The counter terrorism community is abuzz over the President's comments yesterday at a principals meeting of the Homeland Security Council. Bush reportedly said he was not in favor of the new term, Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE). In fact, he said, "no one checked with me". That comment brought an uncomfortable silence to the assembled group of pooh bahs. The President insisted it was still a war as far as he is concerned.
Johnson, as a counter-terrorism guy, understandably sees this episode as illustrative of the broader confusion that reigns within the Bush Admin's competing bureaucracies regarding counter-terrorism. But the confusion goes to the heart of a profound tension between policy and politics that the Bush Admin has created for itself. To mobilize a considerable part of the American public, Bush and his team oversold an idea that was questionable at the outset but has by now certainly outlived its usefulness. The Administration now has to engage in a sleight-of-hand -- it must shift goalposts and policies to ones that are far more realistic, promising and sustainable internationally, while maintaining the unquestioning loyalty of a critical domestic constituency whose support is premised on that core idea.
At Liberals Against Terrorism, we've been tracking the welcome evolution of GWOT to GWOE/GSAVE since at least January (what I've called elsewhere a long-term strategy, akin to Cold War "containment," of "marginalization" of extremism). From the second Inaugural Address onwards, the word "terror" had virtually disappeared from the Bush Admin's lexicon -- especially Rumsfeld, Myers and Rice (see her confirmation hearings) but including Bush -- and the word "war" (other than in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan) had become less and less frequent. At the end of June, however, the GWOT made a dramatic reemergence in the President's prime time speech on Iraq. The speech was a replay of the entire old "terror" package, including the bogus link between 9/11 and Iraq and the (morally bankrupt and strategically counterproductive) assertion that the US should "fight them over there instead of over here."
Bush is in a pickle. His policies are, in fact, shifting, even if the marketing stays constant. Setting Iraq to one side for the moment, the objectives of the GWOT have shifted from rapidly defeating the "bad guys" and dismantling their support infrastructure to a longer-term multi-dimensional approach to reducing threats to American interests writ broadly.
Adjustments in priorities and approaches can be seen both at State and DOD. State is emphasizing diverse coalitions (including some of Kofi Annan's UN reform proposals such as a Peace Commission) and high-profile attention to promote more open societies, encourage Muslims to denounce extremism and violence, prevent the emergence of failed states, intervene to manage instability and reduce conflicts, and improve post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. There is a growing emphasis throughout much of the US military -- especially the Army and Marines -- on "non-kinetic," culturally-conversant approaches to counter-insurgency, providing more training to "friendly" forces in unstable countries, and incorporating the special demands of "operations other than war" -- including, heaven forbid, "nation-building" tasks and capabilities -- into plans for force restructuring and transformation.
These incremental moves -- when seen as a larger strategic adjustment -- have been bringing US government attitudes, policies and rhetoric into better alignment with the interests and attitudes of countries with which the US needs to work or which the US needs to influence. When compared to the initial "war" approach to the GWOT, a multi-dimensional opposition to Islamist extremism and transnational violence can serve as the basis for constructing a far larger, more effective, and more sustainable set of "coalitions of the willing." Countries will participate in ways that fit with their own agendas. Those agendas will reflect the particular threats each country perceives to its own national interests and the specific capacities the country has to marginalize and eliminate extremists and their threats of violence. Those countries which have opposed the US war in Iraq, or at least which have substantial portions of their publics opposed, can nonetheless collaborate openly with the US on the broader problems of homegrown and transnational Islamist violence.
Iraq is an anomaly, albeit a pretty large one, in the emerging strategy. Jim Hoagland, as the first journalist to report on a Global War on Extremism, clearly has an inside track on discussions/debates within the Admin. After Bush's June speech and the London bombings, Hoagland complained that the President was backsliding on message discipline -- that the Iraq war needs to be disentangled ASAP from the longer-term strategy of countering threats from Islamic extremism.
[bin Laden's] ultimate aim is to encircle and dominate the Muslims who do not submit to the Salafist ideology of the Sunni extremists. Muslim moderates, Shiites of all political persuasions and other "nonbelievers" -- especially Jews -- are the physical targets of destruction, not Western freedoms or armies. The long-term struggle is within Islam, for Islam, and will be won or lost by Muslims -- with crucial outside support.Although the GWOT, Iraq, and "winning the war" remain joined at the hip in presidential speechifying, they are already disconnected in fact. Rumsfeld et al have been trying to manage this by backing off, step by step, from any US responsibility for outcomes in Iraq: "it's in the Iraqis' hands."
