"Are We Safer?" (David Cole, NYRB, March 9, 2006 issue)

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David Cole reviews

The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right
by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon

According to the Bush administration's Web site lifeandliberty.gov, we are "winning the war on terrorism with unrelenting focus and unprecedented cooperation." The US government has captured or killed some three thousand al-Qaeda "operatives," including two thirds of its leadership. Among those captured is the alleged mastermind of September 11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, from whom the government reportedly obtained substantial intelligence, if only after the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture. The Bush administration says it has disrupted terrorist plots throughout the world—the Web site claims 150, although President Bush in a speech in October 2005 claimed only ten. The government has increased security at the borders and airports. The Justice Department has prosecuted more than four hundred people in "terrorism-related investigations" since September 11, and it has, according to the Web site, obtained convictions or guilty pleas in more than two hundred of these cases. It claims to have broken up terrorist cells in Buffalo, Detroit, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, and northern Virginia. And over 515 foreign nationals linked to the investigation of September 11 have been deported. Most important for Americans, there has not been another terrorist attack on US soil in the more than four years since September 11.

Of course, President Bush also famously proclaimed victory in Iraq, aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. (Shortly thereafter, he announced that "we found the weapons of mass destruction.") Since then, more than two thousand Americans and probably ten times as many Iraqis have died in Iraq, and we still haven't found any weapons of mass destruction. So victory proclamations from this administration deserve a strong dose of skepticism.

How does one measure victory in the "global war on terrorism"? In April 2004, the State Department reported that terrorist incidents throughout the world had dropped in the previous year, a fact Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage promptly cited as "clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight" against terrorism. Two months later, a chagrined Colin Powell acknowledged that the department had miscounted, and that in fact terrorism worldwide had increased—where the initial report stated that the number of injuries resulting from international terrorist incidents had fallen from 2,013 in 2002 to 1,593 in 2003, the corrected report stated that in fact terrorist-related injuries had risen to 3,646. In 2005, the State Department eliminated numbers from its annual terrorism report, saying they were too difficult to track accurately, but soon thereafter a leak suggested another reason for the omission—government analysts had found that terrorist incidents worldwide had jumped threefold from 2003 levels, with 651 attacks in 2004 resulting in 1,907 deaths. So much for progress in the global war on terror.

President Bush is fond of repeating, "We are fighting them over there so that we won't have to fight them here at home." As a slogan, this may be good politics. But as a counterterrorism strategy, it appears to be a disaster. Fighting them "over there" has since 2003 meant committing over one hundred thousand troops, hundreds of billions of dollars, and thousands of lives to a conflict in Iraq whose only clear connection to the "war on terror" has been its encouragement of terrorism. The US attack on Iraq has created the world's principal breeding and training ground for anti-American terrorists. Many highly informed commentators have argued that the war in Iraq, based at best on faulty intelligence and at worst on outright lies, was a major diversion from the real enemy—al-Qaeda and the terrorists loosely linked with it, or inspired by it—and that the war with Iraq has therefore made us less secure.

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