeed yielding them victory. The latter would amount to furnishing Osama bin Laden, at prohibitively high risk, with precisely the violent "clash of civilizations" that is integral to his apocalyptic eschatology.

Both positions are admittedly caricatures of viewpoints that are not quite so unsubtle. But the larger point is that post-9/11 strategic thinking has not found a realist middle ground. Nowadays the working premise of strategy, whether capitulatory or confrontational, is that talking to Muslims is essentially futile--that they must be either appeased or dominated. The West is hardly so intellectually barren as to be left to such crude and unsatisfactory dispensations. The trans-Atlantic pragmatism that successfully steered grand strategy through the Cold War ought to hold more nuanced answers--a "third way" through which the United States can both honor its commitments and strike an accommodation with Islam sufficient to marginalize Bin Laden and his followers. That is the core challenge of terrorism.

Yet government agencies have their hands full just keeping terrorists at bay. In the rush of operations, they are not empowered or practically able to take a fully balanced strategic view or, in most cases, to look far into the future. The Bush Administration's Middle East Partnership Initiative, its repackaging of Helsinki process programs, and the Djerejian panel's study highlighting the need for more robust public diplomacy in the Muslim world point tentatively in the right direction. But they also reflect an approach to defining and tackling terrorism's root causes and attenuating terrorist motivations that is interstitial rather than systemic. The integrity of State Department policy planning--which was formidable under George Kennan and Paul Nitze during the Cold War and later under Dennis Ross in anticipating early post-Cold War challenges--has proven extremely difficult to maintain against the relentless day-today demands of foreign relations and crisis management.

These became even more varied and complicated in the 1990s. Moreover, those who have executed U.S. foreign policy have usually had little time for internal or external analysts. "Occasionally an outsider may provide perspective", Henry Kissinger has noted, "[but] almost never does he have enough knowledge to advise soundly on tactical moves." (2) The Defense Department has an important policy-planning role in determining the size and makeup of military forces, as well as their roles and missions, but this does not extend to subtler inquiries about terrorist threats, motivations and ideology. The National Security Council is charged primarily with coordinating rather than formulating policy, and during the Clinton Administration, its "strategic planning" unit was essentially a speechwriting office. The CIA's remit is to inform rather than devise policy. And while the National Intelligence Council forecasts problems authoritatively, it does not offer remedies.

IN LIGHT of these gaps in the government's intellectual capabilities, it might be tempting to invest confidence in the ability of American institutions of higher learning to meet the intellectual requirements of a new strategic epoch. After all, the nexus between the federal government and academia began in earnest in World War II and momentously demonstrated its efficacy with the Manhattan Project. University professors readily became veritable intellectual soldiers in a cause behind which there was broad intellectual consensus. Today, however, the discipline of Middle Eastern studies--as well as the broader academic sphere of political science--has become so politicized and polarized as to render the academic establishment incapable of channeling the efforts of its constituents into a cohesive intellectual mobilization in the interest of national security.

The Vietnam War as well as the Church Committee's revelations of intelligence excesses made many academics wary of working on national security issues for the U.S. government. New intellectual trends spurred by the 1960s' philosophical ferment, particularly in Paris, reached this side of the Atlantic. "Post-colonial" studies and gender studies triggered by the feminist movement crystallized wariness into opposition. Deconstructionists, in their scorn for purported objectivity and value-free judgments, contributed to a broadly subversive mindset. An institutionalized academic refusal to perpetuate Western (particularly American) hegemony, and a commitment to "using the father's tools to dismantle the father's house" emerged on campuses. To undermine authority became the aim of scholarship. None of the social sciences or humanities was immune to this dimension of the zeitgeist. Notwithstanding compelling reasons for opposing Soviet communism and expansion, an ideological perspective developed that minimized Soviet (and other) transgressions and maligned Western civilization.

Those engaged in Middle Eastern studies were disposed to target what they perceived to be pro-Israel, anti-Arab U.S. foreign policy. To give substance and amplitude to these criticisms, they interpreted the late Edward Said's powerful...