Are we trapped in the war on terror?

Lustick, Ian ; Eland, Ivan ; Beers, Rand 等

The following is an edited transcript of the forty-sixth in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council The meeting was held on November 3, 2006, at the Independent Institute, with Chas. W. Freeman, Jr., presiding.

CHAS. W. FREEMAN, Jr., president, Middle East Policy Council

Sunzi, the great Chinese military thinker, said, Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will win every war. Do we know ourselves? Do we know our enemies in the struggle we are now engaged in? Or do our enemies have a greater understanding both of themselves and of us? Five years into the war on terror, there are still, I think, more questions than answers.

We were cruelly struck on 9/11, five years ago. Our enemies saw their actions as a reprisal for our policies and sometimes lethal actions in their homelands. We were not aware that we had done anything to earn their ire. Is the problem of terrorism really just sort of a supply-side issue--all push from that side and no pull from ours? Or is it a product of angry men with real or imagined grievances? Could we enhance our security by reducing the humiliations that create terrorists even as we kill those who have taken up arms against us?

Who struck us on 9/11? Was it the Taliban or other Afghans with whom we have ever since been engaged on the battlefield? Was it the Arabs or just some Arabs? Was it conservative Muslims or a few fanatics? Are we fighting the foes that we have, to paraphrase Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, or the enemies that we have invented or enemies that we are creating as we go along? Can military intervention make imagined enemies come to life? Were Iraqis in this fight before we took it to them? Are we making more enemies than we are killing?

What is the nature of this struggle? Is it best thought of as a war supported by intelligence and law enforcement or as a struggle led by intelligence and law enforcement backed up by the military? If the struggle is between ideologies and values, is it correct to say of our opponents, as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld did in introducing the Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR, that, "compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life or we will succeed in changing theirs." If this struggle is indeed as existential as the secretary implies, are we changing them and their way of life for the better, or are they catalyzing changes in our values and practices for the worse? Is this struggle best prosecuted by entering their territories and challenging them to defend them or by adopting a policy of live and let live?

Finally, the deaths of 3,000 of us on 9/11 did diminish our country, but it didn't threaten the existence of our nation, as the Cold War did. Then, with the push of a button, tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of Americans and others would have perished within hours. Is the threat we now face really on a par with the Cold War or so much greater that it justifies a range of measures we never considered necessary when we were threatened with nuclear obliteration? Is a loose nuke in an American city a greater threat than thousands of warheads aimed at us? Does the situation now justify the militarization of our policy and the creation of a national-security state? Is the threat to us really that much greater than similar threats long faced by our allies, who have managed, by and large, to deal with them without sacrificing their civil liberties or compromising the vigor of their democratic debate?

Finally, when and how does this war end? We are told it will be a long one. What's the strategy for winning it? How should we define victory? What level of safety would we have to achieve to consider ourselves once again secure? Is it realistic to expect such a level of security? Or are we entering an era in which, instead of zero risk, we must accept the task of risk management?

This is, after all, the Middle East Policy Council, so we'll be discussing our war with terrorists primarily in the context of the Middle East. Still, these questions that I've raised, I think, are some that we can bear in mind usefully as we proceed to the discussion.

There is a certain pathology at work here, and Ian Lustick has made a very powerful case that the war on terror has assumed the level of national ideology, even as it has set off the usual feeding frenzy at the political trough, something anyone who lives in this town is, unfortunately, very familiar with.

IAN LUSTICK, Bess W. Heyman Chair, Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; author, Trapped in the War on Terror

The war in Iraq has become politically radioactive. It's a burden to any politician associated with it. Not so the War on Terror. It continues to attract the allegiance of every politician in the country, whether as a justification for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq to win in a central front in the War on Terror or as a justification for withdrawing those troops to win the really crucial battles in the War on Terror at home or in Afghanistan.

What accounts for the stupendous success of the War on Terror as a political program, as a frame of reference for policy and as undisputed champion in the battle for increases in discretionary funding over the last five years? Certainly it is not the scale of the threat to the homeland. Since 9/11, there has been no evidence of any serious terrorist threat from Islamic extremists inside America--no sleeper cells, no attacks, no evidence of serious planning or preparation for an attack. This, despite red-teaming analyses (and monthly shootings in schools and shopping malls) that show how easy it is, or would be, for terrorists bent on killing Americans to do so. This absence of evidence of a big domestic terror threat is even more instructive thanks to the unprecedentedly exhaustive, constant, unrestrained and heavily funded scrutiny of anyone and anything that law enforcement agencies have had even the vaguest reason to imagine might be suspect.

For many the absence of attacks is truly puzzling. What has puzzled me more, however, is how to explain a nearly universal allegiance of Americans to the War on Terror--the steady polling numbers showing support for it, the often panicky concern that it is not being prosecuted successfully enough, its dominance of the political landscape and the $650 billion that we have so far spent on it. Answering this question means understanding how the War on Terror was triggered and how it sustains itself.

The official mantra is that we fight in Iraq because it is the central front in the War on Terror. The exact opposite is the case. We are trapped in fighting an unwinnable and essentially nonsensical "War on Terror" because its invention was required in order to fight in Iraq. When we were struck on September 11, 2001, the U.S. military budget was the equal of the military budgets of the next 24 most powerful countries. That structural fact of military unipolarity, by sharply reducing the perception of the costs of military adventures, made it likely that the United States would fight some kind of war abroad. However, in the first eight months of the George W. Bush administration the State Department, the uniformed military and the intelligence community blocked efforts inspired by the Project for the New American Century, and led Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to launch a war in Iraq as the first stage of a radical transformation of U.S. foreign policy toward global hegemony and military unilateralism. But when 9/11 produced an immense amount of political capital for a president peculiarly ready to accept the role offered him by that supremacist cabal--of anointed Churchillian savior in a global, epochal "War on Terror"--the cabal had exactly what it needed. As they spun it, the global War on Terror divided the world into those with us and those against us. Coupled with the principle of preemption, this radical division of the world into our camp and the enemy camp rendered automatically any country or group not with us as subject to attack by the United States at will. In this way, although Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, the cabal was able to devise and implement the formula linking the September attacks to its long-cherished goal: forcible regime change in Iraq as a model for a series of quick neo-imperialist wars to revolutionize American foreign policy and accomplish conservative political objectives at home. Thus the latent propensity of the United States to go to war, born of immense military preponderance, was exploited by the supremacists, able to portray their long-sought invasion of Iraq as a requirement of a global War on Terror.

After years of slaughter in Iraq, the neocon fantasy of a series of cheap, fast imperial wars is dead. But the War on Terror lives on stronger than ever. How did it take on a life of its own and trap the entire political class and most Americans into public beliefs about the need to fight a global War on Terror as our first priority, even when there is no evidence of an enemy present in the United States?

Consider how the Congress responded to the War on Terror. In the summer of 2003, a list of 160 potential targets for terrorists was drawn up to be protected, triggering intense efforts by representatives and senators in Congress and their constituents to find targets in their districts that could generate funding. The result? Widening definitions of potential targets and mushrooming increases in the number of infrastructure and other assets deemed worthy of protection--up to 1,849 such targets in late 2003, 28,360 in 2004, 77,769 in 2005 and up to an estimated 300,000 in our national-assets database today, including the Sears Tower in Chicago but also the Indiana Apple and Pork Festival.

Across the country virtually every lobby and interest group cast its traditional objectives and funding proposals as more important than ever, given the imperatives of the War on Terror. In exuberant press releases of the National Rifle Association, the War on Terror means more Americans should own and carry firearms to defend the country and themselves against terrorists. According to the gun-control lobby, fighting the War on Terror means passing strict gun-control laws to keep assault weapons out of the hands of terrorists. Schools of veterinary medicine called for quadrupling their funding. Who else would train veterinarians to defend the country against terrorists using hoof-and-mouth disease to decimate our cattle herds? Pediatricians declared that more funding was required to train pediatricians as first responders to terrorist attacks, since treating children as victims is not the same as treating adults. Pharmacists advocated the creation of pharmaceutical SWAT teams to respond quickly with appropriate drugs to the victims of terrorist attacks. Aside from the swarms of beltway-bandit consulting firms and huge corporate investments in counterterrorism activities, universities across the country created graduate programs in homeland security and institutes on terrorism and counterterrorism, all raising huge catcher's mitts into the air for the billions of dollars of grants and contracts blowing in the wind.

As these and other groups found counterterrorism slogans effective in raising revenue, they became even more committed to the War on Terror, convincing those who had been slow to define themselves as part of the war to do so quickly or lose out.

