BOUNDING THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERRORISM

Jeffrey Record

December 2003
ii

*****

The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not 

necessarily refl ect the offi cial policy or position of the Department of the Army, the 

Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. This report is cleared for public 

release; distribution is unlimited.

*****

Comments pertaining to this report are invited and should be forwarded 

to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 122 Forbes 

Ave, Carlisle, PA 17013-5244. Copies of this report may be obtained from the 

Publications Offi ce by calling (717) 245-4133, FAX (717) 245-3820, or by e-mail at 

Rita.Rummel@carlisle.army.mil

*****

All Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) monographs are available on the SSI 

Homepage for electronic dissemination. SSI’s Homepage address is: http://

www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/

*****

The Strategic Studies Institute publishes a monthly e-mail newsletter to 

update the national security community on the research of our analysts, recent 

and forthcoming publications, and upcoming conferences sponsored by the 

Institute. Each newsletter also provides a strategic commentary by one of our 

research analysts. If you are interested in receiving this newsletter, please let us 

know by e-mail at outreach@carlisle.army.mil or by calling (717) 245-3133.

ISBN 1-58487-146-6
iii

FOREWORD

The United States is now in the third year of the global war 

on terrorism. That war began as a fi ght against the organization 

that perpetrated the heinous attacks of September 11, 2001, but 

soon became a much more ambitious enterprise, encompassing, 

among other things, an invasion and occupation of Iraq. As part 

of the war on terrorism, the United States has committed not only 

to ridding the world of terrorism as a means of violence but also to 

transforming Iraq into a prosperous democratic beacon for the rest 

of the autocratically ruled and economically stagnant Middle East to 

follow. 

Dr. Jeffrey Record examines three features of the war on terrorism 

as currently defi ned and conducted: (1) the administration’s 

postulation of the terrorist threat, (2) the scope and feasibility 

of U.S. war aims, and (3) the war’s political, fi scal, and military 

sustainability. He fi nds that the war on terrorism—as opposed to 

the campaign against al-Qaeda—lacks strategic clarity, embraces 

unrealistic objectives, and may not be sustainable over the long haul. 

He calls for down-sizing the scope of the war on terrorism to refl ect 

concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American military 

power.

The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to offer this monograph 

as a contribution to the national security debate over the aims and 

course of the war on terrorism.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

JEFFREY RECORD joined the Strategic Studies Institute in 

August 2003 as Visiting Research Professor. He is a professor in 

the Department of Strategy and International Security at the US 

Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the 

author of six books and a dozen monographs, including: Making 

War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force 

from Korea to Kosovo; Revising US Military Strategy: Tailoring Means 

to Ends; Beyond Military Reform; Hollow Victory, A Contrary View of 

the Gulf War; The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam; and Failed 

States and Casualty Phobia, Implications for U.S. Force Structure and 

Technology Choices. Dr. Record has served as Assistant Province 

Advisor in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War, Rockefeller 

Younger Scholar on the Brookings Institution’s Defense Analysis 

Staff, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, 

the Hudson Institute, and the BDM International Corporation. He 

also has extensive Capitol Hill experience, serving as Legislative 

Assistant for National Security Affairs to Senators Sam Nunn and 

Lloyd Bentsen, and later as a Professional Staff Member of the Senate 

Armed Services Committee. Dr. Record received his Doctorate at the 

Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
v

SUMMARY

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorist attacks 

on the United States, the U.S. Government declared a global war on 

terrorism (GWOT). The nature and parameters of that war, however, 

remain frustratingly unclear. The administration has postulated a 

multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states; weapons of mass 

destruction (WMD) proliferators; terrorist organizations of global, 

regional, and national scope; and terrorism itself. It also seems to 

have confl ated them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has 

subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in 

foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of 

open-ended and gratuitous confl ict with states and nonstate entities 

that pose no serious threat to the United States.

Of particular concern has been the confl ation of al-Qaeda and 

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. 

This was a strategic error of the fi rst order because it ignored 

critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and 

susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has 

been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred 

Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic 

terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing 

the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable 

al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT, but 

rather a detour from it.

Additionally, most of the GWOT’s declared objectives, which 

include the destruction of al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorist 

organizations, the transformation of Iraq into a prosperous, stable 

democracy, the democratization of the rest of the autocratic Middle 

East, the eradication of terrorism as a means of irregular warfare, 

and the (forcible, if necessary) termination of WMD proliferation to 

real and potential enemies worldwide, are unrealistic and condemn 

the United States to a hopeless quest for absolute security. As 

such, the GWOT’s goals are also politically, fi scally, and militarily 

unsustainable.

Accordingly, the GWOT must be recalibrated to conform to 

concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American power. 
vi

The specifi c measures required include deconfl ation of the threat; 

substitution of credible deterrence for preventive war as the primary 

vehicle for dealing with rogue states seeking WMD; refocus of the 

GWOT fi rst and foremost on al-Qaeda, its allies, and homeland 

security; preparation to settle in Iraq for stability over democracy (if 

the choice is forced upon us) and for international rather than U.S. 

responsibility for Iraq’s future; and fi nally, a reassessment of U.S. 

military force levels, especially ground force levels.

The GWOT as it has so far been defi ned and conducted is 

strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, 

and threatens to dissipate scarce U.S. military and other means over 

too many ends. It violates the fundamental strategic principles of 

discrimination and concentration.
1

BOUNDING THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERRORISM

INTRODUCTION

The great Prussian philosopher of war, Carl von Clausewitz, 

believed that the “fi rst, the supreme, most far-reaching act of 

judgment that the statesman and the commander have to make is 

to establish the kind of war on which they are embarking, neither 

mistaking it for, not trying to turn it into, something that is alien to 

its true nature. This is the fi rst of all strategic questions and the most 

comprehensive.”1

In the wake of the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 

2001, on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the 

President declared a “war against terrorism of global reach.” 

Subsequently and repeatedly, he and other administration 

offi cials used the terms “global war on terrorism,” “war on global 

terrorism,” “war on terrorism,” “war on terror,” and “battle against 

international terrorism.” The “global war on terrorism,” complete 

with its acronym, GWOT, soon became the most often used term.

The nature and parameters of the GWOT, however, remain 

frustratingly unclear. The administration has postulated a 

multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states, weapons of mass 

destruction (WMD) proliferators, terrorist organizations, and 

terrorism itself. It has also, at least for the purposes of mobilizing and 

sustaining domestic political support for the war on Iraq and other 

potential preventive military actions, confl ated them as a general, 

undifferentiated threat. In so doing, the administration has arguably 

subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it seeks in foreign 

policy and may have set the United States on a path of open-ended 

and unnecessary confl ict with states and nonstate entities that pose 

no direct or imminent threat to the United States.