The war in Iraq cannot at this point be solely or even largely about fighting terrorists there so that we don't have to fight them here, as Bush continues to repeat on every occasion. It has to be about empowering a responsible, tolerant government of Muslims to overcome murderous subversives who want power there.
Iraq must in fact be increasingly detached from the war on terrorism, at least in the terms that Bush has been using. In any event, the war against terrorism must be converted into a long-term struggle for something -- a struggle for tolerance in which ideas, resources and inclusion rank in importance with U.S. military bases in Central Asia. [ed. -- emph supplied; note Hoagland already was clued into the "struggle" lingo]
Even before Rumsfeld's most recent trip to Baghdad, when he and Casey hinted broadly at an accelerated timetable for drawing down forces, operational intensity and force rotation plans had made it clear that the US military has decided to stage-manage withdrawal without a victory (in traditional warfighting terms) for US forces -- neither victory over the "terrorists" nor other "insurgents." { ed. See Eric Martin's extensive post from earlier today on the emerging withdrawal policies. } "Success" is no longer defined by the Admin in terms of "winning" or protecting the US from some threat (WMD, Al Qaeda). As Rumsfeld rightly says, ultimately the insurgents will be defeated by the Iraqis, not by American forces.
Rather, the goal has shifted to, as Hoagland puts it: "empowering a responsible, tolerant government of Muslims to overcome murderous subversives who want power there." Even that objective is likely to be diluted if the constitutional process continues to be as unpromising as it now appears. The "minimum" goal for the US in Iraq is to avoid Iraq becoming another Afghanistan, a safe haven for international jihad and a source of wider regional instability. Ironically, as the goals in Iraq are defined down, they begin to reconnect with the minimum goals of a GWOT/GSAVE.
As Hoagland reported in his first piece on the GWOE, the internal discussions about retiring "GWOT" from official discourse began some time ago, at the instigation of the military. And from the marked change in vocabulary since January by leading figures of the Admin -- including Bush -- it would certainly appear that this has been a matter of concern at the highest levels, not simply a topic of debate among a bunch of bureaucrats.
Senior officials have had good reason for concern. The American public has become more antsy about Iraq, and the Bush Admin's "credibility gap" on Iraq -- that gap between claims of progress and on-the-ground reality -- has become a canyon. When the disconnect between evolving policy and political rhetoric gets too large for any Admin, there will be problems with three key audiences: the general public (to the extent the credibility gap becomes increasingly evident in negative nightly news); the staff of the executive branch who are supposed to implement policy (whether civil service or members of the military); and the rest of the world, both other countries and public opinion.
What the folks who developed the GSAVE overlooked, however, was that when things get bad for the White House, there's a fourth audience that's more important than the other three. And that audience isn't troubled by cognitive dissonance or the "credibility gap." Rather than try to close the gap by sketching out shifts in US strategy and policy both globally and in Iraq, Bush's recent speeches and remarks are going whole hog in the other direction, re-connecting Iraq to the GWOT not only today (the jihadis are trying to kill US forces in Iraq) but from the outset with the 9/11-Iraq canard. At the same time, other parts of the Admin -- both Rice and Rumsfeld and his generals -- are spelling out the evolving GSAVE strategy within the context of specific policies.
Bush's recent revival of the GWOT in the context of Iraq is an implicit acknowledgment that the "war on terror" is critical to shoring up a key part of the support he received last November. Without the GWOT, Bush becomes much more vulnerable when attempting to justify his previous policies. His posture as the "war" President is also essential to continuing to claim unprecedented executive powers and maintaining the "king can do no wrong" approach that is embraced by his ardent fans.
When it comes to a choice between political marketing and policy, Bush is probably right. Marketing wins. He's got to bring along with him all the self-described "warriors" as he gradually moves the goalposts and shifts both strategy and tactics. A rhetorical shift, which would implicitly challenge the basic notion that we're "fighting" a "war" that can be definitively "won" in the relatively near-term, would produce howls of outrage from his most important constituency. And make no mistake, the aggressive GWOT supporters are critical for him, because even if things don't descend into open civil war, Iraq is going to provide a regular source of negative news that he can't control for some time to come.
So expect policy and speeches to international audiences to continue down the (implicit) GSAVE track, but expect to continue to be fed a regular diet for domestic consumption of (explicit) GWOT rhetoric from the White House.
cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism
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