The same imperative--translate your agenda into War on Terror requirements or be starved of funds--and its spiraling consequences, surged across the government affecting all agencies. Bureaucrats unable to think of a way to describe their activities in War on Terror terms were virtually disqualified from budget increases and probably doomed to cuts. With billions of dollars a year in state and local funding, the Department of Homeland Security devised a list of 15 national planning scenarios to help guide its allocations. To qualify for Homeland Security funding, state and local governments had to describe how they would use these funds to meet one of those chosen 15 scenarios. What was the process that produced this list? It was in part deeply political, driven by competition among agencies, states and localities that knew funding opportunities would depend on exactly which scenarios were included or excluded--with anthrax, a chemical attack on a sports stadium and hoof-and-mouth disease included but attacks on liquid-natural-gas tankers and the spreading of West Nile virus excluded. Most instructive of all in this process was the unwillingness to define the enemy posing the terrorist threat. Why? Because if a particular enemy were identified certain scenarios profitable for some of the funding competitors would be disqualified. Thus the enemy in these scenarios is officially referred to as the "universal adversary"; in other words, it's Satan. This is how the War on Terror drives the country from responding to threats to preparing for vulnerabilities, producing an irrational and doomed strategic posture that treats any bad thing that could happen as a national-security imperative.

Of course, this entire dynamic is accelerated by the hallowed principle of CYA, Cover Your Ass. Each policy maker knows that if there is another attack no one will be able to predict where and when it will be; but after it occurs, it will be easy to discover who it was who did not approve some project or level of funding that could have prevented it.

Finally, apart from the merciless competition among politicians posing as War on Terror warriors--think of the bizarre public posturing about Abu Dhabi controlling our ports--there is no more important energy source for the War on Terror than the media. I don't mean just the films and television shows thriving on exciting images of maniacal but brilliant Middle East terrorists ready to destroy the country if not for a few heroes operating to protect us in an otherwise incompetent government. I am also talking about the news media.

When a blizzard bears down on a large American city, the local news media has a field day. Ratings rise. Announcers are barely able to contain their excitement. Meteorologists become celebrities. They warn of the storm event of the century. Viewers are glued to their sets. Soon, however, the blizzard dumps its snow and passes, or fizzles and is forgotten. Either way, the blizzard story ends. Ratings for local news shows return to normal, and anchors shift their attention back to murders, fires and auto accidents.

When it comes to the War on Terror, however, the "blizzard of the century" is always about to hit and never goes away. For the national media this is as good as it gets. Officially the terrorist threat level is always and everywhere no less than "elevated." Absent any actual attacks or detectable threats, government agencies manufacture pseudo-victories over alleged or sting-produced plots to justify hundreds of billions of dollars worth of mostly silly expenditures. With every lost soul captured by the FBI and presented as the latest incarnation of Muhammad Atta, the news media and the entertainment industry fairly exult, thriving on fears stoked by evocations of 9/11 and the ready availability of disaster scenarios too varied to be thwarted but too frightening to be ignored. Compounded by media sensationalism, these fears then provide irresistible opportunities for ambitious politicians to attack one another for failing to protect the terrorist target du jour: ports, border crossings, the milk supply, cattle herds, liquid-natural-gas tankers, nuclear power plants, drinking water, tunnels, bridges or subways. The result of such sensationalist coverage, accompanied by advice from academic or corporate experts anxious to sell their counterterrorism schemes to a terrified public and a cover-your-ass-obsessed government bureaucracy are more waves of support for increased funding for the War on Terror. But every precaution against the terrorists quickly produces speculation about what grounds the terrorist could use, thereby fueling more cycles of anxiety, blame, expert counterterrorist advice and increased funding.

These are the vicious cycles, the self-powering dynamics that have produced a widespread hysteria over non-existent "sleeper cells" and a vulnerability to bad things happening not seen here since the anti-communist frenzy of the McCarthy era. How humiliating! The country that was able to adjust psychologically, politically and militarily to the real capacity of the Soviet enemy to incinerate our cities on a moment's notice has been reduced to moaning, wasting resources and spinning in circles by ragged bands of Muslim fanatics.

We have been and are still being suckered big time. Before the attacks, al-Qaeda was a shattered remnant of a failed movement dropping into the dustbin of history, the equivalent of the Aryan Nations on the American political scene. But the diabolical strikes against the twin towers and the Pentagon saved them. Well, not really. What saved them from political oblivion, and lifted them to a protagonist declared as equivalent in potency and word-historic importance to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, was the American reaction to those attacks. Our invasion of Iraq, cast within a global War on Terror, was for them the "crusade" that makes their world of "jihad" appear not just real but compellingly real to hundreds of millions of Muslims. The Bush administration launched the War on Terror, but it was a war fought according to Osama's script. Now our army is broken and demoralized in an Iraq war that breeds al-Qaeda recruits and turns their propaganda into reality. Meanwhile, the very strength of American democracy and free enterprise--motivating every faction in America to turn the War on Terror to its own interest--is hijacked and turned against us by our adversaries just as effectively as they hit us with our own airplanes in 9/11.

We want to arm wrestle with our enemies. Why not? We have more economic and political and military muscle than any state in history. But that is precisely why they fight us with judo, using our strength against us. They hijack our planes to attack our buildings. They use our passionate patriotism to propel us into a war in the Middle East that precisely serves their interests and was the main reason for their attack. And they hijack Madisonian democracy itself to create a vortex of aggrandizing exploitation of the War on Terror for self-interested agendas that spin our country out of control.

One of the things that the War on Terror does to defend itself is to prevent itself from being known. Consider what happened to John Kerry when he said something true about it in October 2004. He said that the War on Terror was inappropriate; that the terrorism threat, though real, had been exaggerated; that it is a nuisance, akin to prostitution and organized crime, something that we have to control through systematic law enforcement. The War on Terror immediately smothered this argument. Both Republicans and Kerry's Democratic handlers forced an immediate retreat. In his debate with President Bush, Senator Kerry sought to prove he did not have a "pre-9/11 mentality" by intensifying his War on Terror rhetoric. In the televised presidential debate, he declared he wasn't going to just hunt down the terrorists and "bring them to justice;" he was going to "kill them."

Indeed, in a whole host of ways the War on Terror suppresses knowledge of itself. For example, it does not allow the American people to see Osama bin Laden, for if we knew and understood him, we would understand that a "War on Terror" is exactly not how we can combat him and what he stands for. So almost no one in America is aware of a passage at the end of Bin Laden's famous tape on November 1, 2004, released right before the election. It is easy, he said,

 for us to provoke and bait this administration. All we have to do
 is to send two mujahidin [jihadists] to the furthest point east
 to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order
 to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human,
 economic and political losses without their achieving for it
 anything of note other than some benefits for their private
 companies....

 So we are continuing this policy of bleeding America to the
 point of bankruptcy.... That being said, ... when one scrutinizes
 the results, one cannot say that al-Qaeda is the sole factor
 in achieving these spectacular gains.

 Rather the policy of the White House that demands the opening
 of war fronts to keep busy their vairous corporations, whether they
 be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction, has
 helped al-Qaeda to achieve these enormous results.

 And so it appears to some analysts and diplomats that the White
 House and we are playing as one team toward the economic goals of
 the United States, even if the intentions differ.... for example,
 al-Qaeda spent $500,000 on the events [the 9/11 attacks], while
 America, in the incident and its aftermath lost--according to the
 lowest estimate--more than $500 billion. Meaning that every dollar
 of al-Qaeda defeated a million dollars by the permission of
 Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As Seif al-Adl, al-Qaeda's security chief, put it, "The Americans took the bait and fell into our trap." Until we know our current enemy as we came to know the Soviet Union and then use that knowledge to adopt, as we did then, an appropriate long-term, sustainable, reality-based strategy, we will be unable to focus properly on security problems that do exist. Indeed, we will remain "Trapped in the War on Terror."

IVAN ELAND, senior fellow, Independent Institute

I'm going to take off from where Ian Lustick started. I have read his book, and I recommend everyone buy it because you'll get a unique perspective that I think is very true. Some of the things that Ian mentions fit nicely with the public-choice theory of economics, which governs every type of public policy we have, from health policy to employment policy, to foreign policy, to defense policy: benefits of government programs are concentrated, and the costs are dispersed among the taxpayers. Therefore, you get huge lobbying groups. They are very well organized, and they usually control the policy until the policy is elevated to a sufficient level of public awareness that the public starts saying, wow, my taxes are really going up; why am I paying all of this money to the government? I think that the costs of the Iraq War are rising to that point. But most issues don't. On most issues, the lobby groups control the policy. In this particular case, we would hope that the lobbying groups wouldn't take advantage of an incident like 9/11, but of course, in Washington they take advantage of it even more, because you do have this threat out there.

The terrorism threat is a little like an airline crash compared to a car crash. An airline crash is a rare event, but statisticians call the irrational fear that people have of traveling on airplanes "probability neglect." You look at your TV set, and you see this smoldering wreckage that killed over 300 people, and you are afraid to fly. But it's much more dangerous to drive your car; flying is very safe. Most people who get killed as a result of a plane crash are not the people who die in the planes, but the people who would have taken a plane but decided to drive. Driving is very dangerous.

