by Matthew Chavez
Daily Lobo columnist
With the arrest of seven al-Qaida
suspects in Miami last week
and National Public Radio's revelation
Monday that the CIA has
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disbanded the unit assigned to
hunting Osama bin Laden and
his top associates, serious questions
have re-emerged about the
Bush administration's approach to
stifling the growing threat of nonstate
terrorism.
Is Washington doing all it can
to protect the United States? Have
the administration's policies even
begun to turn the tide toward
peace and security? It's a grim
sign when the highest-level foreign
policy leaders outside of the
administration answer decisively
"no" to this important question. In
a groundbreaking study published
in the nation's preeminent foreign
affairs magazine, Foreign Policy,
100 expert foreign policy makers
upend the administration's rosy
claims of success in the war on
terrorism. Eighty-four percent of
the bipartisan sample of leaders
disagree with the Bush administration's
persistent claim that it
is winning the war on terrorism.
Even among the conservative respondents,
only 23 percent agree
with the administration's claims
of success.
"Foreign policy experts have
never been in so much agreement
about an administration's performance
abroad," the president of
the Council on Foreign Relations
remarked in the article introducing
the study's findings.
These conclusions would be
unsurprising if they were the
product of progressive academia,
but, to the contrary, this study
surveys an elite cross-section of
the U.S. foreign policy establishment,
including retired military
commanders, former secretaries
of state and former national
security advisors - "the very
people who have run America's
national security apparatus over
the past half century," as the authors
put it.
The study's unsettling findings
further corroborate an already conclusive
body of evidence that the
Bush administration, with every
over-reactive and opportunistic
counterterrorism policy it has introduced
in the last six years, has
systematically increased the threat
posed by the al-Qaida movement.
Only one year ago, the State Department
revealed in its report,
"Patterns of Global Terrorism,"
that international terrorist attacks
had tripled in 2004, and this was
after reaching a 20-year high in
2003 - figures met with such embarrassment
in Washington that a
subsequent report was suppressed.
The Foreign Policy study leaves
little doubt about Bush's role in escalating
the crisis: Large majorities
of respondents credit key administration
policies with increasing the
threat of international terrorism.
The Iraq war ranks the highest
- 87 percent - in its negative impact
on counterterrorism efforts,
and Guantanamo, where it was
revealed Monday that less than 10
percent of the prisoners are "real
cases," ranks second. This concurs
with what counterterrorism analysts
have consistently argued: The
size and stealth of our counterterrorism
bureaucracy matters little
if our corrupt and interventionist
foreign policy persists as terrorism's
primary catalyst. To quote
the former head of the CIA's nowdisbanded
Osama bin Laden unit,
al-Qaida's biggest fear is that the United States will "change some of
the policies that have been in place
for the last 20 years."
Regrettably, the Bush administration
is doing little to make that
fear a reality - the course and consistency
of its policies in the Middle
East and elsewhere suggest the
batch of politicians and faux-analysts
running the executive branch
is neither capable of acknowledging
errors nor learning from them.
Consider Bush's reaction to Israel's
reinvasion of the Gaza Strip
last week: When the Israeli government
used American military
hardware to bomb Gaza's only
power plant, Bush was spoon-fed
an opportunity to demonstrate
U.S. solidarity with civilian victims
of an operation the New York
Times headlines aptly described as
a squeezing vice. But he refused to
condemn what is the clearest textbook
example of a war crime in the
recent history of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Doing so would
have helped reverse the belief that
Israeli crimes are an extension of
U.S. regional ambitions.
But one cannot expect Bush to
see the connections. Even the leaders
Foreign Policy surveyed fail to
connect the dots: Opposition to
U.S. support for the Israeli occupation
is ranked third on the study's
list of factors that motivate global
terrorists, but paradoxically only 7
percent of respondents regard Israeli-
Palestinian peace as a critical
element in countering terrorism.