Sound strategy mandates threat discrimination and reasonable 

harmonization of ends and means. The GWOT falls short on both 

counts. Indeed, it may be misleading to cast the GWOT as a war; 

the military’s role in the GWOT is still a work in progress, and the 

military’s “comfort level” with it is any event problematic. Moreover, 

to the extent that the GWOT is directed at the phenomenon of 

terrorism, as opposed to fl esh-and-blood terrorist organizations, 
2

it sets itself up for strategic failure. Terrorism is a recourse of the 

politically desperate and militarily helpless, and, as such, it is 

hardly going to disappear. The challenge of grasping the nature and 

parameters of the GWOT is certainly not eased by the absence of a 

commonly accepted defi nition of terrorism or by the depiction of 

the GWOT as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, “us” 

versus “them.”

This monograph examines the GWOT from three vantage points: 

(1) threat postulation, (2) the scope and feasibility of its objectives, 

and (3) its political, fi scal, and military sustainability. What are the 

postulated threats and their relation to one another, and have they 

been soundly prioritized? What are the aims of the GWOT and how 

and by what means, military and other, are they to be achieved? Are 

political ends and the military component of the means in reasonable 

harmony, or has the United States bitten off more than it can chew? 

Is the GWOT politically sustainable at home and abroad, and if not, 

should the GWOT’s ambitious goals be adjusted to conform to the 

limits of political tolerance and U.S. military power?

WAR AND TERRORISM

Before turning to these matters, however, we must address two 

issues that continue to impede understanding of the GWOT: its 

incomplete characterization as a war, and the absence of an agreed 

upon defi nition of terrorism.

Is the GWOT a War?

American political discourse over the past several decades 

has embraced “war” as a metaphor for dealing with all kinds of 

“enemies,” domestic and foreign. One cannot, it seems, be serious 

about dealing with this or that problem short of making “war” on 

it. Political administrations accordingly have declared “war” on 

poverty, illiteracy, crime, drugs--and now terrorism. Even political 

campaign headquarters have “war rooms,” and “war” is a term used 

increasingly to describe bitter partisan disputes on Capitol Hill. 

“War” is perhaps the most over-used metaphor in America.

Traditionally, however, war has involved military operations 
3

between states or between a state and an insurgent enemy for 

ultimate control of that state. In both cases the primary medium for 

war has been combat between fi elded military forces, be they regular 

(state) or irregular (nonstate) forces. Yet terrorist organizations do 

not fi eld military forces as such and, in the case of al-Qaeda and its 

associated partners, are trans-state organizations that are pursuing 

nonterritorial ends. As such, and given their secretive, cellular, 

dispersed, and decentralized “order of battle,” they are not subject 

to conventional military destruction.

Indeed, the key to their defeat lies in the realms of intelligence 

and police work, with military forces playing an important but 

nonetheless supporting role. Beyond the military destruction 

of al-Qaeda’s training and planning base in Afghanistan, good 

intelligence--and luck--has formed the basis of virtually every 

other U.S. success against al-Qaeda. Intelligence-based arrests and 

assassinations, not divisions destroyed or ships sunk, are the cutting 

edge of successful counterterrorism. If there is an analogy for the 

GWOT, it is the international war on illicit narcotics.

But these “wars” on terrorism and drugs are not really wars as 

most Americans, including the professional military, have come to 

understand the meaning of the term since the United States became 

a world power. By traditional standards of what constitutes a war, 

the GWOT, like the drug war, qualifi es, in so far as it encompasses 

the military’s participation, as a “military operation other than 

war,” or MOOTW (to employ an offi cially discarded but very useful 

term.) To be sure, the GWOT has so far encompassed two major 

military campaigns, in Afghanistan and Iraq, but those campaigns 

were part of a much broader grand strategy and struggle that has 

mobilized all elements of national power as well as the services of 

many other countries. The proper analogy here may be the Cold 

War, a much larger and longer contest than the occasional hot 

wars--e.g., the Korean and Vietnam confl icts--that were waged on 

its behalf. Moreover, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM saddled the U.S. 

armed forces, especially the U.S. Army, with costly and open-ended 

imperial policing and nation-building responsibilities outside the 

professional military’s traditional mission portfolio. The major 

combat operational phase of the war against Iraq unexpectedly and 

seamlessly morphed into an ongoing insurgent phase for which 
4

most U.S. ground combat forces are not properly trained.

Traditionally, most wars, especially those waged in the European 

tradition, have also had clear beginnings and endings. On a certain 

day hostilities were declared or initiated, and on another certain day 

one side agreed to stop fi ghting. But the line between war and peace 

was never as clear in the non-European world, and has been steadily 

blurring for the United States since the end of the Cold War in part 

because it is diffi cult to obtain conclusive military victories against 

irregular enemies who refuse to quit precisely because they cannot 

be decisively defeated. Thus even though the Taliban and Saddam 

Hussein regimes were militarily smashed, combat continues, even 

escalates, in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Traditional wars also provided clear standards of measuring 

success in the form of territory gained and enemy forces destroyed 

or otherwise removed from combat. But these standards were always 

of limited utility against irregular enemies that fought to different 

standards of success, and they are of practically no use in gauging 

success against a terrorist threat like al-Qaeda. Terrorism expert 

Bruce Hoffman notes that terrorists “do not function in the open 

as armed units, generally do not attempt to seize or hold territory, 

deliberately avoid engaging enemy military forces in combat 

and rarely exercise any direct control or sovereignty over either 

territory or population.”2 Additionally, al-Qaeda has demonstrated 

impressive regenerative powers, in part because, as Daniel Byman 

points out, it is:

not just a distinct terrorist organization: it is a movement that 

seeks to inspire and coordinate other groups and individuals. 

Even if Al-Qaeda is taking losses beyond its ability to recuperate, 

there is still a much broader Islamist movement that is hostile to 

the United States, seeks to overthrow U.S. allies and is committed 

to mass casualty terrorist violence. . . . The conceptual key is this: 

Al-Qaeda is not a single terrorist group but a global insurgency.3

Against such an enemy, tallies of dead and captured are dubious, 

although the capture of al-Qaeda leaders contributes to success by 

removing dangerous operatives from circulation and providing 

new sources of intelligence on al-Qaeda. The analogy here is the 

failure of the body-count standard in Vietnam. The United States 
5

confronted in the Vietnamese Communists, as in the fi ght against alQaeda, an enemy of extraordinary tenacity and discipline that was 

more than capable of replacing the great losses infl icted by the U.S. 

forces. (A strategy of attrition, which the United States pursued in 

Vietnam, is problematic against an enemy able to control his losses 

by retaining the tactical and operational initiative. In the Vietnam 

War, Communist forces initiated 75-80 percent of all fi refi ghts and 

generally did not hesitate to break off action when losses approached 

the unacceptable.4)

The ultimate measure of success in the GWOT will be diminished 

incidence and scope of terrorist attacks--i.e., nonoccurring events. 