The same thing is true with terrorism. It's a rare event, but it's spectacular. It also differs from natural disasters in that there is a diabolical enemy. It's not just some random natural occurrence. This gives us focused press coverage, and, as Ian mentioned, the press eats it up. But terrorism is very rare, especially in North America. John Mueller, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, went over some of the statistics. He writes that the average American has a one-in-80,000 chance of getting killed by an international terrorist, about the equivalent of the chances of getting hit by a meteorite or a comet.

I would disagree with him a little bit. The chances of getting attacked are actually lower than that. If you look back through the Patterns of Global Terrorism that the State Department used to put out, you'll find that North America was the continent that had by far the lowest terrorism, simply because we are farther away from the centers of conflict, and the terrorists have logistical problems getting here.

Moreover, we don't have a community that will shelter them, unlike other places, such as Europe. Most of the terrorist attacks on U.S. targets are overseas, at our embassies, government facilities, military bases, et cetera. So if you live in the United States, you have even less of a chance of being killed by a terrorist, and if you don't live in Washington or New York, you probably have even less of a chance.

So terrorism is a rare event; but as Ian was saying, the lobby groups have taken this and run with it. We have all of these new Homeland Security bureaucracies. We have a new director of National Intelligence. The FBI has converted itself into an anti-terrorism agency. And of course, the government has also undertaken Draconian civil-liberties constrictions, the latest one being the suspension of habeas corpus.

You have to ask yourself--and this is a very radical thing to say--do we have more to fear from the terrorists or from our government and its response? There is all of this effort and it's not just money being spent; civil liberties have been eroded. The Cold War too was very bad for civil liberties because it was a long war; it never stopped. Civil liberties have been eroded in every single war we've had, but previous wars--World Wars I and II, even the Civil War--were short, and civil liberties sort of recovered. The problem with the Cold War is that it created the imperial presidency. This threat that was hanging over us created the imperial presidency and distorted the Constitution from the legislative emphasis that the founders had intended, and put a lot of the authority in the presidency.

Both of these things, the civil liberties restrictions and the distortion of government checks and balances go to the heart of our system. So we really have to ask what the consequences of these actions are. We also need to ask an important question: What is causing this terrorism? Almost nobody ever asks that question, at least in a public forum. Terrorists believe that they are retaliating for our actions. But most Americans don't realize what an interventionist foreign policy the United States has conducted since World War II. It's diametrically opposed to the traditional foreign policy throughout most of American history, which involved military restraint overseas.

So we have an activist foreign policy, and, like all empires, we are experiencing blowback. The problem now is that we have modern communication and transportation systems that small groups can use to retaliate against us. We really have to address this question and ask, do we really need to be doing some of the things that we are doing overseas? It's a very important question, and it doesn't get addressed because it's very sensitive. People think you're implying that the victims killed on 9/11 were at fault. That is not true at all. But perhaps their government had some complicity, unintentionally.

I'm certainly not suggesting that the government had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, but in certain respects, the government is not protecting its citizens. The first objective of every government, no matter what kind, is to protect its citizens and its territory. But we now have an informal empire around the world of military bases, alliances, military interventions.

If you look at the historical record, the United States has been by far the most interventionist country since World War II. Do we really need to do this for our security? We have always had the luxury of being away from the centers of conflict, and we have a nuclear arsenal that the founders didn't have. The founders realized our advantage of being rather isolated. Of course, it is often said that nuclear weapons have made this obsolete, but they haven't. If anything, we're more invulnerable from a conventional or even a nuclear attack because we have the most potent nuclear arsenal in the world.

The real threat we face comes from terrorists, but we have to keep it in perspective. It's still rare. We still enjoy advantages from being on the other side of the world from the terrorists. And if we want to reduce our chances of being hit by a terrorist even more, we ought to tone down our foreign policy. We have the luxury of doing that, but in Washington, this is a nonstarter because there are so many groups that have an interest in military intervention.

The public-choice question is this: Does your government really have an interest in protecting you? The answer is probably no, because it's tied up with all of these other issues and reasons for intervening all over the world. If we want to pose some hard questions, we have to ask government officials whether they haven't contributed to the problem. Certainly Bin Laden ought to be killed or captured. We probably should have devoted our resources to that instead of making the problem worse by invading Iraq and stirring up the hornets' nest. But in the long term, we have to address the foreign-policy issue that is motivating the terrorists.

I differ from Ian in only one area. He likes George Kennan's Cold War containment policy. I think it is certainly a better policy than the one we're running now. But I would say that, even during the Cold War, we could have run a more minimalist policy. In this case, it's a little different. We are trying to de-motivate terrorists from attacking us. So the Cold War model is not really applicable. Certainly containment is better than active provocation, which we are doing. But we really need to find out what our vital interests are--by any poll that you take in the Islamic or Arab worlds--and cut out the successive interventions that are causing the terrorism. That is what is driving it.

AMB. FREEMAN: Thank you very much, Ivan, particularly for the point that we do have choices that we can make. We are a very fortunate country in our strength and in our two oceans, and we do have choices. There is nothing inevitable about the particular set of policies we have adopted. I am surprised that neither you nor Ian mentioned Osama bin Laden's greatest achievement, which is that he is the largest creator of federal employment after Franklin Delano Roosevelt and continues, as Ian was suggesting, to provide gainful employment for a very large and growing number of people, including, I was happy to learn, at the Indiana Apple and Pork Festival.

RAND BEERS, former member, National Security Council (1988-98)

I'm going to come at this from a somewhat different but not dissimilar direction. Having served as assistant secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, I was always struck by the terminology that was used in the war on drugs, a phrase coined, I believe, by Richard Nixon in an effort to mobilize national activity to deal with the problem of drug addiction and drug use. During the Clinton administration, Barry McCaffrey labored without success to try to change the terminology and discovered that, for all of his efforts to find analogies like cancer and things like that, he was unable to do so. But I was encouraged that in Spanish, the war on drugs does not translate as la guerra, but as la lucha, the struggle against drugs, which I always thought was a much more apt metaphor in terms of dealing with that particular problem.

As we moved into the war on terrorism, we were informed by Zbigniew Brzezinski that having a war on terrorism was like having a war on Blitzkrieg. We were focusing not on the enemy but on a tactic that was used by that enemy and a number of other enemies. And I got involved, as John Kerry did, in the campaign and was also blasted for using the word "struggle" instead of war because the metaphor was deemed to be so apt and expressive, a basis for mobilizing the population and our resources in order to deal with the problem.

The two previous discussants have raised what I think are very important questions. As the key judgments of the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Terrorism were published, I was struck by a conversation that I had had earlier this year with my friend Graham Allison at the Kennedy School. He had conducted a class in which he had asked his students to pretend that they were advisers to Osama bin Laden in the immediate aftermath of the dispersal of al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. The task was to write a strategy: if you could control what the United States would do from here forward that would allow us to recover from this defeat that we have suffered in Afghanistan, what would you suggest to Mr. Bin Laden? Graham indicated that there were five general responses that he got from the class.

The first was, attack a Muslim Arab country, especially if it had holy places. Second, kill innocent civilians and commit human-rights abuses. Third, associate some form of proselytizing with this particular process. Fourth, support autocratic, secular Muslim regimes. Fifth, and perhaps most important, use language that evokes the notion of clashes of civilizations or the Crusades.

The National Intelligence Estimate said that there were four advantages that al-Qaeda had that on balance gave it more advantages than vulnerabilities. These were entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation and a sense of powerlessness; the Iraq jihad; the slow pace of real and sustained socioeconomic and political reforms in many Muslim-majority nations; and pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among Muslims.

So, in effect, the things that would allow Bin Laden and al-Qaeda to maintain and advance their particular cause seem to be the things that we are doing, rather than the other way around. As Don Rumsfeld put it, they are able to recruit faster than we are able to capture and kill jihadists.

We are, at this point in time, faced with having to think about what kinds of actions should be undertaken to limit the ability of a very adroit political master, Bin Laden, to use events of our making to advance his own activities in the Muslim world.

The good news is that, if one can believe the polling that Pew and others have conducted, the amount of strongly supportive sentiment in the Muslim world for al-Qaeda and Bin Laden still remains small. The question is whether our continued actions can evoke that kind of advance on the part of Bin Laden. We have to begin to think about programs and activities that are designed to reduce the sense that this is a war, a clash of civilizations, and--probably not with ourselves in the lead, given the attitude of many Muslims toward the United States--foster programs that are going to reduce these advantages that al-Qaeda is using to their benefit.

