By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
January 15, 2004
During the first week of January a 56 page report entitled “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism” giving the latest opinion of Professor Jeffrey Record was released to the public by the National War College, with the warning that it expresses the views of the author, not the War College. For some reason that totally escapes me, newspapers all over the world headlined the report, especially those who opposed President Bush’s action in Iraq and touted the report as “proof” that President Bush has been proven “wrong.”
London’s left-wing Guardian and California’s left-wing Los Angeles Times, along with the BBC and numerous smaller media outlets around the world gave front page headline treatment to the latest of Jeffrey Record’s opposition to whatever the current administration is doing. While this time he has called Bush’s decision to invade Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein a “detour into an unnecessary war” in 1998 he was scolding President Clinton for the “creeping irrelevance” of his strategic planning. Only, I don’t recall any media coverage of his 1998 criticism of Clinton nor could I find any in a search.
The LA Times article began, “A Report published by the Army War College criticizes the Bush administration's global war on terrorism as ‘unfocused’ and contends that the war in Iraq is ‘unnecessary’ and a ‘detour’ that has diverted attention and resources from the threat posed by Al Qaeda. The report warns that the administration's global war on terrorism may have set the United States ‘on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States."
Record’s 1998 Report, entitled “The Creeping Irrelevance of U.S. Force Planning” warned that the Clinton Administration Defense Department “continues to prepare for …big conventional wars, and not for just one at a time but rather for two and, according to Record the Pentagon “has yet to recognize the reality of an America that now acts as a global empire, rather than as one of two rival superpowers, or a normal state.”
Record stated in 1998 that the Arab-Israeli wars “demonstrated the futility of Arab attempts” to defeat Israel” and many Arab leaders had come to the conclusion “that pursuit of conventional military victory over Western adversaries was a hopeless and costly enterprise and therefore that unconventional alternatives should be examined. These alternatives include continued search for deliverable weapons of mass destruction.” Saddam, he said, was “simply slower to learn than others;”
He went on to say, however, that while Saddam Hussein’s conventional military options in the Gulf are extremely limited, Iraq’s “continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, especially bacteriological weapons,” and Saddam’s “success in stripping the United States of International support for military action to enforce the UN inspection regime in Iraq” were “worrisome.” Jeffrey Record ended his 1998 report by urging the Clinton Administration to maximize “military operations other than war, especially peace enforcement operations” and to scrap the notion that America might ever again have to fight two wars in different parts of the world.
Three and a half years later, there had been simultaneous attacks on New York and Washington DC that killed more than three thousand people and within five years we had fought two wars on different sides of the world, none of which Jeffrey Record thought would take place. President George W. Bush opted to actually DO something about Saddam’s success in “stripping the United States of International support for military action,” and put together a 30-nation coalition to enforce the UN resolutions. That was all wrong, Record is telling the world: “The war against Iraq was not integral to the global war on terrorism, but rather a detour from it.”
According to Record’s most recent report, “most of the global war on terrorism’s declared objectives, which include the destruction of al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorist organizations, the transformation of Iraq into a prosperous, stable democracy, the democratization of the rest of autocratic Middle East, the eradication of terrorism as a means of irregular warfare and the (forcible, if necessary) termination of weapons of mass destruction proliferation to real and potential enemies worldwide, are unrealistic and condemn the United States to a hopeless quest for absolute security. As such, the global war on terrorism’s goals are also politically, fiscally, and militarily unsustainable.”
Record points out that Bush’s goals in the global war on terrorism, in the Administration’s National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, as a time when “Americans and other civilized people around the world can lead their lives free of fear from terrorist attacks.” However, Record says, the Bush goal to “destroy or defeat terrorist organizations of global reach, …is both unattainable and strategically unwise.”
Furthermore, we ought to just accept some terrorists, Record suggest, because “countless millions of people around the world” believe that the terrorism is an acceptable form of “irregular warfare” if those committing terrorism do it, as Yassar Arafat told the UN, in defense of “a just cause.”
That, of course, makes any form of terrorism acceptable, since EVERYONE, including Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein believe ANY fight they pick is a “just cause.” After all, how many tyrants and dictators have you ever met in your life who claim they are abusing you because they are WRONG?
Record ends his report by charging that Bush’s “war on terrorism as presently defined and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military and other resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security. The United States may be able to defeat, even destroy, al-Qaeda, but it cannot rid the world of terrorism, much less evil.
We’ll see. What Bush’s polices have done in 2 years time is to give 50 million fellow human beings in Afghanistan and Iraq the same opportunity to live better lives, have more liberty and better opportunities to pursue happiness than they had under previous terrorist regimes. In the meantime, there has been no new terrorist attacks on continental United States in September 11, 2001.
That’s a pretty impressive set of accomplishments, I think.
To comment: Mary@bannerofliberty.com