[Mb-civic] Tomgram: Which War Is This Anyway?

[Michael Butler]

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Tomgram: Which War Is This Anyway?

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2251

Are We in World War IV?
By Tom Engelhardt

Throughout much of the Cold War, people feared above all else a global hot
war, the third great one in a century of devastating world wars; and we
crept up to it more than once -- most desperately, there can be no doubt, at
the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. For decades, the world
was poised for that next world war; the two superpowers with their nuclear
arsenals running to thousands of weapons (as they still do), a few hundred
of which would have been civilization-busting, many hundreds of which might
have been nuclear-winter inducing and life extinguishing; all of them cocked
in their silos or loaded in the bomb-bays of Soviet or American planes, or
stashed on the submarines that made up the unreachable third leg of the
nuclear "tripod" and were primed for almost instantaneous action. World War
III, which might have ended it all, could indeed have started, as the U.S.
military feared for decades, with those Soviet tanks pouring through the
Fulda Gap in Germany, and escalated from there to "theater," and finally
intercontinental, ballistic missiles. It would have been a show. The last
picture show, you might say. And, let's face it, it didn't happen.

Yes, the two superpowers, armed to the teeth and eyeing each other for half
a century, oozed aggression, and fought and bled each other in a series of
proxy border wars; relatively overtly in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan;
more covertly or indirectly in lands ranging from Tibet to Angola. (Yes,
yes, in each of those cases, other powerful forces were at work, but
certainly the global Cold War was part of the mix.) Nonetheless, over those
fifty-plus years -- despite mutual memories of bloody stalemate in Korea,
our memories of grim defeat in Vietnam, and Russian memories of the same in
Afghanistan -- the most striking aspect of the Cold War was that the
emphasis remained, however barely at times, on the "cold," not the "war."
It's worth saying more than once, given our present moment and the claims
being made: World War III never happened -- or I wouldn't be sitting here on
the Internet writing this and you wouldn't be at your computer reading it.
Put another way, "the Cold War" was simply an oxymoron that we got
incredibly used to; a small, bleak sigh of linguistic relief at what hadn't
quite (yet) come to be.

I mention this ancient history only because, to listen to the
neoconservatives and their various allies now embedded in the top ranks of
the Bush administration (or in well-connected think tanks and front groups
scattered inside Washington DC's Beltway), we are in fact enmeshed in
nothing less than "World War IV" today. Eliot Cohen, professor of Strategic
Studies at Johns Hopkins University, first proclaimed us there as the Afghan
War was underway, just a couple of months beyond September 11, 2001. Former
CIA Director James Woolsey swore we were there as the invasion of Iraq began
in 2003. The grandfather of the neocons, Norman Podhoretz, reaffirmed that
World War IV was the only war in town, the only thing that mattered, last
September in a gargantuan piece in Commentary magazine. Others regularly say
the same. It's become a commonplace trope of the imperial right. They even
have full-scale World War IV conferences (happily attended by Paul Wolfowitz
among others) and arguments over the term's exact nature abound. Woolsey,
who seems to be making a profession of roaming the country, preaching World
War IV to the unconverted, is already dubbing it "the longest war of the
21st century," or as Steve Clemons, President of the New American
Foundation, puts it, the new "Hundred Years' War."

Conceptually, it underlies the slightly toned down, but still distinctly
ramped up, description of our present state proclaimed from the planetary
rafters by the Bush administration -- that we are, as the White House was
already announcing before the end of 2001, "one hundred" days into a
multi-generational "global war on terrorism," now more familiarly (and
rather fondly) known among the cognoscenti by the awkward acronym GWOT.
Since WWIV and GWOT are the allied rubrics under which our world is being
reorganized, it's worth taking a look at them and how well or poorly they
describe that world.

Back in November 2001, introducing the term World War IV -- he now says
"tongue-in-cheek" -- Eliot Cohen wrote: "Political people often dislike
calling things by their names. Truth, particularly in wartime, is so
unpleasant that we drape it in a veil of evasions, and the right naming of
things is far from a simple task."