AMB. FREEMAN: I was struck at the outset, when you referred to the war on drugs, not only by the problems with the war you and Zbigniew Brzezinski have referred to, but also by the analogy to the problem of addiction. Drugs are a supply-side problem, the fault of Colombians, Peruvians and Afghans. The fact that we use them and have the largest market for them in the world has nothing to do with the problem. In fact, the definition of an addict is someone who can't do demand management. Perhaps we need to do a bit of demand management on the issue of terrorism. That is a theme that all three of you have struck, which I'm sure Ed Luttwak will now contradict.

EDWARD LUTTWAK, senior fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies

I disagree with nothing I have heard on a functional basis. But I disagree with some of the premises. First of all, our situation is scarcely catastrophic. This morning unemployment was less than 4.5 percent of the labor force. This is the envy of every other industrialized country around the world. It represents substantial economic success by this administration. Low unemployment means that the poor are doing okay or at least better than they did in the past. We might still have median income trends that are disturbing in the long term, but at least the poor are doing better. The Dow is about 12,000, so the rich are doing better too. Everybody should be happy about the economy, and that is part of the picture.

Another part of the picture is that, as it has been pointed out from different perspectives, evidently September 11, 2001, was not the beginning of a war, at least not a war by terrorists against us. There was no September 12, September 13, or September 14. War, by the way, never interfered with the advancement of European civilization, not even wars that lasted for years, in which 1,000 might be killed in a single day. As a matter of fact, historians probably will come to the conclusion that war sprang from the very breast of European civilization, that war was part of its dynamic, its renewal, its growth. War becomes the excuse, the cause or the motive of structural change and advancement in different capacities. It is a reality that women would not have been brought into full citizenship without two world wars.

All of these are realities. So the counterterrorism war can be seen as follows: it has all of the defects that have been pointed out, including a fundamental lack of reality. Nevertheless, it is the only response we have, and one should not quickly dispose of it. To be sure, the conventional view is that war is only bad. But anybody who reviews the history of the United States or Europe or Israel--a country that has grown 10 times in population and much more than that in GNP since 1948, which has its Nobel Prizes and some excellent restaurants in Tel Aviv--will find that its success would not have been possible without war. Without war, Israel would have been a provincial backwater. War is not all bad.

These are all realities that we must not rush to forget. Another reality is the Iraq War. I opposed it absolutely, though for rather nasty reasons. It is the first war I've opposed in 40 years. I happen to have known its protagonists rather well over a long period of time. Therefore I knew that they were sincere, that they really believed what they said: that this was a war for democracy. The weapons-of-mass-destruction justification came later, when Colin Powell insisted on getting UN sanction for the war--which we did not have for the Kosovo war in 1999. Since I happen to have been brought up in Sicily, where some 60 elections have been held since Garibaldi landed, with no democracy to speak of, and since I know something about the Middle East, I thought that fighting a war to bring democracy to Iraq was a fantasy project that could only fail. The only open question was how it would fail.

Likewise, I certainly supported the demolition of the Taliban, but I did not support staying in Afghanistan thereafter. Afghanistan is a country that I happened to have visited before the Soviet invasion of 1979. The attempt to create a democratic Afghan state was another fantasy project, in my view. There was an op-ed in The New York Times written by somebody who complained that in spite of all the American treasure and blood expended in Afghanistan, women's rights were still being suppressed, that there was still a lot of domestic violence against women. The remedy I suppose is to station a U.S. Marine in every Afghan family, so that when the husband hits the wife, the Marine can shoot the husband.

What is happening now--and we have brought some of our NATO allies into this project--is that we are fighting not just Taliban and other fanatics but also the thirteenth century. It is akin to landing in thirteenth-century France, to force thirteenth-century Frenchmen to abide by twenty-first-century norms. If these are imperialist projects, they are not the sensible kind of imperialism in which there is money to be made, as the Dutch did in the East Indies, or the Spanish in Peru. They resemble the late-nineteenth-century projects of the latecomers to imperialism, like the Italians, who went to Somalia and Ethiopia and spent a lot of money there that should have been spent in Sicily or Sardinia.

So our counterterrorism endeavor, misnamed a war, is a foolish waste of money; it is poorly conducted; it is ridiculous. Yet we are doing very well and not only economically: we have not had a terrorist attack in the United States since September 11, 2001. Therefore all of the counterterrorism lobbies, bureaucracies and agencies can point to the absence of attacks and claim the credit for themselves. It is like my own anti-elephant machine. Ever since I installed it, no wild elephants have been ravaging Chevy Chase.

But, while the threat may be feeble or absent within the United States, there is plenty of violence elsewhere. I was recently in Indonesian waters. Somebody asked me how to provide security for a large sailing boat. Instead of sending somebody else, given that it was Darwin to Sawu, Sumba, Sumbawa and Bali, I sent myself. While we were not attacked during our journey, every single day at sea brought news of attacks all around us. There were attacks by Muslim pirates out of Mindanao, against ships and boats in the Sulu Sea between Saba and Mindanao. This was not on our course, but it was definitely within our area. There were also attacks by Muslim pirates out of Aceh operating in the Straits of Malacca and by Muslim pirates from Yala. There were 33 attacks over a 28-day period in those sectors.

This brings me to my first disagreement about premises. One is the very American belief that all religions are equally good. I regret to say that they are not even equally bad. Quite removed from any action by the United States, wherever there are Muslims in contact with non-Muslims, whether in Nigeria, Southern Thailand, Mindanao, Celebes, the Moluccan Islands of Indonesia or Bali and Lombok--all places that have nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy, or with Israel and the Palestinians--Muslims attack non-Muslims. In Indonesia, Nigeria and the Philippines, they attack Christians. In Bali and Lombok, they attack Hindus. In Thailand, they attack Bhuddists. In our days, religiously motivated violence is a specifically Muslim phenomenon.

There was no reaction by Buddhists anywhere when the two colossal statues of Buddha were destroyed in Afghanistan. No Buddhist went on a rampage against local Muslims, even though there are conspicuous Muslim minorities in Buddhist lands. It was more than the printing of a cartoon, this destruction of two statues of Buddha, and it was not the act of a couple of editors but rather formally authorized in writing by the Islamic school of Dar al Ulum, the Deobandi head school of some 14,000 Dar al Ulum schools all over the world, some located not very far from this room. Located in Deobandi, Uttar Pradesh, India, the Dar al Ulum school has tax-exempt status and a website in Urdu that denounces terrorism, its term for the policies of the UK, the United States and Israel.

The premise that Islam is just like Buddhism or Christianity or whatever just is not true. I hope that nobody is teaching this falsehood in U.S. schools and universities in the name of political correctness. Americans have been highhanded in Latin America, but we have never had Latino terrorism except for a handful of Puerto Ricans long ago. We rampaged across Latin America for a long period of time. We have done things all over the world that have not evoked terrorism. We have to recognize the reality that Islam is different.

Finally, as a taxpayer, I wish that the U.S. Congress would start cutting the CIA's budget. Our diplomats are highly competent; our armed forces are highly competent. We just have to accept that we are not equally good at all that is non-technical in Intelligence. Our people do not even know languages, let alone their business. Michael Scheuer spent three years in the CIA's Bin Laden unit without knowing Arabic, without even trying to learn Arabic, without being told to learn Arabic.

I also wish, as a taxpayer, that the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration, would be de-funded, that we would recognize the fundamental realities of the security business as practiced by the Indians and Israelis. Alas, I fear we are going to continue down this path because, with unemployment this low and the Dow this high, it will be very difficult to persuade people of the truths we have heard this morning.

Q&A

Q: What kind of course correction might be possible in the next two years? The administration and the neocons have a couple of more wars left before they leave office. Iran is an obvious primary target. I'm getting reports from people in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East that we're about to launch some covert operations in the West Bank and perhaps in Lebanon. We've antagonized the entire Sunni world, and it looks to me as if we're about to do the same thing with the Shiites. What do we do now and over the next two years to prevent ourselves from being in a far worse predicament because of exactly this false concept of a global war on terror? DR. LUSTICK: Edward Luttwak noted that the terrorism industry points to the fact that there have been no attacks as evidence that their elephant gun is working. But, of course, if the opposite were true--if there were an attack--that would be used to even greater effect to increase the price of elephant guns. We're likely to have something happen, some shopping mall shot up by someone with a Muslim name, at least. We have to be prepared for this war on terror to get even more powerful, to be reinvigorated.

Before an election, it is impossible to do anything very dramatic, by the very logic of the War on Terror. And my argument is, it's not a metaphor; this is a real thing. The War on Terror exists and protects itself, and it uses politicians, universities and industries to do that. After an election, there may be an opportunity in Congress for a culture of truth to emerge. In good, thorough hearings on the War in Iraq and the War on Terror we can start to talk about how we have been suckered--by Shia, by Kurds, by the Iranians, by the neocons. That sort of trope, based on politics of truth and realism could have an effect.

