Experts Urge Bush to Expand Anti-Terror Campaign: U.S. faces daunting threat from Saddam Hussein, says Pentagon advisor.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

Despite broad-based efforts by the United States to undermine terrorist organizations worldwide, the best that this nation can hope for is a slowdown in their activities, but not their complete elimination, experts said. The Bush administration, additionally, needs to expand its anti-terrorism strategy beyond the campaign in Afghanistan, these experts asserted.

"We will always have terrorism," said Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism. He was formerly the State Department's ambassador-at-large for counter terrorism during the Reagan administration. "We can reduce terrorists ability to operate on the scale we have seen," he said. A realistic goal for the Bush administration would be to create an environment where terrorism becomes more of a criminal problem that could be tackled by routine intelligence and law enforcement operations. Success for the administration, said Bremer, would be to reach a point in time when terrorism "does not dominate American foreign policy."

Bremer spoke at a national security conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis.

He had some words of caution for President Bush. According to Bremer, the administration's strategy to fight global terrorism is wrong for two reasons." For one thing, he said, the anti-terrorism campaign is not far-reaching enough, because it focuses on the al-Qaeda organization, but does not target those who have killed more Americans than any other terrorist group in the world. That group-hizbollah--"has to be on the list of terrorist groups we go after," said Bremer.

The administration also must figure our what to do about Saddam Hussein, regardless of whether the Iraqi dictator had any involvement in the September 11 attacks. "We are going to have to finish the job we left unfinished in 1991, because Saddam Hussein considers himself to still be at war with us," Bremer said.

It has been more than three years since Iraq was subjected to any United Nations inspections for weapons of mass destruction. "It is safe to assume he has reconstituted his chemical and biological programs, at a minimum, and perhaps his nuclear program," said Bremer. Saddam Hussein, he added, will be a "major threat to regional stability after the United States deals with radical Islam in Afghanistan."

Bremer charged that U.S. policies against Iraq have been ineffective at best. The United States imposed economic sanctions that did not hurt the Iraqi government, but gravely harmed the country's population, which has suffered from lack of food and medicine. "It would be hard actually to conceive of a worse policy, except one which started an inspection regime and then stopped it, which is also what we did," he said. "It is a mark of...