The right naming of things. As Cohen says, it's no small matter. And since
he wrote that passage, this administration of lexicographers has spent
startling amounts of time, dictionaries in hand, renaming and redefining
terms ranging from our country or nation (now "the homeland") to the
outsourcing of torture ("extraordinary rendition") -- always, not
surprisingly, to their advantage. Either in its baldest form as World War
IV, or as the slightly milder GWOT, this particular renaming of our moment
-- in a sense, the largest renaming of all -- has many advantages.

At the simplest level, each term provides an umbrella of meaning for what
otherwise might be experienced as remarkably disparate events. Both are
convenient catch-all terms that implicitly advance political programs and so
are remarkably useful. World War IV, in particular, places whatever is
happening now in an ancestry that descends from World War II or the "Good
War" (World War I is really just an add-on) and what's now called "the
greatest generation." As a name, it's also instantly alarming, fitting an
American sense that something cataclysmic, apocalyptic, and completely
singular happened to us on September 11, 2001 and that any response to it
should be in a similar cataclysmic, singular, and even apocalyptic vein.
(After all, a quarter of Americans in a recent Gallup poll claimed
themselves ready and willing over three years later to use nuclear weapons
to "attack terrorist facilities.")

With its Cold War overtones of nuclear annihilation, World War IV implies
that our very existence as a nation is in immediate danger and will be for
years, decades, perhaps a century or more to come; and yet it is also a
familiar, even reassuring image -- another global war in the triumphant
tradition of the three that preceded it. In this way, it can both scare
people and help make instant sense of, and lend instant meaning to, things
happening all over the world. After all, if this is a global war, then
events in Afghanistan and Spain, or Central Asia and Iraq don't really have
to be explained fully; they can just be subsumed in, and related to, the
larger World War, using the familiar war language of "fronts," "battles,"
and "theaters" in a far vaster struggle. ("But as I will attempt to show,"
writes Podhoretz typically, "we are only in the very early stages of what
promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the second front to have
been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of
a five-act play.") In fact, you can sweep anything -- Iraq, Iran, Lebanon,
Syria, North Korea -- into the same war-basket of meaning, just as our
President swept two bitter enemy nations (Iraq and Iran) and one completely
unrelated state (North Korea) into an "axis of evil" (which drew, obviously,
on the memory of World War II's Axis powers).

"World War IV" does many other useful things as well. It moves the goalposts
into the future, way off there in an endless generational struggle. In other
words, it conveniently excuses much that might otherwise seem baleful or
ridiculous in the present. And of course it disarms critics -- for who wants
to stand in the path of a necessary global war against your own
annihilation? As an image, it (and GWOT) undergird what, in the Cold War,
was called the national security state and now has morphed into an even more
all-encompassing homeland security state. The two terms make sense of
soaring Pentagon budgets, offshore mini-gulags, and so much else. It becomes
possible to write, as Earl Tilford, former director of research at the U.S.
Army's Strategic Studies Institute, did: "This is World War IV. Forget the
sleazy sickness of Abu Ghraib. Stop mouthing meaningless slogans like, ŒBush
lied, soldiers died.' Steel yourselves for a long, bloody fight. This is a
war we must not lose."

Think of WWIV or GWOT as a kind of "bulking up," a Rambo-esque urge to
hype-up the present. If you go back to the 1950s and catch your basic cowboy
film, those strong, silent heroes -- it doesn't matter whether you're
talking about John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or even Alan Ladd -- are, in
retrospect, strangely unimpressive looking. They don't seem either that
large or particularly strong. They usually were only modestly armed with a
six-gun or two. Most of the time, they didn't even shoot down that many
enemies. And yet, in those post-World War II/early Cold War days, they
looked strong enough to us.

