McCain and the war on terrorism

Is McCain the man with the experience and judgement to lead America during a war against Terror?

From:

The New Republic magazine

The Next Front
by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon
Seven years after 9/11, John McCain still doesn't get the war on terrorism.
Post Date Thursday, September 04, 2008


At a stop on July 22 in Rochester, New Hampshire, Senator John McCain was asked a series of questions about the American troop presence in Iraq. As he has throughout his campaign, McCain insisted that U.S. forces were winning the war in Iraq and, if allowed to complete their mission, would leave behind a working democracy, check "disruptive" influences, and clear the way for a transformed Middle East. The back-and-forth culminated with the following exchange:

Questioner: Don't you believe that we are inflaming the Muslim world by our presence there?

McCain: Thank you. I do not. I believe that if we had been defeated in Iraq that the radical elements in the Muslim world would have been dramatically encouraged.


The Arizona senator's response presented in a nutshell his belief that military force is the sine qua non of a successful counterterrorism policy. McCain does not promise that victory in Iraq--which he does not define--will end Islamist terrorism in other regions or prevent attacks directed at the United States. Implicit in his view, though, is the notion that terrorists will be deterred by American military might and that their defeat in Iraq will make it more difficult for them to acquire the recruits, funding, and popular backing they need to continue their efforts.


Undoubtedly, flagrant displays of U.S. weakness could embolden America's terrorist enemies, though it seems far-fetched that a U.S. departure from Iraq in the next three years--a move endorsed by the Bush administration, the Baghdad regime, and Senator Barack Obama--would be seen as a rout. But McCain's approach fails to take into account the many other factors that affect the jihadists' ability to promote their cause and carry out attacks. Above all, it ignores the motivational power of the jihadist "story"--the contention, made by Osama bin Laden and others, that the United States is a predatory power which seeks to occupy Muslim countries, destroy Islam, and steal the Middle East's oil wealth. Undermining that narrative, most counterterrorism analysts believe, must be a central part of the strategy against radical Islamism. Yet McCain's insistence that the U.S. military stay in Iraq for the long term does just the opposite.


For a man who routinely calls the fight against terrorism "the transcendent challenge of our time," John McCain seems to understand little about it. At least twice, he has confused Sunni and Shia, the two main sects of Islam. On one famous occasion in Amman last March he suggested that Al Qaeda terrorists, who are Sunnis, were receiving training from Iran's Shia government. That notion would have surprised the late Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Mussab al Zarqawi, who killed Shia with a demonic fury and repeatedly called them "worse" than Americans. According to the CIA, Al Qaeda personnel do operate within Iran, but the Iranian government is unaware of their presence. McCain's other fumble came just a few weeks later when he implied that Al Qaeda was "an obscure sect of the Shiites." Perhaps there should have been less surprise at McCain's mistakes, given that in a 2003 interview with Chris Matthews, he predicted that there would be comity between the sects in postwar Iraq because "there's not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias. So I think they can probably get along."


Like the key architects of the Iraq war, McCain appears to see all hostile Muslims as part of a monolithic enemy. This conflation of Al Qaeda with other threats underlay President Bush's belief that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Cheney's repeated insistence that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were working together years after that was proven untrue, and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's obsessive demands that the intelligence community demonstrate a connection between the jihadists and Saddam's Baathists. McCain has also spoken about Hamas and Hezbollah in terms that suggest that he considers these groups no different from Al Qaeda, Iraq's Baath Party, and the Iranian regime. He has speculated that if the United States were defeated in Iraq, Iran and Al Qaeda would reach a strategic understanding to divide the country between them--an inconceivable outcome, given their deep hatred for each other.


Ironically, the McCain campaign's principal critique of Barack Obama, as expressed by foreign policy aide Randy Scheunemann, is that he "does not understand the nature of the enemy as we face it." Former CIA director James Woolsey, also an adviser to McCain, said in a conference call with reporters that Obama "ignores that we are in a war against terrorism." Insofar as we are in a conflict that involves violence, we are in a war. But the flaw in McCain's worldview is his conviction that the war against terrorism is a war in the conventional sense--something of a cross between Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day. The depth of the McCain team's embrace of the "war paradigm" has been apparent both in the candidate's near-exclusive focus on Iraq and his revival of the Bush/Cheney canard that Democrats see terrorism solely as a law enforcement challenge--that they would rather serve a terrorist a subpoena than kill him. To McCain, the central front in the war on terrorism is Iraq, and it is a war that must be fought chiefly with military power. One hundred thousand or more U.S. troops stationed in Iraq will maintain order, destroy malefactors through air strikes and ground engagements, and demonstrate that no one can outgun the American military.


