NAME CALLING
by George Packer | The New Yorker | August 8/15, 2005
You had to be a careful reader of the inside pages of the Times last week to notice that America is no longer fighting the global war on terrorism. The Administration has replaced, or revised, or expanded the G.W.O.T. with a new phrase: “a global struggle against violent extremism.” The war is now a struggle. The terrorist enemy is now the violent extremist enemy. The focus has shifted from a tactic to an ideology. In a major new strategy document quoted in U.S. News & World Report, the Pentagon is even more specific (and more accurate), venturing onto delicate ground by calling the threat “Islamist extremism” and “extremist Sunni and Shia movements that exploit Islam for political ends.” In June, a Marine lieutenant general, Wallace Gregson, floated the new thinking in a speech: “This is no more a war on terrorism than the Second World War was a war on submarines,” he said. “The decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world.” On July 12th, Donald Rumsfeld used the new language in a press conference, repeating the word “extremist” or variations of it eleven times. On July 23rd, two top White House officials followed up with an Op-Ed in the Times: “At its root, the struggle is an ideological contest, a war of ideas that engages all of us, public servant and private citizen, regardless of nationality.” The President’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, once said of war planning for Iraq, “You don’t introduce new products in August,” but the rebranding of the war formerly known as G.W.O.T. has all the earmarks of a full-blown summer marketing campaign. What’s going on here?

Something serious, in fact—almost unprecedented. The Administration is admitting that its strategy since September 11th has failed, without really admitting it. The single-minded emphasis on hunting down terrorists has failed (“Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people,” Gregson said). The use of military force as the country’s primary and, at times, only response has failed, and has stretched the Army and the Marines to the breaking point. Unilateralism has failed. “It’s not a military project alone, and the United States cannot do it by itself alone,” Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and a leading advocate of going it alone with military force, said on his way out the Pentagon door and into private life (good luck, fellas!). The overwhelmingly American character of the war has failed, isolating moderate Muslims—who, in the end, are the only hope for political change—or driving them closer to the radicals. Loading the entire burden of the war onto the backs of American soldiers, while telling the rest of the citizenry to go about its business, has failed, even as public relations: in a recent Gallup poll, only thirty-four per cent of Americans said that we are winning the war on terrorism. The phrase has outlived its enormous political usefulness.

These recognitions are late in coming. Arguments for a broader, deeper, more nuanced strategy appeared in the report of the 9/11 Commission, a year ago. They were the basis for a sixteen-billion-dollar national-security bill that was introduced by Senate Democrats in January, and is currently going nowhere. At the Pentagon, they date back to October of 2003, to a memorandum in which Rumsfeld candidly asked, “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” Almost two years later, in the summer of Sharm al-Sheikh, Netanya, London, and Baghdad (where 7/7 is an average day), the answer is no. Jihadis are crossing the borders into Iraq, for example, far faster than they can be killed or kill themselves. A recent study by an Israeli researcher shows that they are predominantly young Saudis, inflamed by footage of the fighting in Iraq and by incendiary sermons from their imams. Do they hate us for who we are, or for what we do? That turns out to be the wrong question. Most of the new jihadis had no connection to terrorism before the Iraq war; the American occupation has filled them with fantasies of violent death. But they come largely from a region in Saudi Arabia where the most extreme Islamist ideology was already flourishing, directed against Shiite Muslims as well as against “crusaders and Jews.” They have the sympathy of millions of fellow-travellers. The war in Iraq is the trigger, not the reason, for their self-annihilation.

A better question is the one suggested by Lieutenant General Gregson: what can be done to persuade the millions of Muslims on whose support the jihadis depend to abandon their ideology? In the wake of the London bombings and the daily massacres of Iraqis, gaps are opening in the ranks of radical Islam. Even certain jihadi Web sites have posted heated arguments over the morality of killing innocents; none other than the spiritual mentor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has attacked his own disciple for giving jihad a bad name in Iraq. But radical Islam is not a problem that Muslims can sort out alone. The grand gamble of the architects of the Iraq war was that a democratic state in the heart of the Middle East would change the political dynamic throughout the region. Right now, the best we can salvage is an Iraq that doesn’t descend into communal violence on a large scale. It seems likely that the Administration will begin to withdraw American forces from Iraq early next year, well ahead of the midterm elections in November—regardless of the realities. Only yesterday, Iraq was the central front in the war on terrorism; perhaps the Pentagon’s new terminology is the linguistic version of an exit strategy. But no one should imagine that an American departure will end suicide bombings in Iraq, or anywhere else. Just as the jihadis in Afghanistan did not retire after expelling the Soviets fifteen years ago, the withdrawal of another superpower will not be enough for this generation of insurgents, either.

In Iraq, America has run up against the limits of war in an ideological contest. The Administration is right to reconsider its strategy, starting with the language. Will anything else follow? The global struggle against violent extremism would inspire more confidence if, for example, the Administration hadn’t failed to include funding for democracy programs in Iraq beyond the next round of elections there; or if Karen Hughes, the President’s choice as Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, hadn’t left the job empty for five months while waiting for her son to graduate from high school; or if the White House weren’t resisting attempts by Congress to regulate the treatment of prisoners; or if Karl Rove would stop using 9/11 to raise money and smear Democrats. No one really knows how American influence can be used to disinfect Islamist politics of violent ideas. This is the first problem. The second is that the Bush team has shown such bad faith, arrogance, and incompetence since September 11th that it seems unlikely to figure it out.

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