From an analytical standpoint, however, this is an unsatisfactory 

measure of success. As in the case of gauging the success of 

deterrence, which also rests on nonevents, there is no way to prove a 

cause and effect relationship. Moreover, even manifestly disruptive 

counterterrorist operations can have self-defeating unintended 

consequences. In the wake of the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein 

regime in Iraq, which the administration hailed as a great victory in 

the GWOT, the International Institute for Strategic Studies issued 

a report concluding that, notwithstanding al-Qaeda’s loss of its 

infrastructure in Afghanistan and the killing or capture of perhaps 

one-third of its leadership, al-Qaeda is “now reconstituted and 

doing business in a somewhat different manner, but more insidious 

and just as dangerous as in its pre-11 September incarnation.” More 

insidious because the West’s “counter-terrorism effort . . . perversely 

impelled an already highly decentralized and elusive transnational 

terrorist network to become even harder to identify and neutralize.” 

Among other things, the destruction of its camps in Afghanistan 

meant that al-Qaeda “no longer concentrated its forces in clusters 

discernible and targetable from the air,” which in turn meant that 

the “lion’s share of the counter-terrorism burden rested on law 

enforcement and intelligence agencies.”5

It should be noted that the President, though apparently wedded 

to the use of the term “war,” clearly recognizes that the GWOT is “a 

new kind of war fought by a new kind of enemy,”6 a statement that 

echoed the Secretary of Defense’s observation just weeks after the 

9/11 attacks, that “this will be a war like none other our nation has 

faced. . . . Our opponent is a global network of terrorist organizations 
6

and their state sponsors. . . . Even the vocabulary of this war will be 

different.”7

In sum, the GWOT contains elements of war and nonwar. It is 

an orchestrated mélange of combat operations, military operations 

other than war, and operations conducted by various nonmilitary 

departments of government. Colin Gray observes:

The confl ict with global terrorism . . . bears more resemblance to a 

protracted hunt than it does to what most people understandably 

call a war. The cutting edge of the counterrorist effort is likely to be 

intelligence, especially multinational cooperation on intelligence, 

and muscular policework. All of which is fairly plausible, but it is 

by no means certain that U.S. national security strategy reduces to 

chasing terrorists of no fi xed abode. Terrorists and their backers 

do provide some targets for military action, and the jury will long 

be out on just how signifi cant a challenge they pose to American 

vital interests, including the world order of which the United 

States is the principal guardian.8

What Is Terrorism?

Sound strategy requires a clear defi nition of the enemy. The 

GWOT, however, is a war on something whose defi nition is mired 

in a semantic swamp. Even inside the U.S. Government, different 

departments and agencies use different defi nitions refl ecting different 

professional perspectives on the subject.9 A 1988 study counted 109 

defi nitions of terrorism that covered a total of 22 different defi nitional 

elements.10 Terrorism expert Walter Laqueur also has counted over 

100 defi nitions and concludes that the “only general characteristic 

generally agreed upon is that terrorism involves violence and the 

threat of violence.”11 Yet terrorism is hardly the only enterprise 

involving violence and the threat of violence. So does war, coercive 

diplomacy, and barroom brawls.

The current U.S. national security strategy defi nes terrorism 

as simply “premeditated, politically motivated violence against 

innocents.”12 This defi nition, however, begs the question of who 

is innocent and by what standards is innocence determined. The 

U.S. fi rebombing of Japanese cities in 1945 certainly terrifi ed their 

inhabitants, many of whom were women and children who had 
7

nothing to do with Japan’s war effort. And what about threatened 

as opposed to actual violence? Is not the inducement of fear a major 

object of terrorism, and is not threatened action a way of inducing 

fear? Is not the very threat of terrorist attack terrorism?

The Defense Department offi cially defi nes terrorism as the 

“calculated use of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to 

coerce or intimidate governments or societies in pursuit of goals 

that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”13 The U.S. 

National Strategy for Combating Terrorism places similar emphasis on 

terrorism as a nonstate phenomenon directed against the state and 

society; terrorism is “premeditated, politically motivated violence 

perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or 

clandestine agents.”14

The problem with both these defi nitions is that they exclude 

state terrorism, which since the French Revolution has claimed far 

more victims--in the tens of millions--than terrorism perpetrated 

by nonstate actors. The lethality of the likes of al-Qaeda, the Tamil 

Tigers, and Sendero Luminoso pales before the governmental 

terrorism of Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and 

of course Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. By excluding state terrorism these 

defi nitions moreover give states facing violent internal challenges, 

even challenges based on legitimate grievances (e.g., Kurdish and 

Shiite uprisings against Saddam Hussein), the benefi t of the moral 

doubt, and in so doing invite such states to label their internal 

challenges “terrorism” and to employ whatever means they deem 

necessary, including the terrorism of counterterrorist operations 

of the kind practiced by the French in Algeria and the Russians in 

Chechnya.

Perhaps inadvertently, the contemporary language on terrorism 

has become, as Conor Gearty puts it, “the rhetorical servant of the 

established order, whatever and however heinous its own activities 

are.” Because the administration has cast terrorism and terrorists as 

always the evilest of evils, what the terrorist does “is always wrong 

[and] what the counter-terrorist has to do to defeat them is therefore 

invariably, necessarily right. The nature of the [established] regime, 

the kind of action that is possible against it, the moral situation in 

which violence occurs--none of these complicating elements matters 

a jot against the contemporary power of the terrorist label.”15 Thus 
8

Palestinian terrorism is condemned while Ariel Sharon is hailed as a 

man of peace. Richard Falk observes that:

“Terrorism” as a word and concept became associated in US 

and Israeli discourse with anti-state forms of violence that were 

so criminal that any method of enforcement and retaliation 

was viewed as acceptable, and not subject to criticism. By so 

appropriating the meaning of this infl ammatory term in such a 

self-serving manner, terrorism became detached from its primary 

historical association dating back to the French Revolution. In 

that formative setting, the state’s own political violence against 

its citizens, violence calculated to induce widespread fear and 

achieve political goals, was labeled as terrorism.16

The defi nitional mire that surrounds terrorism stems in large 

measure from differing perspectives on the moral relationship 

between objectives sought and means employed. It is easy for 

the politically satisfi ed and militarily powerful to pronounce all 

terrorism evil regardless of circumstance, but, like it or not, those 

at the other end of the spectrum are bound to see things differently. 