I regret to say that the two elements in the American polity that have the function and the privilege to speak the truth as they see it, regardless of the consequences--professors with their tenure, the press with their many immunities--should have been on watch for what was actually going on, not just with respect to the war in Iraq, but with regard to the War on Terror. Only recently have some within academia and the press begun to speak truthfully against the grain of what their audiences expect to hear or can even tolerate hearing.

DR. ELAND: I'd like to make three points. First of all, I don't want to defend President Bush and the neocons, but sometimes liberals forget that Clinton was a champion of intervention, too. I admit that Bush has really gotten us into a quagmire and has put in ground troops. Clinton learned his lesson after Somalia, that you had to be very careful about putting ground troops anywhere. But Clinton might be the modern king of interventions. They were all small, but it builds up. And I think the policy is not just the neocons'. If we get Hillary Clinton as president in 2008 or some other Democrat, you're going to see the same basic policy. The neocons come at it from the right and say they're taking a little more unilateralist position or saying they are safeguarding U.S. national interests, whereas they say the Democrats are soft-headed humanitarian-intervention types.

But it all goes to the same place. You saw a humanitarian and democracy rationale for intervening in Iraq when the WMD and the al-Qaeda link fell through. We just shop these rationales around. It's like a prosecutor charging somebody. You put up all the reasons that you want to do these things, and when some of them fall away you just rely on the other ones. You say, we talked about that all the time, right? That's what they've done with the "democracy" rationale. But the media pretends the democracy rationale was the Bush administration's main reason for doing this in the first place. So I don't think it's a neocon problem. It's a structural problem with U.S. foreign policy after World War II, the interventionist foreign policy. We need to stop that.

The problem with terrorism is that it's a low-probability threat, but it's very difficult to deter, and we have a big country with a lot of targets and open borders. Homeland Security can only do so much and probably can't do much at all. Why would you bring a nuclear bomb in a container when you can go down to the Gangplank Marina here in Washington and bring it in on a private yacht? There's nobody watching that. Why would you put it in a container? But all the homeland security is directed towards that.

I think the only thing that you can do--to the extent that you can--is reduce unnecessary interventions, which motivate terrorism. The empirical research shows that. Second, I'm not saying you have to go with law enforcement exclusively, though I think law enforcement should lead. But, if you do have to hit military targets, you need to run a quiet war against specific groups. The war on al-Qaeda, if you have to call it a war at all, might be more successful through the use of Special Forces and the CIA in the shadows.

But, of course, this public war on terrorists is primarily for domestic consumption. It's counterproductive, and it's not really providing us security, because it's creating the terrorism that it's supposed to be doing away with.

AMB. FREEMAN: There is fundamental question, as Ivan points out, about whether Americans really understand how to employ power. There are moments in history when intervention is entirely appropriate and justified. Like Dr. Luttwak, I have encountered wars I thought were entirely justified. So the question is, when is it justified and when not, and when is it efficacious and when is it not? It probably has something to do with distinctions between interests and values. It's important to defend values; it's not terribly efficient or useful to try to impose them on other people. And it's very important to try to advance and defend your own interests. We don't make these distinctions very clearly in our thinking on either side of the political aisle.

DR. LUTTWAK: As far as I am concerned, the question of values and of interests was settled by George Washington, who said more or less that interests we defend, but values we can only proffer. I think the remedies to the current situation have to be functional. We need to encourage and support actions that will restore our civil liberties, which have been needlessly compromised. Given a severe enough threat, I would accept even martial law if it were useful. But to accept the loss of civil liberties to fight a bunch of fly-bitten losers is absurd. Ordinary police procedures are quite enough.

It would be best not to engage in a general discussion, but just to say, we're in favor of everything you want to do, but just give me back my civil liberties; this low-quality threat does not warrant the loss thereof. Or, we agree with everything, we just ask you to de-fund TSA because its modus operandi of looking at things instead of people is absurd. They will only find a bomb if it is attached to a pair of nail clippers. Somebody mentioned a yacht. I can guarantee that you can enter any marina in the coastal United States without being inspected. We have to take a functional attitude to all these things. Just because Afghanistan and Iran are hopeless, it does not mean that we should become automatically anti-interventionist. Interventionism has worked very well for us historically.

Iran might be a case in point. We are not going to invade Iran--it is the peoples of Iran that must fight for their own national identities and political freedom. But we might want to destroy 7 or 17 buildings in 4 or 5 locations, to destroy equipment used in the acquisition of nuclear weapons. That might be a worthwhile use of force, even if only a delay of some years is achieved. After all, in a few years anything can happen. Their regime might change; our policies might change; nuclear weapons might go out of fashion.

That brings us to the final point. As both George Washington and Chas. Freeman have pointed out, we should fight to protect our interests and our liberties, but we should never fight to impose our values. There is also a practical limitation involving tools. We don't have an effective global intelligence operation. We have very good diplomats; we have a competent military. But we happen not to have a national talent for human intelligence; therefore we're not doing well. We can destroy buildings; we know how to find them and destroy them. The 17 reasons we're failing in the struggle against terrorism itself is that we're not good at hitting things that are not high-contrast, stable targets. And that is an additional limitation that we should accept.

AMB. FREEMAN: I'm beginning to get the sense that, just as the errors or incapacities of American national-security policy are bipartisan, so too are the answers and the objections. Left and right agree on doing some very stupid things, but they also seem to agree on doing some intelligent things.

MR. BEERS: We really need to both reduce the rhetoric associated with this effort and recognize in so doing that what we're really talking about is a risk-management problem: to define what the risks are and then to manage them, recognizing that we are never going to be perfectly successful. Unfortunately, both of those notions require that we restore some degree of civility to the political process in this country, lest one side or the other simply seek to use their notions as a way to obtain political advantage. In addition, I think we obviously need to reduce our presence in Iraq, particularly our combat forces, in a way that does not produce or expand the level of chaos there, although it's difficult to contemplate how it could be made much worse.

Lastly, I think we need, especially working with others, to offer additional opportunities in the Islamic world. I couldn't agree more with Ed. Democracy may be a worthy goal, but it's certainly not near-term, and it may not be possible in any reasonable time frame, if at all. So the idea is not let's bring democracy immediately but let's give opportunity immediately. The Arab Human Development report talked about expanding education in the Islamic world. That's an opportunity. Expanding cyberspace in the Islamic world is another opportunity. Interestingly enough, both of them are undermining fundamental principles that al-Qaeda would espouse. So we are using things that we can do and manage in order to reduce their appeal.

Q: I'm surprised there's so much unanimity on the panel, and I think Ian Lustick made too much of the statistical infrequency of terrorist attacks. Not only was there 9/11; there was a Spanish train bombing and a London subway bombing. The liquid bomb threat appears to have been real. The Toronto 17 were real, and amid all the psuedo arrests that we've had in this country and highly publicized empty arrests, there are probably one or two people that represented real threats. There is a real ongoing effort to duplicate 9/11 and a real necessity to be doing some things about it. It does not minimize the 9/11 attacks because they are statistically unlikely. How do we balance the unreality in our response with the need to have a real response to what are real threats?

DR. LUSTICK: It is instructive to notice how much agreement there is with my basic argument. Many people react to my argument by saying or thinking that it is more or less what they had been thinking, but had never actually said or heard anybody say it. In social science this phenomenon is called a spiral of silence. It's the "Emperor's New Clothes" effect; everybody believes something, but nobody can actually say it or has the reason to say it.

But let me respond to the question. Part of what I'm trying to do is to focus attention on the real threats. I deal in the book with the real possibility of al-Qaeda and its clones using weapons of mass destruction against us. If they do so, any chance we have had or will have to prevent it will be drastically reduced by the highly politicized War on Terror and the waste and diffusion of the energy and attention of our country associated with it. The way you deal with those serious threats is in deep cooperation with allies in South Asia, in the Middle East, in Europe, who are put off or alienated, rendered incapable of cooperating with us because of our politicization of a "War on Terror." To the extent that the last threat--the alleged plot from London--was real and effectively thwarted, it's important to note that the British absolutely reject the idea of being in a war on terror. By contrast, the first thing the president said about reports of the plot was to explicitly characterize it as validating the War on Terror.

You suggested that I seem to ignore the magnitude of the real effects of 9/11. I'd be the last person to deny how damaging they were. But I would still argue that what you interpret as the real effects of 9/11 are hugely a function of the American government's response to it. In November 2001, I was brought in to help organize a conference of social scientists to help the FBI and the intelligence community cope with the difficulty of making judgments in an atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty and great risk.

The first recommendation I made to the organizers, relatively high up in the FBI, was to advise the media to stop showing, several times a day, the hijacked airplanes hitting the towers and destroying them. Those terrifying, repeatedly broadcast images were creating the false sense, psychologically, that more catastrophes were likely to happen to individual viewers, thereby distorting the American psyche in its expectation of what kind of a threat it faced, intensifying the trauma that it was feeling, and the aggravating distortion that trauma will subsequently produce.

