WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- The deadly attacks perpetrated against two Istanbul synagogues on Saturday that killed about 23 people and injured some 300 others is a sign of things to come if terrorism isn't addressed. But terrorism, of and on its own, is impossible to address. It's not an entity, a political philosophy, a doctrine or a belief. It is simply a means to an end, a tool. So how does one fight such a tool?
What needs to be done in the continuing battle against terrorism is to tackle and resolve the root causes that propel people to become terrorists and use that tool -- terror -- as the deadly tactic it has become.
"Terrorism is a technique for killing people. That can't be an enemy," writes President Jimmy Carter's former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in an article published in the International Herald Tribune last Friday. "It's as if we said that World War II was not against the Nazis but against blitzkrieg. We need to ask who the enemy is, and what springs him or her to action against us?"
As Brzezinski pointed out, "making the war on terrorism the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today reflects a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's primary superpower...."
Indeed, critics of U.S. foreign policy have consistently accused the United States of suffering attention deficit disorder when it comes to international affairs.
American foreign policy is dictated and driven by a 4-year election cycle and everything the White House does, appears to be generated with the November presidential elections in mind. America's enemies, and political opponents on the other hand, have no such time restraints. They know they can "sit out" American administrations, because odds are, policies will be driven with the coming ballots in mind, and more often than not, the next administration will adopt diverging views from those taken by its predecessors. This makes sustaining a cohesive and consistent foreign policy a difficult matter for both the United States and its allies.
Iraq is a case in point. The United States went into the war without the full support of the international community, then accused those of not being "with us," of being against us." It is highly impractical to formulate foreign policy based upon such a simplistic tenet.
From the start of the Iraq war, President George W. Bush has repeatedly stated that the United States would be there for the duration, no matter how long it took. Yet, with the electoral year already in full motion and the presidential elections just 12 months away, the Bush White House is already changing its outlook on the situation, and vying for an early exit strategy.
The mounting death toll of troops and the systematic attacks against American and coalition soldiers now appears to have forced Bush to speed up his timetable on Iraq, altering original plans. Iraq will be handed over to Iraqis by the summer of 2004 -- much sooner than anticipated. All the initial plans of having Iraqis write their constitution before holding elections has been suddenly relegated to the back burner, with November 2004 in mind.
This behavior sends a wrong message to the perpetrators of terror. It tells them that their campaign has been successful and it stresses the fact that U.S. foreign policy is fragile and unreliable, and above all, self-centered.
It's not that it would be wrong to hand Iraq back to Iraqis as quickly as possible, this in fact, should have been accomplished much earlier. The Iraqi army, for example, should have been given a larger role to play from the outset. Instead, it was dissolved; a move that has undoubtedly provided a number of easy recruits to the terrorists fighting coalition forces in Iraq.
The mistake in this case lies in the danger of declaring an early victory and quitting Iraq prematurely, now that the country has become a haven for international jihadis. This would leave Iraq in far greater chaos than it was before the U.S. intervention, when at least there was a certain "chaordic" -- order in chaos -- situation.
The result would be offering those who use terrorism as a tool to advance their political agendas a safe haven from which to launch a multitude of attacks similar to the horrendous bombings carried out in Istanbul on Saturday, and of which more were promised by al-Qaida in e-mail messages released to London-based Arabic language newspapers.
But in order to adequately fight terrorism, we would need a consistent and clear-cut foreign policy that would remain uninterrupted by quadrennial election campaigns and 180 degrees shifts in foreign policy. Because the agendas of those using terror as a tactic to advance their causes does not go away every 4 years.