Condemning all terrorism as unconditionally evil strips it of political 

context and ignores its inherent attraction to the militarily helpless. 

This is not to condone terrorism; it is simply to recognize that it can 

refl ect rational policy choice. 

Terrorism, like guerrilla warfare, is a form of irregular warfare,17

or “small war” so defi ned by C. E. Callwell in his classic 1896 work, 

Small Wars, Their Principles and Practice, as “all campaigns other 

than those where both sides consist of regular troops.”18 As such, 

terrorism, like guerrilla warfare, is a weapon of the weak against a 

“regular” (i.e., conventional) enemy that cannot be defeated on his 

own terms or quickly. Absent any prospect of a political solution, 

what options other than irregular warfare, including terrorism (often 

a companion of guerrilla warfare), are available to the politically 

desperate and militarily helpless? Was Jewish terrorism against 

British rule in Palestine, such as the 1946 Irgun bombing attack (led 

by future Nobel Peace Prize Winner Menachem Begin) on the King 

David Hotel in Jerusalem (killing 93, including 17 Jews),19 justifi ed as 

a means of securing an independent Jewish state? “Terrorism may 

be the only feasible means of overthrowing a cruel dictatorship, the 
9

last resort of free men and women facing intolerable persecution,” 

argues Laqueur. “In such conditions, terrorism could be a moral 

imperative rather than a crime--the killing of Hitler or Stalin early 

on in his career would have saved the lives of millions of people.”20

In short, in circumstances where the choice is between one of two 

evils, might selection of a lesser evil be justifi ed? The United States 

chose to fi ght alongside Stalin to defeat Hitler, and it effectively 

became a co-belligerent with Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war with the 

Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. In both cases, the United States allied 

itself with two of the 20th century’s greatest practitioners of state 

terrorism for the purpose of defeating what it at the time regarded 

as the greater evil.

Morally black and white choices are scarce in a gray world. One 

man’s terrorist can in fact be another’s patriot. “Is an armed Kurd a 

freedom fi ghter in Iraq but a terrorist in Turkey?” asks Tony Judt. 

“Were al-Qaeda volunteers terrorists when they joined the U.S. 

fi nanced war [against the Soviets] in Afghanistan?”21

To be sure, consensus on the defi nition of terrorism is hardly 

necessary to prosecute counterterrorist operations against specifi c 

terrorist organizations. We know a terrorist act when we see one, 

and we know that al-Qaeda is an enemy. But lack of defi nitional 

consensus does impede the study of terrorism, which is a necessary 

component of dealing with the phenomenon itself.

THE GWOT: THREAT POSTULATION

Identifying the Threats.

The administration has elaborated its views on the GWOT, 

including the threat to which the GWOT is a response, in a host of 

public statements and documents, including The National Security 

Strategy of the United States of America and National Strategy for 

Combating Terrorism. Chapter III of The National Security Strategy, 

titled “Strengthen Alliances to Defeat Global Terrorism and Work 

to Prevent Attacks Against Us and Our Friends,” begins with the 

following excerpt from President Bush’s speech at Washington’s 

National Cathedral on September 14, 2001:
10

Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet 

have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is 

already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.22

Chapter III then goes on to declare:

The United States is fi ghting a war against terrorism of global 

reach. The enemy is not a single political regime or person or 

religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism--premeditated, 

politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.

In many regions, lasting grievances prevent the emergence of 

a lasting peace. Such grievances deserve to be, and must be, 

addressed within a political process. But no cause justifi es terror. 

The United States will make no concessions to terrorist demands 

and strike no deals with them. We make no distinction between 

terrorists and those who knowingly harbor or provide aid to 

them.23

Chapter V, “Preventing Our Enemies from Threatening Us, Our 

Allies, and Our Friends with Weapons of Mass Destruction,” links 

terrorism, rogue states, and WMD. In the wake of the Cold War’s 

demise,

new deadly challenges have emerged from rogue states and 

terrorists. None of these contemporary threats rival the sheer 

destructive power arrayed against us by the Soviet Union. 

However, the nature and motivations of these new adversaries, 

their determination to obtain destructive power hitherto available 

only to the world’s strongest states, and the greater likelihood 

that they will use weapons of mass destruction against us, make 

today’s security environment more complex and dangerous.24

Rogue states are those states that:

• brutalize their own people and squander their national resources for the 

personal gain of the rulers;

• display no regard for international law, threaten their neighbors, and 

callously violate international treaties to which they are party;

• are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with other 

advanced military technology, to be used as threats or offensively to 

achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes;
11

• sponsor terrorism around the globe; and,

• reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for 

which it stands.25

The National Security Strategy identifi es Iraq, Iran, and North 

Korea as rogue states, and declares, “[W]e must be prepared to stop 

rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten 

or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and 

our allies and friends.”26 And this means, “[g]iven the goals of rogue 

states and terrorists, the United States can no longer solely rely on a 

reactive posture as we have in the past.”27 Because our enemies see 

WMD not as means of last resort, but rather “as weapons of choice 

. . . [as] tools of intimidation and military aggression,” the “United 

States will, if necessary, act preemptively.”28

The core of the threat is the potential marriage of political/

religious extremism and WMD, or what the President has called “the 

crossroads of radicalism and technology,” and the threat is so grave 

that “America will act against such emerging threats before they are 

fully formed.”29 In his West Point speech of June 2002, the President 

elaborated: “When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear 

weapons, along with ballistic missile technology--when that occurs, 

even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power 

to strike great nations.”30 The Secretary of Defense subsequently 

spoke of a “nexus between terrorist networks, terrorist states, and 

weapons of mass destruction . . . that can make mighty adversaries 

of small or impoverished states and even relatively small groups of 

individuals.”31

National Strategy for Combating Terrorism is a detailed plan of 

action. The document defi nes terrorism as “premeditated, politically 

motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by 

subnational groups or clandestine agents,”32 and declares: “Our goal 

will be reached when Americans and other civilized people around 

the world can lead their lives free of fear from terrorist attacks.”33 It 

pledges “a strategy of direct and continuous action against terrorist 

groups, the cumulative effect of which will initially disrupt, over 

time degrade, and ultimately destroy the terrorist organizations.”34

The document’s “Introduction” closes by referencing “the power of 
12

humanity to defeat terrorism in all its forms.”35

National Strategy for Combating Terrorism then proceeds to assess 

the nature of the terrorist threat today, including its globalization, the 

interconnectedness of terrorist organizations, and the proliferation 

of WMD. “The terrorist threat is a fl exible, transnational network 

structure, enabled by modern technology and characterized by 

loose interconnectivity both within and between groups.”36 Terrorist 

organizations operate at three levels. “At the fi rst level are those 

terrorist organizations that operate primarily within a single country. 