But massed armies and traditional notions of total war have little to do with the current conflict with the jihadist movement. Most of the terrorists cannot be overrun with tanks. Many of them are in Pakistan--in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and, increasingly, in the broad western band of the country ranging from the Northwest Frontier Province down to Baluchistan, where Al Qaeda and its allies in the Pakistan Taliban operate in the open and increasingly destabilize our operations in Afghanistan. The United States may be able to disrupt an emerging conspiracy there with military means, such as drones, tactical air strikes, or Special Forces, but it cannot invade this nuclear armed-country, even though the terrorists who plotted 9/11 have found refuge there.


McCain has long maintained that the way to deal with this problem was to press the Pakistanis into action. "I know Musharraf. ... I know how to deal with Pakistan. I've been to Waziristan. I know these issues and I've been involved in them for the last 20 years," the Arizonan said in a Fox News roundtable during the primaries. Of course, the Bush White House emphasized working with Musharraf, too, and the failure of that approach is now clear. As The New York Times has reported, years of frustration with Pakistani military intelligence--the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate--has boiled over in the Bush administration, and a senior CIA official recently flew to Islamabad to present information showing the ISI's attempts to subvert the Afghan government and its complicity in the July bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Besides which, Musharraf is now gone.


After South Asia, the other key areas of concern are in the Muslim diaspora, especially in Europe, in urban ghettoes or university cafes. These are the haunts of the plotters who planned in 2006 to rival the 9/11 attacks by blowing up six or seven airliners flying out of Heathrow. Others have burrowed into the societies of pro-Western Muslim countries, like the 700 or so Saudis arrested in the last year whose main targets were oil facilities. Military force will not be used in any of these areas, which cover most of the "theaters of jihad."


Where military force does matter--say, in Afghanistan--McCain's prescriptions have made little sense. Initially, he touted Afghanistan as a military success, but after Obama repeatedly pointed to the decay there, McCain reversed course in July and called for more troops. His pledge to deploy three more brigades, however, is hollow if he also insists on maintaining a high troop level in Iraq until 2013. As Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointed out on July 2, the Pentagon does not have those brigades today, and increasing the size of the army will take years.



Undoubtedly, the United States must continue working with the Iraqi army and Sunni tribes to dismantle Al Qaeda in Iraq--a parasite that came to Mesopotamia to feed off the chaos created by Bush's invasion--but doing so won't require the 15 combat brigades McCain wants to keep there or anything close to that number. Military force from some country or coalition may also be needed elsewhere in the failed and failing states that radiate violence, such as Lebanon, Somalia, and Gaza. The jihad in these areas has taken root in tribal areas, slums, and refugee camps that are effectively off-limits to police. Unlike in Europe or Saudi Arabia, these jihadists are contesting territory, not just terrorizing unlucky individuals. Ultimately, a mix of special operations forces and conventional units will be needed to chip away at these insurgencies. But they will succeed only if their efforts are carried out in the name of a government that enjoys popular support.




What McCain fails to comprehend is that his preference for firepower will give the terrorists exactly what they want. For bin Laden and his fellow jihadists, it is axiomatic that the United States must feel itself to be at war with Islam. Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, explained this clearly to his American captors after he was apprehended in Pakistan in 1995 and flown back to the United States for trial. When the United States considers itself at war, the mujahedin believe, it will behave in a warlike way, and the deployment of its heavy equipment in places like Iraq will confirm to the world's Muslims that America is, as bin Laden claims, at war with Islam. This is the jihadists' strategy for winning hearts and minds, and it has worked for them. It is true that Al Qaeda hasn't mobilized the masses as it wanted, but it is nevertheless getting the funding and recruits it needs.


The key is to provoke an American overreaction. It's not just the pictures of tanks or humvees cruising through Muslim countries that horrify and motivate Al Qaeda's target audience; it is the enormous number of civilian casualties in Iraq--from a documented minimum of just below 100,000 to estimates of more than six times that--which are laid at America's doorstep. The New York Times and Fox News may not routinely show images of Iraqi civilian casualties, but media outlets overseas do. Supporters of the war have been so delighted by the decline in violence in Iraq--purchased mostly through the arming of Sunni tribesmen whose long-term reliability is dubious at best--that they fail to notice the continued erosion in America's standing in a Muslim world, where the occupation of Iraq has come to rival the plight of the Palestinians as an issue of concern.