After the American defeat in Vietnam, our heroes ­ from Rambo (Sylvester
Stallone) to Arnold Schwarzenegger -- began to bulk up, to wear their
muscles on their sleeves, so to speak, so that no one could mistake them for
anything but strong, silent types; and should you have made that mistake,
they and their slightly shrimpier peers were so completely over-armed that
you wouldn't have made it twice. In the post-Vietnam era, the United States
began to muscle up in a similar manner and that process ­ at first
psychologically defensive in nature -- has now, I suspect, neared its zenith
in the imagery of World War IV. It's the good fortune of the Bush
administration neocons that they have as an enemy the fanatics of al-Qaeda,
filled with their own global-war pretensions and hell-bent on their own
version of bulking up. (Let's not forget, by the way, that, given
globalization, both sides have probably seen and been affected by the same
bulked-up action and disaster movies with bulked-up special effects.)

But are we really in a multi-generational GWOT? Is this really World War IV?
Let's start with that number IV. For the image to work, you do have to
accept that the "Cold War" -- and the marriage of those two words always
indicated that as a war it would remain half-frozen because the full-fledged
hot version of itself could never be fought -- was indeed World War III,
which, as I've already indicated, it most distinctly wasn't. And if you move
beyond the phrase World War IV (which most people won't) into the elaborate
writings produced by its proponents, you find that what they really want to
do is cherry-pick the "best" of the two actual world wars -- their sense of
globalism and mission, the threat of mass death and the apocalyptic (the
Holocaust in particular) against which to mobilize, the raw badness of World
War II's enemies ­ and combine it with the "best" of the Cold War.

After all, World Wars I and II lasted inconveniently short periods of time
for our planners' purposes; 4 years in one case, 6 in the other (longer, if
in Asia you begin with the Japanese invasion of China). No
multi-generational struggle there, unfortunately, and it's the time they
want above all. Time without end and a war that can be put in the company of
World War II (but without anything like the equivalent in actual warfare).
What they would far prefer is the threat level of the World Wars combined
with the localized fighting of the Cold War era.

Of course, they want their enemies not only evil, but imposingly so ­ and,
as a result, scattered groups of terrorists and their supporters in World
War IV writings are regularly compared to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia,
the monster industrial states of the last century. Despite the constant
invocation of the Nazis, Roosevelt, Churchill, and so on, World War IV-ers
in the fine print can be almost defensive about the limited nature of World
War IV. ("Those parallels [with the Cold War] are: that it will last a very
long time -- decades; that it will sporadically involve the use of military
force, as did the Cold War in Korea for example; but that an important
component would be ideological.") What they are especially enamored with,
though, is the idea of a lengthy, life-and-death global struggle to victory,
or as James Woolsey puts it, "We helped win World War I, we prevailed, along
with Britain, in World War II, and we prevailed in the Cold War."

As people who like having a war on their hands, they have long been in the
process of both bulking up and stripping history down to one-size-fits-all,
streamlining it for action in support of a program of American global
domination that involves the further militarization of our society, remaking
the Middle East in their own image, controlling the oil lands (the so-called
"arc of instability") of the world, and, oh yes, of "democracy" of a sort.
Much of their program, as you'll notice if you read old documents from the
Project for the New American Century website, was already in place before
September 11, 2001 (just as the ill-named Patriot Act was brought into
existence so quickly because all sorts of already existing right-wing legal
hobbyhorses were simply swept into it).

As the names "World War IV" and "the Global War on Terror" imply, modestly
is ill-suited to the men who are promoting them. No John Waynes or Gary
Coopers in this crowd. From their think-tank or governmental perches, every
one of them is a Terminator with the intellectual muscles to show for it.
But if we were to put WWIV aside for a moment and, starting with September
11, 2001, took a calmer look at the world we find ourselves in, what would
we actually discover?

