The past several days have focused Kerry and Bush on a simple task: defining their rival as incapable of fighting an effective war on terror. Despite all of Kerry’s emphasis on fighting and killing the actual terrorists (al Queda instead of Saddam Hussein), Bush’s take is that Kerry doesn’t understand the fight we’re in.
With 13 days before the election, Bush said Kerry has a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the fight in Iraq and is not capable of winning a war on terrorism. “The next commander in chief must lead us to victory in this war, and you cannot win a war when you don’t believe you’re fighting one,” Bush said at a rally on the fairgrounds here where he suggested that the Democrat was unwilling to use military force.
None of this makes a lick of sense if you’ve paid any attention to Kerry’s message for the last, say, two years, but reality certainly never got in Bush’s way before.
But the best rebuttal, perhaps ever, to the question of who’s better suited to win a war on terror is Spencer Ackerman’s piece in this week’s The New Republic. It explains perfectly how confused Bush is about his own declared war — and how well Kerry gets it.
It’s true that Kerry conceives of victory in the war on terrorism chiefly in terms of destroying Al Qaeda. But what Kerry understands — and the administration disastrously does not — is that Al Qaeda is not “narrow,” nor, increasingly, is it “concrete.” The day after the first presidential debate, Al Jazeera broadcast an audiotape communiqué from Ayman Al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, directed largely at disaffected Muslim youth. “We must not wait until the American, British, French, Jewish, South Korean, Hungarian, and Polish forces enter Egypt, the Arab peninsula, Yemen, and Algeria to begin the resistance,” Zawahiri instructed. “O, youth of Islam, this is our message. If we are killed or taken prisoner, continue along the path after us.” This is the true face of Al Qaeda: Less a discrete jihadist organization than the vanguard of a global jihadist ideology.
Bush does not seem to understand the difference. If he did, he would realize that touting the capture of “seventy-five percent of known Al Qaeda leaders” is foolish when those remaining can draw from a pool of millions. Bush insists he understands that winning the war on terrorism involves, as he told Time in August, “a long-lasting ideological struggle” to mute Al Qaeda’s allure. Yet the president’s chief contribution to the ideological struggle has been the occupation of Iraq, which has horrified the very Muslims it was supposed to draw to America’s side. Beyond Iraq, the president has done little to promote Middle Eastern democracy beyond giving speeches to domestic audiences. In its final report, issued this July, the 9/11 Commission practically begged the Bush administration to “engage the struggle of ideas” in order to “prevent the continued growth of Islamist terrorism.” Little wonder, then, that the perpetrators of the Madrid train bombings, the Abu Hafs Al Masri Brigades, proclaimed themselves “very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections” in a March statement to an Arabic newspaper.
Bush’s fundamental flaw, which Ackerman noted but doesn’t get enough attention, is his belief that battling terrorism is a matter of battling states. This is misguided and counterproductive.
Ever since his September 20, 2001, address to Congress, and especially in his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush has emphasized the need to attack state sponsors of terrorism at least as much as actual terrorists….Kerry, by contrast, understands that the threat from Al Qaeda is not state-centric. Asked where the “center” of the war on terrorism is, Beers immediately replies, “There isn’t one.” He explains, “What Al Qaeda did during its Afghan period was to create a jihadist movement on a global basis. While Al Qaeda certainly has the financial wherewithal, the organizational skills, the tactical wherewithal to conduct significant operations à la the dual embassy bombing in Africa in 1998 or the World Trade Center-Pentagon attack in 2001, the fact that the major events since then have been conducted by organizations which were able to operate at a distance from and, to at least some degree, independent of central direction from Osama bin Laden is an indication. I wouldn’t say that it’s Al Qaeda 2.0, I’d say it’s Global Terrorism 2.0. That means we’re going to have to have a much broader and a much more comprehensive campaign that goes beyond the decapitation strategy that seems to excite George Bush.”
Kerry and his advisers intend to refocus the nation’s military and intelligence efforts on eliminating Al Qaeda directly. To achieve that, Kerry has endorsed the 9/11 Commission’s plans for intelligence reform and has proposed enlarging the regular Army by 40,000 soldiers and doubling the Army’s Special Forces capacity. Presently, Army Special Forces units — which include agile and innovative forces best trained and equipped to operate deep behind enemy lines and in nontraditional combat situations — total about 26,000 active and reserve personnel, or only 2 percent of the entire Army. Expanding Special Forces would expand the range of military options available when confronting jihadists in nations where large or conspicuous U.S. incursions are politically impossible — i.e., most of the approximately 60 countries where Al Qaeda operates.
Unlike Bush, Kerry appears to have a firm understanding of all three components of a successful war on global terror: (1) the military effort to kill the terrorists themselves, (2) the cultural and ideological effort to undermine radical Islam, and (3) the diplomatic effort to address ground-level grievances that weaken our ability to pursue #1 and #2.
The amazing thing is, after all that’s happened, Bush still doesn’t understand the war he declared. Ackerman’s piece should be required reading for anyone who considers the terrorist threat the primary issue of this campaign. Hell, it should be required reading for everyone.