Ponder and deliberate before you make a move.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Can We Win The War on Terror?

Yesterday morning, President Bush was asked by Matt Lauer of the Today Show if the War on Terror could be won.  The President replied “I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.”  Bush was wrong.  The War on Terror could have been won.  But the Administration failed to see the War on Terror in coherent policy terms.  This strategic failure continues to this day and threatens to result in defeat for the United States.

The goal of the United States in the War on Terror should have been simple—to dismantle terrorist networks planning to attack the U.S. by physically capturing or killing their members and destroying their ties to the communities which supported them.  Thus a proper strategy for the United States in the war would involve an all-out attempt to capture the leaders and footsoldiers of al Qaeda, coupled with a public-relations blitz to separate the Arab masses and terrorist funders from al Qaeda’s brutal brand of Islam. 

A quick application of the ideas of the celebrated military theorist von Clausewitz supports this conclusion.  Clausewitz held that war was state policy by means of force.  A corollary to this concept was that the center of gravity of resistance to this policy must be identified and blow after blow must be directed towards it.  In popular uprisings of the sort similar to today’s terrorist campaigns, Clausewitz held that personalities of the uprising’s leaders and public opinion were the center of gravity. Clausewitz also advised that the best way to begin a war was with the defeat and destruction of the enemy’s fighting forces. 

Yet this Administration has never approached the War on Terror with anything approaching a coherent strategy of any type.  Although it acted to quickly eliminate the Taliban and the terrorist training camps as Clausewitz would have advised, it quickly lost focus once major military operations in Afghanistan ended.  It never adopted a unified strategy with which to pursue the goal of eliminating Islam-inspired terrorism aimed at the United States.  Major al Qaeda leaders remain alive to inspire, if not direct, their followers.  Rather than capture these leaders and take down their networks, the Bush Administration instead sought to graft the major thrust of its pre-September 11th Middle East policy—eliminating the régime of Saddam Hussein—onto the War on Terror. 

Setting aside theories that the War on Terror was a smoke-screen for neocons to fulfill pro-Israel wish lists, the Administration apparently hoped an attack on Iraq would result in victory in the War on Terror.  According to the most coherent of these dubious theories, Islamic peoples surrounding the new successful Iraqi democracy would demand the same of their leaders, somehow causing Muslim public opinion to accept pro-Western values.  Other theories implied that American victory over Hussein would make anti-American elements in Islamic countries cower in fear.  Even on their face these two ideas suffer from an incompatibility which has played a large role in the looming specter of an American defeat in Iraq, a defeat sure to embolden our enemies and balk our friends.

This war is not lost, however.  But the chances of victory are much less now.  Victory requires twin Gordian feats:  a stable Iraq must be created while drawing out the troops necessary to hunt and kill terrorist leaders, and the massive damage created to world public opinion by the ill-conceived adventure in Iraq must be reversed.  It is clear that a second Bush administration can do neither.