Re-examining the War We Have

September 11, 2001: On that morning over three years ago, three planes
smashed into American buildings (and one went down short of its target over
Pennsylvania). Of the three buildings, the Pentagon is in a sense now
largely forgotten, despite the memorial being built for it using private
funds. As a target, it had obviously been chosen to represent America's
global military power -- as the World Trade Center was to represent
financial power, as the downed plane was surely heading for some building
representing political power in Washington DC. And yet, as far as I know,
the spot where United Flight 93 ploughed into the Pentagon has no special
name and no particular mythology attached to it, although people died there
too.

In the Hollywood terrorist Kabuki that Osama bin Laden engineered and
Mohammed Atta carried out, what's remembered, of course, is not the smoking
Pentagon but the two towers in New York crumbling (and crumbling again and
yet again on television for all to see). The spot where they went down, with
the slaughter of thousands, was promptly dubbed Ground Zero, previously the
designation only for an atomic blast, and it was treated the way it looked
on television (and I might add, for those of us who lived in New York, the
way its ruins looked in person) -- as if an apocalyptic event worthy of the
World War-III-we-hadn't-had had actually taken place in our midst.

The brilliant aspect of the al-Qaeda assault on America was its ability to
combine such modest ingredients into a visual mega-package, a blockbuster of
a disaster: money in the range of $400,000-$500,000, flight-school training,
box cutters, mace cans, the element of surprise, and the hijacking of a
vehicle -- a very large vehicle well supplied with combustible fuel -- all
of the above to be directed at three symbolic targets on, as luck would have
it, a bright, beautiful, photogenic day, in the knowledge that (as
everywhere in our world) the cameras would be there, and on, and prepared to
mix-and-match scenes that had already been previewed in so many Hollywood
action thrillers in which terrorists attack, the towering inferno burns, the
atomic bomb goes off. And then there was just the blind, dumb good luck --
from the attackers' vantage point -- of having both buildings collapse in
full camera view in the midst of New York City. Throw in the fact that
nothing like this had happened in the continental United States since the
British burned down Washington in the War of 1812 and you have a truly
combustible mix of elements.

Not surprisingly, most Americans focused on the apocalyptic aspects of what
had happened, and not the paltry 19 men in stolen vehicles who carried out
the attack. Nothing proved more fortuitous for Bush administration planning
than that. (In 1993, after all, when one tower of the World Trade Center was
bombed and damaged but didn't come down, no one thought that we were in
World War IV, though the intent was hardly different.) Top officials in
Washington seized not the relatively modest scale of the preparations for
the attack, but on the apocalyptic look and feel of the event.

And yet -- though no one in the mainstream can say this any more -- as World
War IV or even a global "war" on terrorism, this is all absurd (however
useful it may have been in forwarding administration desires to sweep Saddam
Hussein from power, free the President from the checks and balances of our
system, curtail irritating civil liberties, and so on). Imagine, for
instance, if after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by a Serbian
terrorist (or, if you're a Serbian, nationalist) in August 1914, the
European powers had mobilized their vast, lumbering armies not against each
other but against anarchists, terrorists, and others threatening the crowned
heads and leaders of Europe -- and declared the world at war.

That the Bush administration did this certainly confirmed Osama bin Laden's
wildest dreams of al-Qaeda's global importance, in this sense, as Robert Jay
Lifton suggested in his book Superpower Syndrome, the most extreme American
and Islamist apocalyptic visions had soon partnered up and begun to dance
together. In reality, the al-Qaeda variety of militant, political Islamism
is (or at least then was) a paltry figure to fill the role of a Nazi-style
enemy (or to fit the term "Islamo-fascism"). Though in the writings of
neocons (like former CIA director Woolsey's) they are regularly compared to
Nazis, Osama bin Laden and his associates in 2001 bore a far greater
resemblance to a malign version of the Wizard of Oz behind that curtain.
After all, their organization was relatively small in numbers and controlled
not a single industrial plant, not a significant army (despite those
training camps and the armed fighters they organized for the Taliban), not a
weapon of major importance, and only, to some degree, a single state -- one
of the most impoverished on this planet, decimated by decades of occupation
and civil war: Talibanized Afghanistan.