Their reach is limited, but in this global environment their actions 

can have international consequences.” Next are those organizations 

that “operate regionally . . . transcend[ing] at least one international 

boundary.” Third are “terrorist organizations with global reach. 

Their operations span several regions and their ambitions can be 

transnational and even global.”37

Yet all three types of organizations are directly linked by 

such operational cooperation as “sharing intelligence, personnel, 

expertise, resources, and safe havens” and indirectly connected 

through “promot[ion of] the same ideological agenda and 

reinforce[ment of] each other’s efforts to cultivate a favorable 

international image for their ‘cause’.” Accordingly, the United States 

“must pursue them across the geographic spectrum to ensure that all 

linkages between the strong and the weak organizations are broken, 

leaving each of them isolated, exposed, and vulnerable to defeat.”38

In other words, the nexus of national, regional, and global terrorism 

is such that terrorism of global reach cannot be defeated without 

simultaneous counterterrorism operations against its regional and 

national props. This judgment is emphatic in an accompanying 

schematic, entitled “Operationalizing the Strategy,” which depicts 

the progressive severance of linkages between global and regional--

and then regional and national--organizations and the concomitant 

destruction or disappearance of all but a few mostly low-threat 

state level terrorist organizations.39 Thus the strategy encompasses 

potential counterterrorist operations against any and all terrorist 

organizations regardless of whether they pose a threat to U.S. 

interests. The only apparent constraint on the strategy is resource 

availability.

National Strategy for Combating Terrorism concludes that because 
13

“we cannot tolerate terrorists who seek to combine the powers 

of modern technology and WMD to threaten the very notion of 

a civilized society. . . we must persevere until the United States, 

together with its friends and allies, eliminates terrorism as a threat 

to our way of life.”40 But defeating terrorism is more than just an end 

in itself:

ridding the world of terrorism is essential to a broader purpose. 

We strive to build an international order where more countries 

and peoples are integrated into a world consistent with the values 

we share with our partners--values such as human dignity, rule 

of law, respect for individual liberties, open and free economies, 

and religious tolerance. We understand that a world in which 

these values are embraced as standards, not exceptions, will be 

the best antidote to the spread of terrorism. This is the world we 

must build today.41

Confl ating the Threats.

The administration has thus postulated a broad, international 

terrorist threat to U.S. national security interests that encompasses 

(1) three geographic levels of terrorist organizations--national, 

regional, and global, as well as (2) rogue states--specifi cally Saddam 

Hussein’s Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Also on the threat list are 

(3) any individuals or entities that proliferate WMD to terrorist 

organizations or rogue states, and (4) failed states, like the Taliban’s 

Afghanistan, that may not sponsor terrorism overseas but that 

willingly or unwillingly provide safe haven and assistance to 

organizations that do.

Discrimination, however, is not the fi rst word that comes to 

mind in examining the administration’s language on terrorism. 

Administration rhetoric is not clear, for example, on the matter of 

whether there are strategically and operationally consequential 

differences between terrorist organizations and rogue states. Rogue 

states, after all, declares The National Security Strategy, “brutalize 

their own people” and “sponsor terrorism around the globe.” 

Additionally, rogue states and at least some terrorist organizations 

with global reach share both a hatred of the United States and a 

desire to acquire WMD. The administration believes rogue states 
14

and terrorist organizations also share another critical attribute: some 

measure of immunity from deterrence.

In the Cold War, we faced a generally status-quo, risk-averse 

adversary. Deterrence was an effective defense. But deterrence 

based only on the threat of retaliation is less likely to work against 

leaders of rogue states more willing to take risks, gambling with 

the lives of their people, and the wealth of their nations.

Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist 

enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the 

targeting of innocents; whose so-called soldiers seek martyrdom 

in death and whose most potent protection is statelessness.42

As it approached war with Iraq, the administration insisted on 

co-conspiratorial links between the Saddam Hussein regime and 

al-Qaeda; repeatedly raised the specter of the dictator’s transfer of 

WMD to al-Qaeda; and encouraged the view that Saddam Hussein 

had a direct hand in the 9/11 attacks. At war’s end, it hailed the 

regime’s destruction as a victory in the war on terrorism. 

In September 2002, President Bush declared, “You can’t 

distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the 

war on terrorism. They’re both equally as bad, and equally as evil, 

and equally as destructive.” He added that “the danger is that alQaeda becomes an extension of Saddam’s madness and his hatred 

and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the 

world.”43

In a formal news conference on March 6, 2003, just days before 

he launched Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, the President linked the 

case for war against Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, implying that Saddam 

Hussein would replicate them once he got nuclear weapons. 

“Saddam is a threat. And we’re not going to wait until he does 

attack,” he declared. “Saddam Hussein and his weapons [of mass 

destruction] are a direct threat to this country,” he reiterated. “If the 

world fails to confront the threat posed by the Iraqi regime . . . free 

nations would assume immense and unacceptable risks. The attacks 

of September 11, 2001, showed what enemies of America did with 

four airplanes. We will not wait to see what . . . terrorist states could 

do with weapons of mass destruction.” Later on, he stated:
15

Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation. September the 11th 

changed the--the strategic thinking, at least as far as I was 

concerned, for how to protect the country . . . .Used to be that we 

could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, 

that oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September 

the 11th should say to the American people that we’re now a 

battlefi eld, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a 

terrorist organization could be deployed here at home.

When asked about the possible human and fi nancial cost of a war 

with Iraq, President Bush answered, “The price of doing nothing 

exceeds the price of taking action. . . . The price of the attacks on 

America . . . on September 11th [was] enormous. . . . And I’m not 

willing to take that chance again.” “The lesson of September the 11th 

. . . is that we’re vulnerable to attack . . . and we must take threats 

which gather overseas very seriously.”44

On May 1, 2003, President Bush, in declaring an end to major 

combat operations in Iraq, stated that the “battle of Iraq is one 

victory in the war on terror that began on September 11, 2001--and 

still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men--the shock troops of 

a hateful ideology--gave America and the civilized world a glimpse 

of their ambitions.” Bush later added:

The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against 

terror. We’ve removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of 

terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network 

will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, 

because the regime is no more. In this 19 months [since the 9/11 

attacks] that changed the world, our actions have been focused 

and deliberate and proportionate to the offense . . . .With those 

attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the 

United States. And war is what they got.45

The President thus postulated, at least with respect to the Iraqi 

regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, a monolithic, direct 

terrorist threat to the United States in the form of undeterrable WMD 

attacks. By implication, the threat extended to Iran and North Korea 

as well, because as rogue states they, too, like Saddam’s Iraq, regard 

WMD “as weapons of choice,” as “tools of intimidation and military 

aggression” that could “allow these states to attempt to blackmail the 
16

United States and our allies to prevent us from deterring or repelling 

the aggressive behavior of rogue states.”46 Thus, as threats, terrorists, 

terrorist organizations, and terrorist states are one and the same.

