[Mb-civic] Evidence that the US May Be Losing the Global War on Terror

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0426-28.htm

Published on Tuesday, April 26, 2005 by the Independent Institute
Evidence that the US May Be Losing the 
Global War on Terror
by Ivan Eland
 

The Bush administration is attempting to suppress key data showing 
that its Global War on Terrorism (or GWOT as government 
bureaucrats have dubbed it) likely has been counterproductive. 
According to Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State 
Department terrorism expert who still has many sources within the 
intelligence community, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s office is 
suppressing data showing that the number of major terrorist attacks 
worldwide exploded from 175 in 2003 to 625 in 2004, the highest 
number since the Cold War began to wane in 1985. U.S. officials said 
that when analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center declined 
the office of the secretary’s invitation to use a methodology that would 
reduce the number of terrorist attacks, her office terminated 
publication of the State Department’s annual “Patterns of Global 
Terrorism” report.

No matter what else George W. Bush does in office, historians will 
define his presidency primarily by his GWOT, initiated after the terrorist 
attacks of September 11. Yet the Bush administration is trying to hide 
important data that might very well lead historians and the American 
public to conclude that the GWOT has been disastrous for U.S. and 
global security.

In the aftermath of 9/11, instead of focusing on a vigorous and 
effective covert war against the perpetrators of the attacks—al 
Qaeda—the administration manipulated public opinion to launch the 
much ballyhooed and excessive GWOT against every “terrorist” group 
on the planet, whether they had ever attacked the United States or not. 
(The definition of a “terrorist” group seemed to be any armed non-
governmental entity that didn’t agree with U.S. policies.) For example, 
under the guise of fighting the group Abu Sayef, the U.S. government 
used the 9/11 attacks to renew its moribund security relationship with 
the Philippine government. The tiny group was not a threat to the 
Philippine government and certainly not to the U.S. superpower.

To make matters worse, as part of the GWOT, the administration then 
cynically manufactured an operational link between two unlikely 
allies—al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein—as an excuse to settle old 
scores with Saddam. Four years later, because of the administration’s 
distraction, the dangerous top leadership of al Qaeda remains at large. 
In fact, perhaps the invasion of Iraq was meant, in part, to distract the 
American public from the administration’s failure to neutralize the worst 
threat to the continental United States since the British invaded during 
the War of 1812.

In addition to distracting from the important task of quietly neutralizing 
al Qaeda, the Iraq invasion has needlessly killed between 26,000 and 
108,000 U.S. and allied troops, U.S. contract forces, Iraqi soldiers, and 
Iraqi civilians and overstretched the U.S. military in a seemingly 
endless Vietnam-style quagmire.

Critics have claimed that invading and occupying Iraq—a Muslim 
country—would inflame a radical Islamic jihad against the United 
States similar to that which afflicted another “infidel” nation—the Soviet 
Union—when it invaded and occupied Islamic Afghanistan in 1979. 
Already evidence exists—in the form of signature suicide 
bombings—that foreign jihadists from all over the world have streamed 
into Iraq to fight the United States, much as they swarmed into Soviet-
occupied Afghanistan during the 1980s.

The Bush administration has always maintained that drawing Islamic 
jihadists into Iraq is actually good because the United States would be 
better off fighting them there rather than in the American homeland. 
The president has called Iraq the “central front” in the GWOT. When 
fighting nation-states, the military’s usual approach of holding the 
adversary as far away from the homeland as possible makes sense. 
Unlike large enemy armies, however, small, agile terrorist groups can 
stealthily infiltrate all layers of defense and surface in the U.S. 
homeland. So we may very well have to fight them both in Iraq and at 
home. Also, the “fighting them there so that we don’t have to fight them 
here” logic assumes that the number of terrorists is constant. Critics 
have alleged that the invasion of Iraq has swelled the ranks of 
terrorists by converting many more fundamentalist Islamists into active 
warriors. The Bush administration is now suppressing government 
data that give credence to just that allegation.

Since the Iraq war went south, mainstream U.S. media feel safe in 
prominently displaying some of the unpleasant facts about that 
conflict—for example, allegations that the Bush administration 
pressured intelligence agencies to exaggerate Iraq’s efforts to acquire 
weapons of mass destruction. Yet the searing effect of 9/11 still makes 
the press leery of criticizing similar administration pressure on 
intelligence analysts to hide the apparent failure of the GWOT.

Such media skittishness is reminiscent of their behavior prior to the 
Iraq invasion, when it was impolitic to question the administration’s 
march to war. The media buried in its back pages a declassified CIA 
report indicating that Saddam Hussein was unlikely to use any 
weapons of mass destruction against the United States or give them to 
terrorists unless backed against the wall during a U.S. invasion. 
Apparently, the nation’s leading intelligence agency destroying the 
main rationale for its boss’s misguided and aggressive policy wasn’t 
headline news. Alas, the same is now occurring with data indicating 
that the administration’s grandiose GWOT may very well be 
counterproductive.

If the U.S. news media weren’t so timid about covering such explosive 
facts, perhaps the American public would just say “no” to government 
policies that endanger Americans and other people everywhere.

Ivan Eland is a Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute, Director of 
the Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty, and author of the books The 
Empire Has No Clothes, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense 
Policy.

© 2005 Independent Institute

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