The Afghan War: That leads us to the first war the Bush administration
launched -- against the Taliban (and al-Qaeda in its camps and caves). This
was a proxy war, similar to the one fought by the CIA in Laos in the 1960s
and early 1970s (or even various proxy wars fought in Central America in the
1980s). CIA agents toting suitcases stuffed with money hired local tribal
leaders (the Northern Alliance and various Afghan warlords) as their foot
soldiers, then supplied arms, overwhelming air power, some special forces
units on the ground, and in short order the ill-prepared, ill-armed Taliban
and al-Qaeda fighters were swept from the battlefield, and largely destroyed
as a fighting force.

Though presented in typical hyped-up form as a monumental victory and
monumental payback for September 11, this was a modest triumph indeed by
Cold War standards; a non-war when set against either World Wars I or II. It
wasn't even terribly successful. It didn't, after all, manage to capture or
destroy either the Taliban or al-Qaeda leadership. What it managed to do was
dismantle the most rickety, most regressive state on Earth and, as it
happened, replace it with one of the poorest and still most regressive
states on Earth whose only claim to fame is that it's fast becoming the
globe's most advanced narco-state. (In our press, Afghanistan is now
generally hailed as a "democracy" largely because, as in the period of the
Soviet occupation, greater rights are available, especially to women, in
Kabul and a few other cities.)

Even as a blow against "global terrorism," the Afghan War may have not been
especially effective ­ and here I'm not referring to the fact that Osama bin
Laden escaped capture. The irony is that the Taliban, left alone to fester
and implode, would have been one of the great anti-examples on Earth when it
came to al-Qaeda's medieval dream of a revived Islamic Caliphate. It was
such a bottom-of-the-barrel theocratic state that there would have been few
on this planet, Muslim or otherwise, yearning to emulate it. Swept away in
the manner it was, it actually freed al-Qaeda types around the world to
dream of glorious futures unimpeded by ugly reality.

The Iraq War: Saddam Hussein's Iraq, unconnected as we know now (as we could
have known back then) to the September 11th assaults or to al-Qaeda, was
swept conveniently into World War IV/GWOT in ways now familiar to many. If,
however, you think "empire" rather than "global war," our Iraq invasion and
occupation makes a lot more sense, falling as it then would into the
category of a frontier or colonial war. Like so many imperial wars before
it, it is being fought, at least in part, for the control of rich natural
resources meant either for the imperial homeland or at least as a way to
gain an advantage over other great powers of the moment.

Our now unending Iraq War has all the hallmarks of a nineteenth or early
twentieth century colonial war (even, in fact, of Great Britain's colonial
war in Iraq in the 1920s). There was the initial shock-and-awe attack,
representing the disparity between the weaponry and industrial organization
available to Western imperial states and to the native peoples they
conquered. There was the occupation with its glorious civilizational claims
and its overweening arrogance; there was the developing resistance, which
quickly took the form of a guerrilla war and shocked the occupying great
power with its ferocity, tenacity, cruelty, and success against what looked
like overwhelming odds; there was the ever more brutal colonial response,
the obvious racism, the attempts to create malleable "native" regimes, and
so on. None of this had then, or has now, anything to do with the twentieth
century's global wars as we understand them.