Consequences of a Confl ated Threat.

Unfortunately, stapling together rogue states and terrorist 

organizations with different agendas and threat levels to the United 

States as an undifferentiated threat obscures critical differences 

among rogues states, among terrorist organizations, and between 

rogue states and terrorist groups. One is reminded of the postulation 

of an international Communist monolith in the 1950s which blinded 

American policymakers to the infl uence and uniqueness of local 

circumstances and to key national, historical, and cultural differences 

and antagonisms within the “Bloc.” Communism was held to be a 

centrally directed international conspiracy; a Communist anywhere 

was a Communist everywhere, and all posed an equal threat to 

America’s security. A result of this inability to discriminate was 

disastrous U.S. military intervention in Vietnam against an enemy 

perceived to be little more than an extension of Kremlin designs 

in Southeast Asia and thus by defi nition completely lacking an 

historically comprehensible political agenda of its own.

Both terrorist organizations and rogue states embrace violence 

and are hostile to the existing international order. Many share 

a common enemy in the United States and, for rogue states and 

terrorist organizations in the Middle East, a common enemy in 

Israel. As international pariahs they are often in contact with one 

another and at times even cooperate. But the scope and endurance 

of such cooperation is highly contingent on local circumstances. 

More to the point, rogue states and terrorist organizations are 

fundamentally different in character and vulnerability to U.S. military 

power. Terrorist organizations are secretive, elusive, nonstate entities 

that characteristically possess little in the way of assets that can be 

held hostage; as The National Security Strategy points out, a terrorist 

enemy’s “most potent protection is statelessness.”47 In contrast, 

rogue states are sovereign entities defi ned by specifi c territories, 

populations, governmental infrastructures, and other assets; as such, 

they are much more exposed to decisive military attack than terrorist 
17

organizations. 

Or to put it another way, unlike terrorist organizations, rogue 

states, notwithstanding administration declamations to the contrary, 

are subject to effective deterrence and therefore do not warrant status as 

potential objects of preventive war and its associated costs and risks. One 

does not doubt for a moment that al-Qaeda, had it possessed a 

deliverable nuclear weapon, would have used it on 9/11. But the 

record for rogue states is clear: none has ever used WMD against 

an adversary capable of infl icting unacceptable retaliatory damage. 

Saddam Hussein did use chemical weapons in the 1980s against 

helpless Kurds and Iranian infantry; however, he refrained from 

employing such weapons against either U.S. forces or Israel during 

the Gulf War in 1991, and he apparently abandoned even possession 

of such weapons sometime later in the decade.48 For its part, North 

Korea, far better armed with WMD than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, has 

for decades repeatedly threatened war against South Korea and the 

United States but has yet to initiate one. 

How is the inaction of Saddam Hussein and North Korea 

explained other than by successful deterrence? There is no way 

of proving this, of course, but there is no evidence that Saddam 

Hussein ever intended to initiate hostilities with the United States 

once he acquired a nuclear weapon; if anything, rogue state regimes 

see in such weapons a means of deterring American military action 

against themselves. Interestingly, Condolezza Rice, just a year 

before she became National Security Adviser, voiced confi dence in 

deterrence as the best means of dealing with Saddam. In January 

2000 she published an article in Foreign Affairs in which she declared, 

with respect to Iraq, that “the fi rst line of defense should be a clear 

and classical statement of deterrence--if they do acquire WMD, 

their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them 

will bring national obliteration.” She added that rogue states “were 

living on borrowed time” and that “there should be no sense of 

panic about them.”49 If statelessness is a terrorist enemy’s “most 

potent protection,” then is not “stateness” a rogue state’s most 

potent strategic liability?

To be sure, rogue states are inherently aggressive and threaten 

regional stability. Moreover, there can be no guarantee that rogue 

state leaders will not fall prone to recklessness, even madness, 
18

although in the case of Saddam Hussein prewar accusations of 

recklessness and certainly madness were considerably overstated.50

The point is that rogue state behavior so far provides no convincing 

evidence of immunity to deterrence via the credible threat of 

unacceptable retaliation. Rogue states regimes may in fact be more 

risk-prone than governments of “normal” states, but does that mean 

they do not value their own survival and are incapable of making 

rational calculations of ends and means?

In confl ating Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s 

al-Qaeda, the administration unnecessarily expanded the GWOT 

by launching a preventive war51 against a state that was not at war 

with the United States and that posed no direct or imminent threat 

to the United States at the expense of continued attention and effort 

to protect the United States from a terrorist organization with which 

the United States was at war. Opponents of preventive war against 

Iraq, including former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft 

and Zbigniew Brzezinski and former secretary of state Madeleine 

Albright, made a clear distinction between the character, aims, and 

vulnerabilities of al-Qaeda and Iraq, correctly arguing that the alQaeda threat was much more immediate, dangerous, and diffi cult to 

defeat. They feared that a war of choice against Iraq would weaken a 

war of necessity against al-Qaeda by distracting America’s strategic 

attention to Iraq, by consuming money and resources much better 

applied to homeland defense, and, because an American war on Iraq 

was so profoundly unpopular around the world, especially among 

Muslims, by weakening the willingness of key countries to share 

intelligence information so vital to winning the war on al-Qaeda.52

Strategically, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was not part of the 

GWOT; rather, it was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of 

necessity against al-Qaeda. Indeed, it will be much more than a 

distraction if the United States fails to establish order and competent 

governance in post-Saddam Iraq. Terrorism expert Jessica Stern in 

August 2003 warned that the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in 

Baghdad was “the latest evidence that America has taken a country 

that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.” How ironic it 

would be that a war initiated in the name of the GWOT ended up 

creating “precisely the situation the administration has described as 

a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders 
19

or provide for its citizens’ rudimentary needs.”53 Former Central 

Intelligence Agency (CIA) director of counterterrorism operations 

and analysis, Vincent Cannistraro, agrees: “There was no substantive 

intelligence information linking Saddam to international terrorism 

before the war. Now we’ve created the conditions that have made 

Iraq the place to come to attack Americans.”54

THE GWOT: OBJECTIVES

Scope.

