Picking Up the Pieces

Peter L. Bergen

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002

Summary:  In three new books, experts explore every angle of September's horrific attacks. The warning signs, it seems, had long been evident. Herewith some strategies for how to read the signals next time -- and how to fight and win the new war on terror.

Peter L. Bergen is the author of Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden.

Blinken's specific prescriptions include developing a rapid-response capability to counter erroneous commentary about American policies (paging James Carville!); encouraging U.S. ambassadors to engage in the public debate in their host countries; routinely deploying American officials to appear on Arabic media outlets like al Jazeera; bolstering the Voice of America in the Middle East, where it is currently heard by only 2 percent of Arabs; and enlisting the help of prominent Muslim Americans to communicate pro-American messages in their countries of origin. All of these ideas are indisputably commonsensible, and they offer another advantage as well: they come cheap.

In a chapter on homeland security, the authors of To Prevail insist that the United States must look beyond hijackings to other threats, involving "missiles, trucks, cars, or ships ... chemical or biological agents or nuclear materials in major U.S. cities; and both cyber and physical attacks on critical infrastructure." Such advice is welcome, for terrorists always seek "soft" targets, which are less well defended than the more obvious "hard" ones. The authors therefore also suggest that Ridge's office "should institute an extensive program of war-gaming exercises" to probe the nation's vulnerabilities and conduct a homeland security review "on the scale of a quadrennial defense review."

GLOBALIZATION GONE AWRY

The Age of Terror is more discursive in tone than the other two volumes reviewed, and its authors emphasize how recent, triumphalist proponents of globalization missed its dark side. As the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis writes,

it was held to be a good thing that capital, commodities, ideas, and people could move freely across boundaries. There was little talk, though, of an alternative possibility: that danger might move just as freely. ... It was as if we had convinced ourselves that the new world of global communications had somehow transformed an old aspect of human nature, which is the tendency to harbor grievances and sometimes to act upon them.

His fellow historian Paul Kennedy picks up that theme. "No one," he writes, "wants to reside in a totally closed society like North Korea, but complete integration and openness also bring their perils and achieving a fine balance between accessibility and security will be excruciatingly difficult."

Meanwhile, the veteran diplomat Charles Hill takes aim with considerable verve at a number of targets, in his essay dissecting the "Myth and Reality of Arab Terrorism." Hill decries the fact that during the 1990s the United States "relied heavily on law enforcement mechanisms to try to investigate and punish terrorists. The results, predictably, were interminable legalistic entanglements that focused on the lowest suspects and left the masterminds alone." Hill blames the American news media, too, for turning inward, closing overseas bureaus, and reducing foreign affairs coverage so that "paradoxically, the greater the U.S. involvement in a globalizing world became, the less knowledgeable or concerned Americans became about events beyond their own borders."

Hill also fires a devastating broadside at the regimes of the Middle East. This critique is worth quoting at length, since it is the political failures of these states that allowed for the genesis of the religious terrorists.

[There is a] single approach to the political ordering of [Arab] society. In Oman, a sultan; in Yemen, a military "president"; in Saudi Arabia, a king and family with special Islamic custodial responsibilities; in Jordan, a king of a simulated constitutional monarchy; in Egypt, a president and a parliament only nominally connected to the original Western meaning of these institutions. Beneath all these styles a single form is discernible. Power is held by a strongman, surrounded by a praetorian guard. ... Those close to political power gain; the weak are disregarded.

Hill is on a roll here, and it gets even better.