The response that I got from the FBI was, "This was one of the first things we thought of, and we recommended it. But the recommendation was rejected because of intervention by very high political echelons, who wanted to keep the political anxiety level in the country high." Why? Those elites were already committed to a war in Iraq, and they needed an aroused and worried public to build support for it. So when we talk about the traumatization of Americans by 9/11, whether it's psychological or economic, I consider that most of that trauma is the result of the American response to it.

The way our War on Terror is organized is as if we are submerged in a pot of water that is being heated, and our job as counterterrorists is to find the molecules that are about to burst into steam and get them before they do. No question some are about to burst into steam, but they all look the same and it's driving us nuts trying to decide which one is about to burst. There's an obvious answer to what to do in a situation like that: reduce the heat under the pot. To make a very substantial contribution to lowering the threat of terrorism emanating from the Muslim world we should, among other things, move quickly and effectively on the Palestinian-Israeli issue. It's not that al-Qaeda cares particularly about the Palestinians, but Muslims in general, especially in the Middle East, do. Savvy as they are, al-Qaeda propagandists fully exploit those emotions and the close identification of Israel with the United States in the minds of most Middle Easterners.

DR. ELAND: It's the duty of analysts and social scientists to deal with statistics, and terrorism is a very rare phenomenon. But the discussion just keeps going. Terrorism is a sexy issue. Everybody wants to talk about it because there's a diabolical enemy. We need to pay attention to statistics, and average citizens need to be aware, especially if they live in North Dakota or Missouri in a rural area, that they have probably absolutely no chance of ever being killed by a terrorist. People have to react on the basis of facts and not what they see in the media. And the government should apply this not only to terrorism but everything else. If you want to live a long life, don't worry about getting killed by terrorists or AIDS; what you should do is exercise, eat right, don't smoke, wear your safety belt, and so on. We do need to pay attention to statistics and a rational analysis. I don't think that we're necessarily saying that we should cease all of the government's efforts to go after terrorists. What we're trying to say is that terrorism is a tactic in asymmetric warfare, and that it is not likely to disappear. That said, we have a strategy for dealing with a similar problem called crime. We have responses and prevention tactics, and we try to use them in a way that doesn't totally disrupt our society. The question here is one of balance.

Something we didn't talk about that really does need to be attended to, is the very real threat of WMD, particularly fissile material that's lying around that could be used by terrorists and make them much more capable. We need to be paying a lot more attention to making sure that material is far more secure than it is today.

DR. LUTTWAK: Let me just mention a few things that have been very effective. The Italians organized a southeast Europe consortium to block the transits from Tunisia to Sicily, from Albania to southeast Italy, from Sarajevo and south Bosnia to northeast Italy with the Slovenians, the Swiss and the Austrians. They intercepted 328 people who were seriously dangerous as direct operators or physical supporters who provided their skills. That was a very good thing, and until they stopped coming--because they all went to Iraq instead--they intercepted them. The Italians were very exposed because Berlusconi sided strongly with the United States and with Israel, but there was no terrorist attack. The Spanish took a rather silly attitude in that regard. They had been warned one year before, in 2004, by the Italians specifically to go and arrest certain people, and they wouldn't. They were the very people arrested the day after, so the Italians did get the right guys.

The United States is now doing something very effective, though it's being ineffective in 17 different ways. The FBI people are visiting mosques all over the United States, leaving their visiting cards with a phone number. Everybody in these places has a brother or cousin who needs help with immigration authorities, so they call the FBI whenever anybody comes near being a threat. The Canadians were very slack but two years ago started getting serious, implementing a similar program of just distributing visiting cards with phone numbers. The immigrant community likes to feel close to the authorities, so they will denounce people who are real threats or potential threats--and of course their personal enemies--but it all kind of helps. What it means is the threat of terrorism is very real and there are real responses, which have nothing to do with invading Iraq or occupying Afghanistan or acquiring nuclear-powered submarines that launch nuclear ballistic missiles and justifying it under the counterterrorism budget.

AMB. FREEMAN: The question for Ian is whether he would say a few more words about terror reduction versus the suppression of terror and dealing with the demand side rather than the supply side. I think it's fair to note that there are some very interesting statistics from places like Iraq. About 1 percent of our deaths are from suicide bombers; two percent are from the drivers of suicide vehicles; that adds up to three percent. The rest of the deaths are not from these causes. Suicide bombing remains a very limited phenomenon. It's most common, actually, in Sri Lanka. It's not perpetrated by Muslims there, but by Hindus, the Tamil Elam. And 10 percent of the French casualties against the Viet Minh were from suicide bombers. So this is nothing that's particularly related to Islam or to anything else.

As to Ed Luttwak's allusions to the patterns of conflict between Muslim populations and their neighbors, which are quite ubiquitious at present, I would say that Islam is having a bad century, just as Christianity has had several bad centuries. Ask any of the inhabitants of the West Indies who survived or the people in Mexico or Peru about that. There's nobody left in North America since we did a very thorough ethnic cleansing. I would say that people like Avigdor Lieberman in Israel are not exactly exemplars of the sort of Judaism that I admire. So everybody is having a bit of a bad time, and we probably all need to think and reach within ourselves to find answers to some of the pathologies that we all, to one extent or another, suffer from--perhaps, some more than others, as Ed suggests.

DR. LUSTICK: Let me comment on those points and the very provocative and interesting observations that Ed made about Islam. He said that we've essentially invaded thirteenth-century France and are seeking to accomplish an epochal civilizational transformation with military means in a matter of months or years. But if you take the entire historical continuum as your analytic space, then it's insupportable to say that Islam, as a religion, has some sort of elective affinity with aggression compared to other religions. Whether it's because they are having a bad century or it's the circumstances that many Muslims have found themselves in throughout the world in the aftermath of imperialism, it is much more reasonable to explain the pattern Edward noted by the conditions Muslims are in rather than the nature of Islam. Certainly, if you went back to the fifteenth century, it would be Catholicism that looked as if it were intrinsically warlike and vicious, even if now Catholic Latin America is not producing lots of terrorists with global reach.

I agree that most terrorism and violence is not suicide bombings, and I'm not so interested in the distinction between suicide versus other non-suicide bombs. If you train people to drop from an airplane at night into Nazi occupied Europe, and there's a 95 percent chance of being killed, is that a suicide mission? Well, not technically. If Samson, in the Bible, pulls down the temple of the Philistines and declares, "Let me die with my enemies!" and kills thousands of Philistine men, women and children at worship, should it be condemned as a suicidal act of terrorism or praised as heroic?

In any event, it is a historical fact that, as a technique, suicide terrorism in the contemporary Middle East originated with its use by Hizbollah in Lebanon and spread from there, first into the West Bank and Gaza and then into Iraq. Indeed we've seen 10 times more Iraqis killed by suicide bombers than have been killed in Israel. I don't believe that the terrorism that al-Qaeda is involved in is tied to occupation per se. On the other hand, occupations give them leverage with their audiences, for whom occupation is re-spun as continued imperialism or Zionist-Crusader oppression. It gives them what they need in a very effective way to blend jihadi appeals with nationalist appeals.

As I've said, I don't believe these Jihadis care particularly about the Palestinians whatsoever. But there has been no issue that they have concentrated on more in their propaganda than that one, for good reason from their own political point of view. If you're going to try to get people to side with you, connect with what they feel angry about. And masses of Muslims all over the world are furious at the images they see of Israeli brutality against Palestinians and the identification of the United States with those policies. So whether you, if you're al-Qaeda, care very much about the Palestinians or not, you'd be idiotic--and they aren't, they're very politically savvy--not to exploit that issue. There's an excellent book, the best one that I know on al-Qaeda, The Far Enemy, by Fawaz Gerges, which would offer an excellent analysis of the relationship between appeals on the Arab-Israeli issue and al-Qaeda's rise to pominence.

DR. LUTTWAK: As far as terrorist actions in the real world are concerned, we have the Deobandi movement, an Urdu-speaking movement that emphasizes the teaching of Urdu in the Dar al-Ulum school, NUP, and the 14,000 or so Dar al-Ulum schools around the world. Their focus is Kashmir. It has nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli issue. They have been maintaining a lively level of violence. In all of the Arab-Israeli wars since 1898, about 50,000 people have died. Those numbers are trivial compared to those in the subcontinent.

The other thing is, please don't talk about the fifteenth century; missionary religions believe that saving others from the eternal fires of hell is much more important than their corporal existence. I am the head of the little-known World League Against Missionary Religions, which has at least one member. But the fact is, as a professor at the university, you cannot ignore the fact that we have a seventh-century record about Islam and an eight-century record, a ninth-century record, and so it goes before 1948 and all of that.