Threat confl ation makes the GWOT a war on an “enemy” of 

staggering multiplicity in terms of numbers of entities (dozens 

of terrorist organizations and terrorist states); types (nonstate 

entities, states, and failed states); and geographic loci (al-Qaeda 

alone is believed to have cells in 60 countries). The global war 

on terrorism is moreover not only a war against practitioners of 

terrorism but also against the phenomenon of terrorism itself. The 

goal is the elimination of both terrorists and the method of violence 

they employ. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism speaks of 

the imperative “to eradicate terrorism” and states that “Defeating 

terrorism is our nation’s primary and immediate priority. It is ‘our 

calling,’ as President Bush has said.”55 Indeed,

We must use the full infl uence of the United States to delegitimize 

terrorism and make clear that all acts of terrorism will be viewed 

in the same light as slavery, piracy, or genocide: behavior that 

no responsible government can condone or support and all must 

oppose. In short, with our friends and allies, we aim to establish 

a new international norm regarding terrorism requiring nonsupport, non-tolerance, and active opposition to all terrorists.56

The goals of the GWOT also encompass regime change, 

forcible if necessary, in rogue states, and in the case of at least Iraq, 

the transformation of that country into a prosperous democracy 

as a precursor to the political transformation of the Middle East. 

Threatening or using force to topple foreign regimes is nothing new 

for the United States. During the 20th century, the United States 

promoted the overthrow of numerous regimes in Central America 
20

and the Caribbean, and occasionally in the Eastern Hemisphere (e.g., 

in Iran in 1953, South Vietnam in 1963, the Philippines in 1986). 

With respect to democracy, the administration believes that a 

politically transformed Iraq and Middle East is a GWOT imperative 

because it believes that the fundamental source of Islamist terrorism, 

including that of 9/11, is the persistence in the region of politically 

repressive regimes incapable of delivering economic modernity. 

For the administration, the political status quo in the Middle East 

is no longer acceptable because it produced the Islamist extremism 

that produced 9/11. This is why Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul 

Wolfowitz declared in late July 2003 that “the battle to win the peace 

in Iraq now is the central battle in the war against terrorism,”57

and why National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice argues that 

“a transformed Iraq can become a key element in a very different 

Middle East in which the ideologies of hate will not fl ourish.”58

The President himself endorsed this objective before the war, in his 

February 26, 2003, speech before the neo-conservative American 

Enterprise Institute. “A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom 

to transform that vital region by bringing hope and progress to the 

lives of millions. . . . A new [democratic] regime in Iraq could serve 

as a dramatic example of freedom for other nations in the region.” 

The President went on to cite the success of the United States in 

transforming defeated postwar Germany and Japan into democratic 

states, noting that, at the time, “many said that the cultures of Japan 

and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values.”59 For 

the administration, the connection between tyranny and terrorism, 

and between “freedom” and the absence of terrorism, is clear. In 

his September 7, 2003, televised address to the nation, the President 

stated:

In Iraq, we are helping . . . to build a decent and democratic 

society at the center of the Middle East. . . . The Middle East will 

become a place of progress and peace or it will be an exporter 

of violence and terror that takes more lives in America and in 

other free nations. The triumph of democracy and tolerance in 

Iraq, in Afghanistan and beyond would be a grave setback for 

international terrorism. The terrorists thrive on the support of 

tyrants and the resentments of oppressed peoples. When tyrants 

fall, and resentment gives way to hope, men and women in every 
21

culture reject the ideologies of terror and turn to the pursuits of 

peace. Everywhere that freedom takes hold, terror will retreat.60

The GWOT ledger of goals--war aims--thus far includes: 

(1) destroy the perpetrators of 9/11--i.e., al-Qaeda; 

(2) destroy or defeat other terrorist organizations of global reach, 

including the nexus of their regional and national analogs; 

(3) delegitimize and ultimately eradicate the phenomenon of 

terrorism; 

(4) transform Iraq into a prosperous, stable democracy; and,

(5) transform the Middle East into a region of participatory selfgovernment and economic opportunity.

But the confl ation of rogue states, terrorism, and WMD, coupled 

with the administration’s preventive war against Saddam Hussein’s 

Iraq for the purpose of disarming that country, make the GWOT as 

much a war on nuclear proliferators--at least ones the United States 

does not like--as it is a war against terrorism itself. Because the 

administration sees a nexus between terrorism and WMD, the GWOT 

is also a global counter-proliferation war, an aggressive supplement 

to, perhaps even a substitute for, the arms control regime established 

by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968. 

Indeed, one can speculate that the 9/11 attacks, which admittedly 

raised the specter of nuclear-armed terrorism, afforded an already 

predisposed administration the political opportunity to shift to a 

new counter-proliferation policy based on threatened and actual 

preventive military action. “We will not permit the world’s most 

dangerous regimes and terrorists to threaten us with the world’s most 

destructive weapons,” declares National Strategy to Combat Weapons of 

Mass Destruction.

61 That document also states: “Effective interdiction 

is a critical part of the U.S. strategy to combat [proliferation of] WMD 

and their delivery means. We must enhance [U.S.] capabilities . . . to 

prevent the movement of WMD materials, technology, and expertise 

to hostile states and terrorist organizations.”62 The administration is 

also promoting development of a new generation of small, “bunkerbusting” nuclear weapons designed to threaten or destroy rogue 

state underground nuclear facilities (see below).

Note should be taken that the administration has displayed no 
22

enthusiasm for arms control treaties, and that it appears to have little 

confi dence in the NPT to prevent even signatory states (including 

Iraq and North Korea) from launching nuclear weapons programs 

in contravention of the NPT. It overlooks the NPT regime’s 

considerable success in restricting and even reversing proliferation63

and is determined to use force if necessary to do what the NPT was 

never designed to do. The GWOT is thus, to repeat, as much about 

counter-proliferation as it is about terrorism. 

So a sixth objective of the GWOT can be identifi ed: (6) halt, by 

force if necessary, the continued proliferation of WMD and their 

means of delivery to hostile and potentially hostile states and other 

entities.

Feasibility.

How realistic are the GWOT’s objectives? Judgments on this 

question are necessarily subjective but must be made nonetheless. 

Certainly objectives that seem inherently unattainable need to be 

identifi ed and examined.

(1) Destroy al-Qaeda. Because the war against al-Qaeda is a 

war of necessity, the attainability of this goal is a moot issue. The 

United States must and will continue to fi ght al-Qaeda even if it 

cannot destroy it. The nature, modus operandi, and recruiting base 

of al-Qaeda make it a very diffi cult enemy to subdue decisively 

through counterterrorism operations. There have been considerable 

successes against al-Qaeda since 9/11--the destruction of its base 

in Afghanistan, the killing and capture of key operatives, the 

disruption of planned attacks, all of which may account for the 

absence of another mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. But 

al-Qaeda is also a fanatically determined foe with demonstrated 

recuperative powers, and its declared goals command signifi cant 

and, some believe, growing political traction in the Muslim world. 