Terrorism: In the meantime, since September 11, 2001, in Spain (the Madrid
railroad bombings, 191 dead), Turkey (synagogue and bank bombings, 29 dead),
Lebanon (the Hariri assassination, at least fifteen dead), Morocco (Jewish
community center, Spanish restaurant and social club, hotel, and the Belgian
consulate, 40 dead), Afghanistan (recent car bombings, 12 dead), Tunisia
(synagogue, 19 people dead),Bali (nightclub bombings, 202 dead), Thailand
(car bombing, 5 dead), Saudi Arabia (at least 35 dead in multiple attacks on
housing projects and an oil facility), Pakistan (12 dead), Russia (330 dead
in Beslan school attack, 89 on two sabotaged jetliners, and 5 more in a
bombing near Kizlyar), the Philippines (coordinated bomb attacks, 11 dead),
and a relative handful of other places, there have been destructive
terrorist attacks, each bloody and horrific in itself, many of them
unconnected or barely connected, and none, except the Spanish one briefly,
crippling to any aspect of the modern world as we know it. While several
hundred people died in Spain and in Bali, overall the casualty figures --
for a purported world or global war on and of terrorism seem modest. Set any
of this against the Holocaust, or Hiroshima, or D-Day, or the rape of
Nanking, or the siege of Leningrad, or the taking of Berlin, or the battles
of Ypres or the Marne in World War I, or any of the grim battles of the
Korean War, and you can see how relatively un-warlike all this really is.

Scorecard: One terrifying, massively destructive terrorist attack; one small
proxy war (very low-level guerilla attacks still ongoing); one
colonial-style war and occupation (ongoing); scattered terror attacks
(ongoing). And a steady drumbeat of very heated rhetoric.

Weapons of Mass Destruction: What gives World War IV its very partial sense
of reality isn't what's happening now (despite the fierceness of the Iraq
War) or even what happened on September 11, 2001, but a set of frightening
future possibilities, all of which rest on the present existence of vast
arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, especially of nuclear weapons. Tens
of thousands of them have been built and still reside on this Earth, and
more are clearly coming. At least some of them, especially in the former
Soviet Union and also in Pakistan are now held, politely put, under less
than reliable circumstances. (But let's remember as well that the anthrax in
the unsolved and now largely forgotten anthrax mail attacks of 2001 -- the
only weapon of mass destruction ever used on American soil, if you ignore
atomic testing -- almost surely dropped out of the American Cold War bio-war
labs, not the Soviet ones.)

It's now clear that, ever since the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
there has been a brake of some kind -- one that seems to have preceded the
concept of "deterrence" into existence -- on nuclear powers using the
nuclear weapons they have. This was the deepest reality of the Cold War and
remains so -- as in the Indian-Pakistani nuclear stand-off not so many years
back -- in our present world (as it undoubtedly will even if North Korea
already has the bomb and Iran gets it). But it's a brake that works only for
states. There is no reason to believe that terrorist groups which might
someday get their hands on such weapons would be similarly constrained. In
fact, car- and airplane-suicide bombers speak grimly to this reality; as
does the fact that the only WMD ever in the hands of terrorists or cult
groups (as far as we know) has been used -- in those anthrax mailings of
2001 but also in the Aum Shinrikyo sarin-gassing of the Tokyo subway system
back in 1995.

This horrific possibility -- in the future, not the present -- is, I
suspect, what actually gives World War IV its punch, what makes it seem
faintly plausible and relatively small groups of terrorists so dangerous; or
rather, this, plus Bush administration global policies that involve the
profligate threat of and use of military force in ways sure to breed further
terrorism and terrorists (while offering some of them on-the-spot training
in Iraq), and that have reaffirmed nuclear weapons as the global currency of
ultimate power. In this sense, World War IV and GWOT may be the policy
equivalents of self-fulfilling dreams.

What Could or Should Be Done?

Police Work: It's worth recalling that another post-9/11 path was suggested
in the wake of the suicide attacks on America. When you read the World War
IV literature what you quickly notice is that these men, their eyes focused
on the crumbling towers (and on a prior policy wish-list), claimed the
moment to be transformative and undoubtedly believed themselves (like our
initially panicked President) in a World-War-IV-type situation. There was,
however, another group which looked at the same situation, considered the
horror, but focused, both more modestly and, as it turns out, more
realistically, not so much on the crumbling towers as on the small set of
men and the obviously audacious yet circumscribed operation that made those
towers crumble. What they saw, reasonably enough, was a massive act of
terror and murder, both an international crime and an armed act of
propaganda, but not an act of war à la, say, Pearl Harbor.