I am influenced by the job I just did. My contempt for what is going on stems from the fact that I have been working in this very field, with people doing real things against real threats. I have interrogated many of these people who have been locked up. Right now the violence is in Malacca, and in other places that have nothing to do with the Middle East. Harping on the Middle East is just wrong historically and factually. Let's adhere to the truth, whatever else we do. We have to recognize that there is a reality. The missionary religions believe that your eternal life is more important than your brief temporal life, and have been the source of great violence. As it happens, the Christians are quiescent right now, and the Muslims are very active. I functionally agree with everybody including the dominant thought you have, professor, which is to reduce the temperature instead of trying to trap the individual molecules.

I have been in the business of trapping the individual molecules. I wish somebody would reduce the temperature in the boiling pot. The fact is that their motivations have nothing to do with any of this. If a bad foreign policy caused terrorism, we would have had terrorism from other directions. It cannot just be ignored in the name of this American belief that all religions are equally good. They are not even equally bad, and that is part of the reality we must confront.

MR. BEERS: As I appreciate Bin Laden and his world view, he began his campaign initially focused on the apostate rulers of Saudi Arabia, who he felt were unworthy of being the guardians of the holy places of Islam. He came to appreciate that the United States, as a principal backer of the Saudis, was a force that he had to take on. This is the near-enemy/far-enemy thesis, and in that original formulation, the Arab-Israeli dispute was not a central issue. But it has become useful in terms of expanding the capability to mobilize Muslims around the world; it is an issue that is often in front of them through their various media. I don't think solving the Arab-Israeli dispute would make al-Qaeda go away. It might have some effect, but I don't think it would make it go away.

DR. ELAND: I agree with that last point. The problem that you have with getting involved in the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it might lower the temperature of the pot, but it might inflame some of the molecules--if this is perceived as a U.S.-coerced or Israeli-friendly settlement because the United States is perceived as pro-Israel in the Arab world. It's better to stay out of it. I think it's an intractable problem. We keep banging our heads against the wall trying to solve it. Frankly, the agreement that we would get could inflame other sectors because we were thought to have sold out to the Israelis and to have unduly pressured the Arabs..

As far as terrorism goes, the idea of this being a problem with Muslims has been overstated. As Chas. mentioned, suicide bombing was invented in Sri Lanka. Robert Pape, moreover, makes a very convincing argument using statistical analysis and a database of suicide bombings that indicates this is more about occupation than religion. The occupied use suicide bombing against the occupiers, which are usually democracies, because they think suicide bombing can get the occupier to withdraw troops. So it has less to do with an Islamic factor than a nationalist reaction to occupation.

Also, there is this idea that Bin Laden is trying to bring back the caliphate or something. But only 6 percent of Muslims and Arabs when polled would support this. And these potential enemies are poor compared to the Soviet Union and other threats that we faced in the past. So this idea that some of the hawks bring up--Islamo-fascism is the word they like to use--is supported by only 6 percent of Muslims.

We talk about all of these threats--Muslim against non-Muslim or whatever--but I always want to know, if I'm a U.S. citizen, what are our U.S. interests in some of these places if Muslims are attacking non-Muslims? Why do we need to be involved in that place? I think we would all be better off if we concentrated on the threats to the United States, on neutralizing al-Qaeda rather than acting against most of the other groups on the terrorism list, which don't even attack U.S. targets.

I want to find a link to U.S. interests and U.S. security. Most of the places we've been involved in since the Cold War really don't affect U.S. security. Our foreign-policy establishment here in Washington tries to find reasons to go into places that we really don't need to. There is pressure from various groups to go into Darfur and other places, but I just don't see the need for that unless U.S. security is threatened.

AMB. FREEMAN: Ivan advised that we should stay out of the Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab conflict. I'm not quite sure you meant what you said because we are already heavily involved. We subsidize the state of Israel heavily. We provide its weaponry. We support it in the United Nations and protect it from its detractors.

DR. ELAND: No, I was advocating getting out of the Middle East and ending U.S. aid to Israel, Egypt and other countries in the region.

AMB. FREEMAN: I see. Well, I know you have the courage of your convictions, but I just wanted to point out that we are heavily involved. And the one thing we are not doing at the moment is assessing our own interests in trying to persuade the Israelis to take account of them. We have been running a vast experiment, letting the Israelis do whatever they want to do and offering carte blanche for that. The results of that experiment have not been very encouraging, to say the least.

The second point I would make is that it's a very odd situation when we have to invent an ideology for our enemy--Islamo-fascism--that exists only in our own minds. It is a sad commentary on the nature of the struggle we have been talking about that we are unable apparently to understand that there are real enemies out there with real grievances. We have to come up with some parody of communism or nazism to energize our opposition to it.

Finally, I want to go back to the matter of weapons of mass destruction, the loose-nukes problem. One of the most instructive elements about 9/11 was that it came at the end of a great national discussion and commitment to a missile-defense program. We were focusing on the problem of North Korea or perhaps China attacking us with a nuclear weapon or an ICBM. It turned out that clever people hiding in the caves of Afghanistan and planning in Germany and practicing on airfields in the United States could take a Boeing aircraft and turn it into a cruise missile. It's not that the bomb would be attached to the toenail clippers, but that someone might figure out a way to use toenail clippers to our disadvantage. At some point, there will be someone who uses his hands on an aircraft, and then we will all have to board the aircraft manacled because hands will be forbidden.

We have a problem that is clearly not going to be solved by the technical means that have proven so good for the military industrial complex--and now the terror-industrial complex that Ian described. We have a problem that does embrace the fire under the pot.

One element fueling that, but not by any means the only one, is the Arab-Israeli dispute. But I think I agree with Rand; if the Arab-Israeli dispute were to disappear, there are many other issues which disturb people and with which we are intimately involved; that would leave us still subject to the threat of action against our homeland.

DR. LUTTWAK: I don't think Islamo-fascism is very useful, but the idea of attacking them ideologically is a good one. Islamo-fascism might be a particularly bad way of doing it. I would favor Islamo-puritanism. Islamo-puritanism may also not be a good phrase, but there should be some other way of evoking this. I have been primarily working with Muslims of all kinds who have been supporting the operations I have been doing--Muslim policemen, Muslim security men, Muslims citizens, drivers, people who are very happy to be Muslims. I do think Islam is a big problem, but 99.9 percent of Muslims do not participate in terrorism. Some of them support it verbally, particularly people like the Palestinians, because they never miss an opportunity to vote for the wrong party, so to speak.

What drives people against al-Qaeda and all of its clones is the puritanism, the fact that the moment they say "support our struggle for Kashmir or for Nigeria in imposing sharia," people say, yes, I support that, because people like the idea of fighting and jihad and so on. But then these guys turn around and say, don't listen to cassettes of Indonesian pop music; don't have music cassettes at your weddings, otherwise we'll slit your throats. Thousands of Algerians have died at weddings because these Islamo-puritans or whatever we call them came in and disrupted them. Many more Algerians have died because of terrorism--37 times more than Americans--attacked by GIA people, whose political agenda many people would support. So we have an enemy that is very vulnerable and should be attacked ideologically on that ground. It is the reason that Muslims who may be inclined to support in a general way warfare against non-Muslims because it's legitimized by jihad, nevertheless are against these guys. Partly it is because they have no solutions to any of their real-life problems, but largely because they want to impose their completely synthetic and historically untrue version of life in seventh-century Hijaz on the way of life of real Muslims around the world. So all of these things I think we should exploit. We can do more than reduce the temperature by being less interventionist; we can also be positive by attacking them ideologically.

AMB. FREEMAN: I would like to embrace your point and redirect it slightly. It is very clear that this struggle requires a heavy element of ideology to be successfully prosecuted in either direction. And as the descendant of Puritans, by the way, referring to the space-time continuum that Ian mentioned, I stand before you as an example of how gluttony and lust can overcome Puritanism if given sufficient opportunity. So there is hope.

On the issue of ideological counters to extremism, Americans are not the best spokespersons for this. And to say what you have said is to make an appeal for the importance of allies in the Muslim world and in the Muslim community because this is a struggle within Islam, as you have suggested. It is not that these people plan to convert the heathen in Iowa to their version of religion, but that they plan to convert their fellow Muslims to this version of religion.

Here I want to say a kind word for a country that never receives a kind word, Saudi Arabia, which is winning its struggle with terrorists, because it is attacking this problem on three levels. It has driven the extremists from the pulpits in the mosques, sometimes in rather unpleasant ways, but nonetheless, it has discredited the ideology that they had been preaching. It has amnestied, co-opted, bribed or intimidated a fair number of people who were on the path to becoming terrorists to step off that path and integrate themselves into society. And it is killing anybody who actually does become a terrorist and doing so very ruthlessly and efficiently.

