REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Getting Serious
America is at war. It must fight by wartime rules.
Yesterday President Bush issued his sharpest statement yet about Tuesday's assaults on U.S. cities, calling them "more than acts of terror" but "acts of war." If he--and we as a country--really mean that, it's time to start getting serious.
As Mr. Bush elaborated, that is going to mean more than anti-terrorist "business as usual" or the moral equivalent of war. It means real war, involving a sustained national mobilization of resources, allies and people. It also means rethinking some of the softer political pieties about our modern, violent world.
One place to start would be to dust off the findings of the 2000 Bremer Commission report on terrorism. That report, which looks prescient now, identified a series of self-imposed U.S. obstacles to confronting organized terror. One such is the 1995 rule, imposed by former CIA Director John Deutsch under political pressure, limiting whom the U.S. can recruit for counter-terrorism.
For fear of hiring rogues, the CIA decided it would only hire Boy Scouts. But the people most likely to inform on terrorists are fellow terrorists. There is always a risk they will behave badly later, and the press will play up that he or she was once paid by the U.S. The bipartisan Bremer panel, whose chairman, Paul Bremer, elaborates today, said this Deutsch rule sent "an unmistakable message to CIA officers in the field that recruiting clandestine sources of terrorist information is encouraged in theory but discouraged in practice." And it led to the sharpest decline in CIA "morale" since the 1970s. For effective anti-terrorism, the CIA needs to be able to dangle enough cash or other incentives to enough bad guys that one of them will talk before Americans die.
This doesn't mean we want to make the CIA the scapegoat for this week's airplane assaults. It has tried to overcome the legacy of the Deutsch rule, and the nature of the intelligence business is that you can't brag about successes, but everybody knows the failures. We're told the CIA has busted up at least three operations against U.S. targets in recent months, saving thousands of lives: at U.S. embassies in Rome and Yemen and Incirlik Air Force base in Turkey. And yet Tuesday's attacks were so sophisticated that they must have been in planning for months, and the failure to discover them suggests large problems remain.
More important, something like the Deutsch rule reflects a broader lack of seriousness, in the political class and society generally. It assumes Americans can confront a global network of organized terror the same way we fight domestic crime. But if the country is really at war, it must fight by wartime rules. That means killing your enemy without the demands of due process or a permission slip from the World Court. Libya's Moammar Gadhafi tempered his terror campaign only after U.S. warplanes tried to kill him in his desert tent. Likewise, intelligence is only one policy tool and all of those policy levers have to move simultaneously. Intelligence can be useful only if it's used.
And getting serious means finishing the job when the U.S. decides to act militarily. Though we supported it at the time as better than nothing, in retrospect nothing might have been preferable to Bill Clinton's feckless bombing of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. It achieved little while making bin Laden look stronger in fanatic Arab eyes. This is also the lesson of George H.W. Bush's decision to end the Gulf War before Saddam Hussein was deposed. We would not be surprised if this week's atrocity was the work of either Saddam or bin Laden or both.
Because today's terrorists form a global network, a war against them also requires allies. So it was encouraging yesterday to see NATO begin to debate its Article 5 obligations, under which an attack on one of its 19 member nations is an attack on all. A serious war on terrorism will have to be as international as the Gulf and Cold Wars were. As Secretary of State Colin Powell noted: "It's not just a matter of going after the perpetrators, but it's going after and dealing with the sources of support that they have, whether that source of support might come from a host country or other organizations that provide them. . . . And so we will hold accountable those countries that provide support."
Finally, there is the matter of a formal declaration of war by Congress. We are used to thinking that such declarations are only made against nations. But modern warfare is often more diffuse and less accountable but still horrible enough that perhaps we need to rethink this limitation. Many more Americans almost certainly died this week than the 2,400 who were killed at Pearl Harbor (and only 68 civilians). Once we learn who is responsible, the U.S. might consider an act of war against all of those who help them.
The larger point is that words of anger and resolve this week will mean nothing if they aren't followed by actions that show a national determination to fight this terrorist war all the way to victory.
