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Old War: Drugs. New War: Terrorism

Old War: Drugs. New War: Terrorism
Bruce Shapiro, Salon
September 21, 2001

When President Bush walked out of the Capitol after his speech Thursday
night, he left behind him bipartisan huzzahs, a new terrorism czar and a
list of demands for the Taliban. Yet paradoxically, he also left behind a
war on terrorism even more murky than it was when he entered the building
an hour earlier.

From his first shaken television appearance hours after the World Trade
Center and Pentagon attacks a week ago, Bush has seemed to promise a
swift and definitive and violent reply. Standing atop the rubble in New York,
he shouted into a bullhorn that the perpetrators of the attack would feel
America's sting; earlier this week he declared presumed mastermind Osama
Bin-Laden "wanted dead or alive"; in Congress he offered a high-oratorical
version of the same John Wayne promise: either "we bring our enemies to
justice, or we will bring justice to our enemies."

But the remarkable reality of Bush's speech Thursday night was just how far
he backpedaled from that promise of easy vindication of the dead. He devoted
much of the speech to explaining what his new world policy is not: "not one
battle but a lengthy campaign," not a war for territory like Iraq, not a
sanitized air war like Kosovo, not even a war with a pre-defined enemy but
against any mafia or state "sponsoring, sheltering or supplying terrorists."

Bush stated his goals so broadly because, despite his rhetoric of the last
days, he faces a crisis that defies military solution. Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld admitted as much at a press conference Wednesday in which he
described the difficulty of finding suitable targets for air strikes in
already-devastated Afghanistan, or waging a ground war in a rural mountain
land that in a century's time defeated the best efforts of the British
Empire and the Soviet Union. Instead, Bush defined the crisis so broadly
Thursday night as to defy effective measurement even of success or failure.

Indeed, while he made reference to the great ideological conflicts of recent
decades -- calling the bombers "the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of
the 20th century" -- the past century, the new strategy described by Bush is
really more heir to the war on drugs than to World War II or the Cold War.
Like the war on drugs, Bush's new campaign means taking on conspiratorial
actors rooted in some of the world's most impoverished economies. Like the
drug war, it means parsing out -- or more likely looking away from -- the
morphing, corrupt relationship between transnational criminals and
governments, some of which happen to be key American allies. For the drug
war's Colombia, substitute Taliban-friendly Pakistan, or perhaps Saudi
Arabia, deeply implicated in the funding of militant Islamic networks
worldwide.

And like the War on Drugs, Bush's new campaign carries a domestic "homeland
security" component which many Americans may find far from congenial. As
recently as the early 1980s, the label "terrorism" was applied with a broad
brush to justify FBI spying on a broad range of American dissidents.
Attorney General Ashcroft's demand for sweeping new power to detain
immigrant "terrorist suspects" without charge and virtually without appeal
has already been compared with the Palmer Raids of 1919, when hundreds
of immigrant radicals were arrested and deported. But it is also frighteningly
reminiscent of the draconian anti-terrorist laws passed by Great Britain
during the Irish Republican Army campaign of the 1970s -- where secret
courts and arrests without evidence led to numerous cases of wrongful
imprisonment, including the Guilford Four whose story was told in brutal
detail in the film "In the Name of the Father."

If Bush left his goals vague it is also because his administration and
advisors are still warring internally. On one side are those who, like
former Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and Paul Wolfowitz,
call for putting an assortment of nations out of business no matter what it
takes: essentially, sending America to war with Iran, Iraq, Syria and
Afghanistan all at once. Secretary of State Colin Powell -- until last week
the most marginalized member of the Cabinet -- clearly favors more limited
and precise action aimed specifically at bin Laden's mafia.

And alongside that debate is an even bigger question, left completely
unanswered in Bush's speech and yet arguably key to the whole enterprise:
whether he is willing to abandon the blunt policy of American unilateralism
which has so far guided the Bush administration every step of the way. Bush
showered praise on Great Britain's Tony Blair and applauded the sympathy
displayed for America in Seoul and Cairo. At the same time, this president
who spurned the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, who has fought
establishment of an International Criminal Court, who angered even close
allies with his missile defense plan, made no mention in his speech Thursday
of the United Nations.

It was an omission all the more notable because recent years have brought
a steady stream of transnational cooperation in the prosecutions of mass
murderers. "Modern democracies have perfectly adequate justice systems
for dealing with terrorists," says William Schabas, a leading international law
scholar and director of the Irish Center for Human Rights in Galway. "We
track them down, catch them, bring them to trial and impose fit punishment.
That is what the United States and the United Kingdom did with those
responsible for the Lockerbie crash, and for the embassy bombings in Nairobi
and Dar es Salaam. It is what the U.N. is doing for those accused of
genocide and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda."
Indeed, says Schabas, "How much more healthy it is for democracy that
Milosevic be judged by an international court rather than murdered by a
cruise missile aimed at his home."

The possibility of such cooperation seemed far from the president's mind
Thursday night. The president's speech was clearly designed to mark for
Americans a new era of global struggle -- but to the rest of the world, it
also says that even after the World Trade Center and the Pentagon this is a
president who goes it alone.

Bruce Shapiro, a national correspondent of Salon News, is co-author of Legal
Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future (New Press).