As part of the process--and I think this illustrates the importance of Ed's point-the Saudi prison system, which contains a fair number of people who were detained for cooperation with terrorists, relies heavily on religious instruction of the inmates to persuade them that they are morally incorrect to take the position that they do, and that in fact they are not behaving in a manner consistent with Islam but against it. This program has been so successful that the United Kingdom has imported people from Saudi Arabia to do the same in British prisons, where the problem has been everywhere the opposite-that in a prison environment the extremist versions of religion tend to prosper.

So the question is, can we find allies, can we demonstrate the tact and the empathy and the understanding necessary to enlist others to make the very points that we would like to make but probably are disqualified from making?

Q: I remember back in the 1980s being up on Capitol Hill and very frequently seeing people like Hekmatyar and others paraded around and heralded as freedom fighters for democracy. At that time, we were rather cynically talking about the idea of playing the Islamic card against the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union, and seeing Islamic fundamentalism rather naively as a potential asset in the war that we were fighting at the time. It was noteworthy to me, whether you looked at Malaysia, Indonesia or Algeria, and al-Qaeda with the Egyptian Islamic jihad group, that there was a common denominator in these phenomena: they were all together in Afghanistan.

We made some boneheaded assumptions about being able to play with fire, and then some of these problems may have been substantially worsened

by our own, and some of our allies' enthusiasm for this weapon against the Soviets back then. Are we still paying the price?

AMB. FREEMAN: The question really is whether the use of religion as an instrument of political warfare, which is something that we and others have attempted in the past, is still a factor in any sense. This has a long history going back millennia. Frederick the Great had some things to say about this which are very instructive. Shin Bet had something to do with the formation of Hamas as a firebreak against the secular PLO, and the United States had a good deal to do, as you suggest, with fostering Islamic extremism and arming it in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union--with notable success, by the way. We brought down the Soviet Union. But no good deed does go unpunished, and now we are dealing with the consequences in many places of misguided efforts to use religion for political purposes.

DR. LUTTWAK: In 1981, Lally Weymouth interviewed Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. She made it clear that Soviet rule over Afghanistan would be less injurious to human rights than Gulbuddin's victory. However, as it happens, that was the time when, fueled by the greatest intelligence blunder in history committed by the Soviet side, the Soviets believed that Ronald Reagan was out to wage nuclear war against them. This was at the very time that Ronald Reagan was flatly saying he would never use the nuclear weapon, even if the United States were attacked with nuclear weapons--the first American president to say that.

We were fighting the Cold War, the imperative of the time. Anybody who went to Afghanistan, as I did, recognized that Lally was totally correct, but we had an imperative, and it seemed much more important to defeat the Soviet Union by using whatever means were available, even though we knew exactly who our allies were, and how terrible they were. By the way, the hero Ahmed Shah Massoud was particularly insistent on women being treated as domestic animals, even though he wasn't as vicious as Gubuddin in regard to attacking fellow Muslims.

As I say, the problem goes back to the seventh century. We didn't start any of this stuff, and of the most victims have occurred in Algeria and so on. The Algerian authorities keep saying that it is le Groupe Islamique Arme (GIA), and the FIS and so on, all the products of Afghanistan. The fact of the matter is that it is the product of a government that insisted on Islamizing Algeria and shutting down French Algeria--I don't mean the Imperialist French; I mean, French-speaking Algerian Arabs. While sending their own children to American universities, they were forcing Algerians to go only to Arabic schools and not French schools, while their own kids did not even know Arabic, and don't know Arabic. That was the regime that provoked that reaction. The fact that a handful of them had been to Afghanistan really was not the driving factor. So let us not fall into this typical American imperialist idea that we are the cause of all evil.

A lot of evil has nothing to do with us, let me assure you, even though in Afghanistan, we most certainly consciously and knowingly supported people who were fanatics because finding non-fanatical people in Afghanistan was an even more hopeless enterprise than bringing democracy to Iraq. Fanaticism was integral to the personality because, as you know, most of them are recent converts to Islam, having converted within the past century-and-a-half. That is not long religiously. They have the ardor of new converts. In Nuristan, the first time I was there, there were still many people who were not Muslim, who have become Muslim since the time I was there.

MR. BEERS: If you look at this kind of situation from either a Clausewitzian or a realist perspective and accept that war is an extension of politics by other means, the mixture of politics and religion always represents a level of conflict that you had better appreciate before you begin to mix them. But if you come from the realist school, you would also say that in some cases you may have to take politically expedient acts in order to achieve ends that you want and accept the risk involved. I remember sitting in the State Department at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and there was a great deal of serious concern in the U.S. government at that time about what the implications of that meant. As people tried to figure out how to respond during the Reagan administration, it was not surprising that that particular choice was made. But, Ed, you're absolutely right about Hekmatyar. He would have been much worse than the Soviets ever were in Afghanistan.

AMB. FREEMAN: He is still there of course.

MR. BEERS: Yes, I know; and we haven't been able to capture him.

AMB. FREEMAN: Unlike what Clausewitz said, sometimes war is the entrenchment of policy failure by other means.

DR. ELAND: The U.S. response in Afghanistan was a classic case of the unintended consequences of your actions. We felt that we needed to battle the Soviet Union everywhere and anywhere. Afghanistan was an area that, in my view, we shouldn't have been messing around in. And after the Soviet Union fell, we have all of these people who say, you know, their invasion of Afghanistan really toppled the regime. But then, of course, we have the missile-defense advocates who say, no, it was missile defense--which I think is pretty close to a preposterous claim, since strategic weapons are a very small portion of the budget.

We get these ideas that the Soviet Union was somehow vanquished by Afghanistan or missile defense or whatever. But their economic system was just non-viable, and that is the main reason they collapsed. I'm a realist/minimalist, and what I would have done during the Cold War is to safeguard Western Europe and Japan and let the Soviet Union have Vietnam, Korea, all of these places that were economic basket cases. If you wanted to over-extend them, which was the original objective of Kennan, let them have these places; let them pump billions of dollars into their economies to prop them up; let them have Afghanistan. You would have had a lot fewer unintended consequences--those from building up the radical Islamic jihadists against the Soviets.

I think we're creating unintended consequences in Iraq as well, maybe along the same lines. We're trying to hold the country together instead of overthrowing the government, but, nonetheless, war has all of these unintended consequences. You really have to be careful in these situations, and I think that is the lesson. Something that sounded like a great idea at the time in a backwater area like Afghanistan has actually caused one of the few threats to the American homeland that we have ever had. You want to avoid creating threats like that. There is an option to do nothing, and we don't take that option often enough. These things can spin out of control.

AMB FREEMAN: We began this session with Ian Lustick, so I will ask him to close it. He made the case that the trauma of 9/11 and the political advantage that it offered allowed a large number of special interests to hurl their pet rocks up on Capitol Hill and get money back. I suspect there are a lot of pet rocks being hurled at the demise of the Soviet Union also, and we can never know exactly why things turned out the way they did, except we know that it was very irresponsible of them to drop dead. We miss them greatly and keep trying to invent somebody else to take their place.

DR. LUSTICK: I want us to notice just briefly what has happened at this event about being trapped in the War on Terror. We went from that topic more or less into how to fight terrorism, and from there to whether we use ideology to fight terrorism. Which ideology should we use? Islamo-fascism; Islamo-puritanism? It led us to the question of whether we could use Muslims to fight the Muslim terrorists, but then what trouble did we get into when we used Muslims to fight Muslim terrorists in Afghanistan or to fight our wars there?

The War on Terror creates a discourse about the threat of terrorism so powerful that it forces even this kind of symposium toward an image of terrorism as a very central problem, when it's not. It is a problem, but it's not one that ought to be high on our list of priorities. We are forced into that discussion and that kind of treatment of it. Indeed, the biggest problem we face with respect to this issue is that the War on Terror is in trouble and needs evidence; it needs terrorist attacks to sustain itself. The logic of my argument is that it will produce those attacks.

In my book, I conclude with a discussion of the most likely way that could occur. I suggest that the war-on-terror discourse will provide the opportunity for that supremacist cabal that I described, which has not yet abandoned its fantasies, to advocate an attack on Iran and to be, again, believed by masses of Americans. An American attack on Iran will produce real terrorist attacks on the American homeland because the Iranians, unlike the Iraqis, actually know how to do it. Their allies and cronies, such as Hizbollah, have the means to do it.

One attack from the Middle East on the American homeland again will give another decade of life to the War on Terror. Before that happens, we must redouble our efforts to insist on rationality and evidence in the design of public policy. For, as the trajectory of this discussion illustrates, the War on Terror has a life of its own and serves its own imperatives. If we do not control it, it will control us, and move us toward what it needs in order to sustain itself, not just more resources, but the production of more attacks as evidence of our need for its "protection."