As the Bush administration and its neocon allies called for a global
response that rose to the level of apocalyptic battle, small groups of legal
types and liberals called for a response keyed to those 19 men and the
dangerous but modest-sized organization behind them. They claimed
"terrorism" was a method of asymmetric warfare, not an enemy; that our
actual enemy, while determined, fanatical, and murderous was not the
equivalent of a state and that what was at stake was not "war" at all; so
they called, in one fashion or another, for internationally cooperative
police work to bring the criminals and murderers to justice and to dismantle
their organization or organizations. This approach was instantly and roundly
dismissed -- trashed, you might say -- by the administration and its various
acolytes and has now largely fled the national mind.

Law professor Anne-Marie Slaughter was not atypical. On September 16, at a
time when the Bush administration was already making plans to take out Iraq
as well as Afghanistan, she wrote a piece for the Washington Post (A
Defining Moment in the Parsing of War) in which she reminded all and sundry,
in part, that:

    "From a legal perspective, the difference between calling what has
happened war and calling it terrorism is considerable. It is the difference
between military conflict and criminal justice (of the sort meted out just
months ago on the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993). It
is the difference between bombing a state and punishing an individual or
several individuals. And it should mean the difference between acting
together with other nations and going it alone.

    "International law has a framework for hunting down hijackers and
terrorists. More than 150 states have signed treaties designed to prevent
terror in the skies. They have pledged to make hijacking a criminal offense
and either to prosecute or extradite hijackers found within their
territories. The U.N. General Assembly has also condemned terrorism and
upheld the obligation to prosecute all terrorists."

Such thoughts were dismissed as typical of liberals, an ill-equipped and
unwarlike crowd, scared to flex anyone's muscles, and obviously incompetent
to respond to such an attack on "the homeland." Four years later, however,
with Iraq firmly, even catastrophically, ensconced as what the President now
likes to call "the central theater in the war on terrorism" -- as, that is,
a terrorism-creation machine as well as a bottomless pit for the American
military -- things look a bit different. Our military claims to have swept
up thousands of low-level al-Qaeda (and Taliban) members in their literal
"war" on terrorism and many of them ended up either in Guantanamo or at
various secret or semi-secret detention centers around the world; but when
it came to significant figures in the terror organization, the actual "war"
on terrorists has turned out to be a matter of -- as Anne-Marie Slaughter
and others suspected back then -- hard-won law enforcement and police work
by various combinations of national police forces around the world.

In fact, as research for this piece by the Center on Law and Security at NYU
School of Law suggests, just about all the major captures of significant
al-Qaeda figures (or figures claimed to be significant) have been made not
by the American military (a blunt instrument indeed when it came to the
capture of men like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, or countless others) but by law enforcement. Here is a listing
of a number of the alleged terrorist figures, large and small, who were
captured in the post-9/11 years (arranged by name, place and time of
apprehension, whom apprehended by [LA stands for "Local Authorities"], and
current custody if known):

