Commentary: An unwinnable war?

WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 (UPI) -- Perhaps the president was caught for a moment thinking uncharacteristically out loud. Perhaps he merely misspoke. Either way he vocalized a notion that -- from the speed with which his aides leapt to clarify it, and the glee with which his enemies repeated it -- appears to be one of those things considered unsayable during an election campaign.

"I don't think you can win it," President Bush told NBC television Aug. 30, referring to the war on terror.

"But I think you can create conditions," he continued, "so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

The reaction to the president's comments shows the current paucity of public debate among the political class of the United States about the titanic struggle the country has joined, and the difficulty of trying to raise the level of discussion to anything above the cretinously simplistic during an election campaign.

But a closer examination of recent comments by the president and other senior members of his administration reveals that the nation's leaders are struggling to get to grips with the huge intellectual challenge of conceptualizing that conflict. If they are serious about it, however, they are going to have to abandon some of their most treasured shibboleths about the fight, and engage in a dialogue of much greater sophistication and -- yes, I'm afraid -- nuance, than they have until now.

Within hours of the NBC interview being broadcast, White House spokesman Scott McClellan was telling reporters that Bush had only been "talking about winning it in the conventional sense ... I don't think you can expect that there will ever be a formal surrender or a treaty signed, like we have in wars past."

And in his next breath, McClellan reiterated the very same positive statement that the president had apparently disowned. "It requires a generational commitment to win this war on terrorism," he said

Democrats put out a news release about the president's comments which weirdly echoed, word for word, Republican attacks on Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. Bush had "flip-flopped" on the issue, they said, accusing him of "being for winning the war on terrorism before he was against it."

The president's campaign seems to have felt it necessary that he clarify his stance personally at the first available opportunity.

"There are some out there that are intent on trying to create a false impression," McClellan told reporters on Air Force One the next day, previewing Bush's speech to the American Legion's National Convention later that morning. The president was going to make it clear -- "crystal clear," to use a phrase his spokesman repeated twice -- that he believed victory was possible, and was being achieved.

"In this different kind of war," Bush said, "we may never sit down at a peace table. But make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win."

Kerry was even more emphatic the following day. "I absolutely disagree," with the president's comments to (NBC's) Matt Lauer, he told American Legion delegates. "With the right policies, this is a war we can win, this is a war we must win and this is a war we will win ... In end, the terrorists will lose and we will win."

But in reality -- as administration officials and Kerry campaign advisers both privately admit -- it is nothing like so simple.

At the end of last year, in a wide ranging interview with United Press International, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., now the president's nominee to run a large chunk of the war on terrorism as director of Central Intelligence, said that conflict was more like the war on crime than the cold war.

"There will always be criminals," he said, "There will always be crime. What you can do is reduce it to an acceptable level."

In the same way, there would always be terrorists, "sick, evil people driven to kill," but their activities could be contained to what he called, without elaboration, "a satisfactory extent."

As a measure of how difficult it is to even conceive victory -- let alone achieve it -- ask yourself what it would look like.

"Osama bin Laden's not going to sign a surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri," one senior intelligence official told UPI earlier this year.

Would morgue photos of bin Laden, a la Saddam Hussein's two sons, constitute a victory? Or perhaps it would require the more Grand Guignol promise made by then-chief of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Cofer Black, who told Bush he would get bin Laden's head delivered in a box? ("Well, we would need some DNA," he deadpanned to staff after the comment became public, reports Peter Bergen in a forthcoming Atlantic Monthly piece.)

How about a dental exam video, like that of Saddam himself released by the U.S. military after his capture?

Bergen says that little planning has been done for the possibility of bin Laden's capture, but adds that it is unlikely he would allow himself to be taken alive. He says that in the long term, the al-Qaida leader's death "would most likely give an enormous boost to the power of his ideas."

Not exactly a victory, then.

Another indicator of the difficulty of conceptualizing an end to the war can be seen in the rhetorical difficulties officials sometimes find themselves in when trying to explain what they mean.

There's a reason why some politicians apparently think it's a good idea not to "do" nuance.

In an interview with the Associated Press' Ron Fournier last week, Bush chief domestic policy adviser Karl Rove compared the war on terror to "the conflict in Northern Ireland, where the Brits fought terrorism, and there's no sort of peace accord with al-Qaida saying, 'We surrender.'"

No transcript of the interview has been released, so it's not possible to see the context, but -- on their face -- the words appear to echo Goss' conception of an endless -- but containable -- war, rather than the emphatic statements of the president and his opponent about the inevitability of victory.

The truth is, it is almost impossible to envisage a victory in the war on terrorism because the whole exercise is -- literally -- misconceived, as in: wrongly thought about.

Calling the conflict the war on terrorism, Sept. 11 Commissioner John Lehman told the U.S. Naval Academy earlier this year, "would be like President Franklin Roosevelt saying in World War II, 'We are engaged in a war against kamikazes and blitzkrieg.'

