Excerpted from Stephen Walt's "The Unbearable Lightness of America’s War Against the Islamic State" originally published in FP
If Washington were really serious about defeating terrorism, it would have an entirely different playbook.
In the classic World War II novel The Caine Mutiny, author Herman Wouk quoted an “ancient adage” about the typical bureaucratic response to a crisis:
“When in danger or in doubt, Run in circles, scream and shout.”
That couplet summarizes the prevailing U.S. response to global terrorism perfectly. All one has to do is read the panicky, narrow-minded, and irresponsible ravings of the current GOP presidential aspirants, as well as look at the latest poll numbers, and it’s clear that a good portion of the U.S. electorate is prepared to follow them off the deep end.
Yet the unhinged nature of the current discourse on terrorism also reveals how profoundly unserious U.S. counterterrorism efforts really are. To say this sounds odd, given the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been thrown at the problem, and the tens of thousands of lives (both American and foreign) that have been lost waging the “global war on terror” (or if you prefer, the “campaign against violent extremism”), is an understatement. It sounds even odder when one considers the vast army of people who are now employed to protect us from terrorism, not to mention the countries we’ve invaded, the drone strikes and targeted assassinations we’ve performed, and the mountains of metadata we’ve collected. Surely all this effort shows that Washington is deeply engaged in the challenge of thwarting al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other violent radicals.
If only. For starters, consider what we have to show for all this effort and expense. We now have a vast counterterrorism industry, much bigger intelligence budgets, and more energetic government surveillance, but the basic counterterrorist playbook has evolved little over the past 20 years. In particular, our national security establishment is still convinced that the main way to defeat extremist groups is U.S. military intervention, despite the nagging suspicion that it just creates more ungoverned spaces and makes it easier for groups like the Islamic State to recruit new members. The New York Times reported this week that the Pentagon is now seeking a new set of military bases in or around the Arab and Islamic world so that it can prosecute the military campaign against the Islamic State et al. more effectively.
Excuse me, but isn’t that exactly what we’ve been doing since the 1990s and with greater energy and effort over time? Yet there are more al Qaeda affiliates now than there were back in 2001, and organizations like the Islamic State didn’t even exist back then. Is it possible that our entire approach here has been ill-conceived and has been making the problem worse instead of better? And what would a more serious approach to terrorism look like?
If the United States were truly serious about terrorism, it would start by gauging the level of threat properly and communicating that appraisal to the American people.
As numerous scholarly studies have shown, the actual risk of terrorism to the average American is remarkably low. In their new book Chasing Ghosts, John Mueller and Mark Stewart estimate the odds that an American will be killed by a terrorist are about one in 4 million each year. Compared with more prosaic dangers that we accept on a daily basis, this level of risk is absurdly small. Yet instead of using logic and evidence to reassure the American people, leaders from both parties have encouraged, since 9/11, the irrational fear of terrorism to drive a host of counterproductive policies. Even President Barack Obama, who seems to have a more measured view than many of his counterparts, did a rather limp job of reassuring the public in his Oval Office speech last Sunday.
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If the United States were truly serious about terrorism, we would also have a more honest and open discussion about our own role in generating it.
Our reluctance to consider whether certain aspects of U.S. foreign and defense policy inspire anti-American extremism began as early as the 9/11 Commission. As the late Ernest May, a distinguished historian who worked with the commission, later acknowledged:
“[T]he report skirts the question of whether American policies and actions fed the anger that manifested itself on September 11…. [it] is weak in laying out evidence for the alternative argument that the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Capitol might not have been targeted absent America’s identification with Israel, support for regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, and insensitivity to Muslims’ feelings about their holy places. The commissioners believed that American foreign policy was too controversial to be discussed except in recommendations written in the future tense. Here we compromised our commitment to set forth the full story.”
Wow.
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If the United States were truly serious about terrorism, we would now be having a frank discussion about the role of the media.
I’m positive organizations like Fox News and CNN do not intend to help al Qaeda or the Islamic State, but that is in fact precisely what they are doing. Whenever a terrorist incident occurs, TV and radio outlets immediately offer up a frenzy of overheated reportage, most of it intended to keep people scared and their eyeballs glued to the screen or their ears glued to the radio. (It’s the nature of modern media; the Weather Channel does the same thing with every major storm.) Yet this Pavlovian response is precisely what groups like the Islamic State are hoping for: It gives them more free publicity; convinces people who are in little to no danger that they should be really, really scared; and makes a comparatively weak movement like the Islamic State seem like a vast multi-headed hydra that is penetrating our society and threatening every one of us. Frankly, the media couldn’t be doing more to help these movements if they were being paid by them directly.
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If the United States were truly serious about terrorism, we’d also see more creative efforts to discredit, marginalize, spoof, and embarrass the groups we oppose.
The Islamic State has a pretty sophisticated social media operation, designed to convince recruits that they are joining a movement that is exciting, visionary, dedicated, and that will change the world. There are many ways to combat this message, but let’s not leave out the role of humor and ridicule. One of the best ways to discredit extremist movements is to make them look ridiculous, so that joining or backing them is seen as stupid, uncool, or embarrassing. Instead of constantly portraying the Islamic State and its ilk as cruel, cunning, fanatical, dedicated, dangerous, etc., we should spend at least as much time depicting them as ignorant, backward, inept, misguided, and absurd.
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If the United States were truly serious about terrorism, you’d see a more hardnosed approach to the various American “allies” who are part of the problem rather than being part of the solution.
U.S. officials would be calling out Turkey publicly for its actions against the Kurdish forces battling the Islamic State, for the porosity of its border with Islamic State-controlled territory, and for its blind eye toward smuggling and other actions that are keeping the militant group in business. Instead of going overboard to reassure Saudi Arabia in the wake of the deal with Iran, we’d be having some unpleasant conversations about the Saudi role in promoting Wahhabism and its connection to extremist movements like the Islamic State. And, by the way, putting that issue at the top of the agenda is not an unfriendly act, given that al Qaeda and the Islamic State are themselves potential threats to the House of Saud. We would also make it clear to the Israeli government that its treatment of the Palestinians is a national security issue for us, and we would make our “special relationship” conditional on the creation of Palestinian state and not just the usual empty promises (I know, I’m dreaming here, but our failure to take this obvious step just shows how unserious our policy still is).
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Read the full article at FP