John Walker Lindh, Afghanistan 12/2001, US, US
Yasser Hamdi, Afghanistan, 12/2001, US, US
Mullah Fazel Mazloom, Afghanistan, Northern Alliance, US
Mullah Abdul Wakil Muttawakil, Afghanistan 2/2002
Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, Afghanistan, US
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Pakistan 3/2003, US, US
Ramzi Binalshibh, Pakistan 9/2002, Local Authorities (LA)
Abu Zubaydah, Pakistan 3/2002, Joint Pakistani police, FBI, and CIA team, US
Yassir al-Jazeeri, Pakistan 3/2003, LA
Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi, Pakistan/Afghanistan, LA
James Ujaama, US 7/2002, LA, US
Richard Reid "shoe bomber," US 12/2001, LA, US
Jose Padilla, US 5/2002, LA, US
Zacarias Moussaoui, US 8/2001, LA, US
Enaam M. Arnaout, US 4/2002, LA
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Undisclosed, LA, US
Mohammed Haydar Zammar, Morocco, LA, Syria
Abu Zubair al-Haili, Morocco
Ali Abdul Rahman al-Ghamdi, Saudi Arabia 2003, LA (surrendered himself)
Ahmed Ibrahim Bilal, Malaysia, LA
Abu Anas Al-Liby, Sudan 3/2002, LA, Sudan
Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Mauritania, LA, US
Omar al-Faruq, Indonesia 6/2002, LA, US
Imam Samudra, Indonesia 11/2002, LA, Indonesia
Mohsen F, Kuwait 11/2002, LA
Najib Chaib-Mohamed, Spain 1/2002, LA, Spain
Atmane Resali, Spain 1/2002, LA, Spain
Ghasoub al-Abrash al-Ghalyoun, Spain, LA, Spain
Abu Talha, Spain, LA, Spain
Bassan Dalati Satut, Spain, LA, Spain
Mounir al-Motassadek, Germany 11/2002, LA, Germany
Ibrahim Mohammed K, Germany 2005, LA, German
Yasser Abu S, Germany 2005, LA, German
Ahmed Ellattah, Belgium 2002, LA
Tarek Maaroufi, Belgium, LA
Nizar Trabelsi, Belgium
Djamel Beghal, UAE, LA, France
Kamel Daoudi, France, LA, France
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Iran 7/2003, LA, Unknown (possibly Iran after Kuwait
refused to take him)

As you'll note, with few exceptions, these men were taken by "local
authorities." While the Bush administration has used our military to turn
Iraq into a terrorist hot spot in the Middle East, police forces around the
world have taken terrorists down. This is one reality that lies behind the
"global war on terrorism." Had the post-9/11 focus been on international
police work (backed up by military force), we might be in a far different
situation today.

Weapons of Mass Destruction and Disarmament: Imagine, in terms of the real
dangers of this Earth, if the United States had invested even a fraction of
those endless billions of dollars dropped into the Iraqi sinkhole into
nailing down the semi-loose WMD and nuclear arsenals of this world. In other
words, if we had put our money and energy into the serious, hard-working,
less than glorious task of denying future terrorists their most obvious
sources of annihilating weaponry (including the various makings for
so-called dirty bombs) and into real security measures at ports, chemical
plants, nuclear plants, and the like, the possibility for World War IV-style
apocalyptic scenarios would have dropped precipitously. What if, instead of
proclaiming nuclear weapons bad and undesirable only if states we dislike
try to create them, working to expand and improve our own nuclear arsenal
while ignoring the arsenals of allies, and finally launching
counter-proliferation wars as a means of "disarmament," we had led the way
in putting the possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical arsenals,
including our own, on the table? What if we had worked at creating a
policing system for WMD as fierce as any policing system for terror -- not
so illogical since these are the real terror weapons on our planet? Had we
really declared a global "war" on terror, we would certainly have had to
make the complex and difficult questions of dismantling all such arsenals
its centerpiece and so, instead of ensuring that WMD would be the preferred
currency of power for the foreseeable future, we might well have begun to
hack out new pathways for the world.

Of course, the mind-set that goes with World War IV and GWOT ensures that
nothing complex and untelegenic, nothing that smacks of our real,
complicated world but doesn't have the clean, Manichaean feel of a global
crusade to it, is possible. If, on our proliferating planet, we end up, one
of these days, with an actual apocalyptic scenario on our hands, it will be
too late to thank the GWOT intellectuals, who took a terrible situation and
are managing to turn it into the Schwarzenegger movie from Hell.

[Special research thanks go to Omer Z. Bekerman of the Center on Law and
Security at the NYU School of Law and Nick Turse of Tomdispatch.]

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular
antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire
Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American
triumphalism in the Cold War.

Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt
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