"Like them," the former Navy secretary said in May, "terrorism is a method, a tool, a weapon used against us."

Exactly. Terrorism is a weapon, and one can no more win a war against terrorism than one could win a war against rifles.

There will, as Goss might say, always be rifles. And there will always be the possibility for small groups of highly motivated and ruthless people to launch deadly attacks against the civilian population of free societies. There's just no way to stop it.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has always struck me as the most intellectually capable member of the Cabinet, made the same point -- albeit at a little noticed seminar in the Far East -- a month later.

"Terrorism is simply a technique being used by extremists," he said in answer to a question after a speech at the Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore, June 5.

"It is not the problem in and of itself."

Now that is what I call a major admission.

And it is doubly significant because it reveals Rumsfeld's understanding that -- as a weapon, or a tool -- terrorism can be used in different contexts and to different ends. This more -- sorry -- nuanced understanding of the nature of the conflict is clearly visible in U.S. policy, even if the people who make it rarely articulate it.

The Nicaraguan Contra, for instance, bombed a news conference, and according to human rights groups, routinely and deliberately killed civilians and destroyed the infrastructure of civil society -- schools, health centers and local government offices. Yet they received open political support from a U.S. administration of which Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney were members.

Nor did Sept. 11 change the willingness of the administration to tolerate some of those who use terrorism.

Last month, three men who had been convicted in Panama of a plot to use a large bomb to kill Fidel Castro while he was visiting Panama received a heroes' welcome from Cuban exiles in Florida, according to The Washington Post. George Gedda, the veteran AP reporter who has been at the State Department longer than most of its employees, wrote in a Washington Times op-ed that Foggy Bottom's refusal to condemn the pardons "may have been influenced by ... the administration's interest in keeping the Cuban-American vote in President Bush's column.

But this more subtle and inflected understanding presents a problem for the administration, too.

In certain political contexts, it is very useful to be able to lump all terrorists together with Osama bin Laden.

Most importantly, it enables those who wish to promote solidarity with the Likud government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to elide the important political differences between the various Palestinian organizations committed to using terrorism as a weapon against the Israeli occupation. They're all terrorists, right? They're all the same.

The problem for everyone else is that what is sauce for the U.S. goose cannot be subject to international law and minimum standards of human rights when employed by the less fastidious gander.

Once again, defining the enemy simply as terrorists obfuscates important political distinctions.

Is the Indonesian military campaign against Islamic insurgents in Aceh not a part of the global war on terror? What about the Uighar nationalists of Xinjang province in Western China -- are they not Islamic terrorists who should be destroyed without mercy, like al-Qaida?

So it is encouraging to hear Bush himself make several little-noticed allusions to an understanding that terrorism is not what his war is against.

"We actually misnamed the war on terror," he told delegates to the Journalists of Color Convention in Washington Aug. 6. "It ought to be 'the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try and shake the conscience of the free world.'"

Bush seems to have intended the remark as a joke -- and the audience certainly took it as one -- but last week he repeated it, stripped of hyperbole, in all seriousness. "Frankly, the war on terror is somewhat misnamed," he told Time magazine, "It ought to be called the struggle (against) a totalitarian point of view that uses terror as a tool to intimidate the free."

But here is Bush seems to be trying a neat trick -- abandoning the useless definition of the enemy as terrorism, but replacing it with one so wide and general that it can still do the necessary work in Israel and elsewhere.

Once again, Lehman -- who at the Sept. 11 commission hearings made a habit of speaking bluntly and giving every appearance of not caring who was offended by the truth -- had a better answer.

"Our enemy," he told the Naval Institute, "is violent, Islamic fundamentalism."

Rumsfeld shows even more -- it's awful but there's no exact synonym -- nuance in his description of the enemy.

"What you have," he said in Singapore, "is a civil war, a struggle in that religion (Islam) where a small minority of people are trying to hijack it ... We as free people have not developed the skills to counter that."

And there's the nub of it. Because only once you recognize that this is -- at bottom -- a conflict about ideas: about how we live and see God and the relationship between the one and the other, can you truly understand how hard it is going to be, and how provisional, how temporary and limited -- even sometimes ultimately counter-productive -- any victories achieved by force of arms will prove.

It is perhaps ironic that it is the secretary of Defense who should best understand that this is not a war that can truly be waged -- let alone won -- with tanks and bombs and guns. But it is downright alarming that he apparently only feels free to make such thoughtful and penetrating comments on the other side of the world.

It is more alarming still that neither side in the presidential campaign was able to publicly acknowledge the insightful character of the president's comments to NBC.

That suggests that the chances of a real debate -- needed now more than ever -- about how to fight this new enemy, this new kind of enemy, are slim to vanishing.

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(Please send comments to nationaldesk@upi.com.)