Moreover, the establishment of a large U.S. military presence in Iraq 

offers a new and proximate target set for al-Qaeda and other jihadist 

bombers, and the failure of that presence to stabilize Iraq eases the 

ability of al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda- inspired organizations to infi ltrate 

the country and conduct their operations without detection.

On the other hand, if the administration is correct--and it may well 
23

be--in its assumption that the ultimate source of Islamist terrorism is 

failed governance throughout most of the Arab world, then it follows 

that democratization and economic well-being would work against 

political and religious extremism. But so profound a change in the 

way things have been in the Arab world for so long is most unlikely 

to come soon or peacefully, if it comes at all. Historically, moreover, 

transition from autocracy to stable democracy has more often than 

not been protracted and violent; the road from the Magna Carta to 

the birth of the American republic took 561 years. So the potential 

policy payoff of a democratic and prosperous Middle East, if there is 

one, almost certainly lies in the very distant future.

(2) Destroy or defeat other terrorist organizations of global reach, 

including the nexus of their regional and national analogs. This objective 

essentially places the United States at war with all terrorist 

organizations, including those that have no beef with the United 

States. As such, this objective is both unattainable and strategically 

unwise. It is unattainable because of the sheer number and variety 

of terrorist organizations. It is strategically unwise because it creates 

unnecessary enemies at a time when the United States has more than 

enough to go around. As strategist Stephen Van Evera observes of 

the administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks:

Defi ning it as a broad war on terrorism was a tremendous 

mistake. It should have been a war on Al Qaeda. Don’t take your 

eye off the ball. Subordinate every other policy to it, including the 

policies toward Russia, the Arab-Israeli confl ict, and Iraq. Instead, 

the Administration defi ned it as a broad war on terror, including 

groups that have never taken a swing at the United States and 

never will. It leads to a loss of focus . . . .And you make enemies of 

the people you need against Al Qaeda.64

Insistence on moral clarity once again trumps strategic 

discrimination. Even if all terrorism is evil, most terrorist 

organizations do not threaten the United States. Many pursue local 

agendas that have little or no bearing on U.S. interests. Should the 

United States, in addition to fi ghting al-Qaeda, gratuitously pick 

fi ghts with the Basque Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (E.T.A. [Fatherland 

and Liberty]), the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, the Provisional Wing of 

the Irish Republican Army, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, 
24

Sendero Luminoso, Hamas, and Hizbollah? Do we want to provoke 

national- and regional-level terrorist organizations that have stayed 

out of America’s way into targeting the U.S. interests and even the 

American homeland?

A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable 

number. A strategy whose ambitions provoke the formation of an 

array of enemies whose defeat exceeds the resources available to 

that strategy is doomed to failure. The Germans were defeated in 

two world wars notwithstanding their superb performance at the 

operational and tactical levels of combat because their strategic ends 

outran their available means; their declared strategic ambitions 

provoked formation of an opposing coalition of states whose 

collective resources in the end overwhelmed those of Germany.

(3) Delegitimize and ultimately eradicate the phenomenon of terrorism. 

Most governments in the world today already regard terrorism 

as illegitimate. The problem is that there are countless millions of 

people around the world who are, or believe they are, oppressed and 

have no other recourse than irregular warfare, including terrorism, 

to oppose oppression. They do not regard terrorism as illegitimate. 

Indeed, they do not regard what they are doing as terrorism. “The 

difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist,” Palestine 

Liberation Organization Chairman Yassir Arafat declared before 

the U.N. General Assembly in 1974, “lies in the reason for which 

he fi ghts. For whoever stands by a just cause and fi ghts for the 

freedom and liberation of his land from the invaders, the settlers and 

colonialists, cannot possibly be called a terrorist.”65 (Similarly, the 

recently executed anti-abortion terrorist Paul Hill denied that killing 

an abortionist was even an act of violence, much less terrorism. “I 

was totally justifi ed in shooting the abortionist, because he was 

actually the one perpetrating the violence,” he told Jessica Stern. 

“I would not characterize force being used to defend the unborn as 

violence.”66)

Bruce Hoffman observes that “terrorists perceive themselves as 

reluctant warriors, driven by desperation--and lacking any viable 

alternative--to violence against a repressive state, a predatory 

rival ethnic or nationalist group, or an unresponsive international 

order.”67 For the Hamas suicide bomber, no Israeli is innocent; all 
25

Israelis are enemies, and to blow them up in buses and discos is an 

heroic act of war against a hated oppressor. As long as irregular 

warfare, including terrorism, remains the only avenue of action 

open to the politically despondent and the militarily impotent, it will 

continue to be practiced regardless of how many governments view 

it as illegitimate. Terrorism can be a logical strategic choice for those 

who have no attractive alternatives.68 It is well and good to counsel 

those with grievances to seek political solutions, but this is hardly 

useful advice if there is no political process available for doing so.

It should also be noted that the analogies of slavery and piracy are 

not encouraging. Both thrived for millennia before they fi nally came 

to be regarded by the civilized world as morally unacceptable, and 

pockets of both remain because they are still profi table enterprises in 

places where enforced national and international laws are absent.

The chief problem with this GWOT goal, however, is that 

terrorism is not a proper noun. Like guerrilla warfare, it is a method 

of violence, a way of waging war. How do you defeat a technique, 

as opposed to a fl esh-and-blood enemy? You can kill terrorists, 

infi ltrate their organizations, shut down their sources of cash, wipe 

out their training bases, and attack their state sponsors, but how do 

you attack a method? A generic war on terrorism “fails to make the 

distinction between the differing objectives of those who practice 

terrorism and the context surrounding its use,” observes Robert 

Worley. “Failing to make the necessary distinctions invites a single, 

homogenous policy and strategy.”69 Again, one is reminded of the 

lack of threat discrimination that prompted U.S. intervention in the 

Vietnam War.

(4) Transform Iraq into a prosperous, stable democracy. The 

attainability of this objective remains to be seen. Experts on Iraq 

and the Arab world are divided on the issue of whether Iraq can 

be converted into a democracy, especially a democracy imposed 

by an outside Western power.70 Few suggest that Arabs are 

culturally incapable of democracy. Monarchy and military rule have 

nonetheless been the norm, and pessimists cite, as a major obstacle 

to representative government in Iraq, the artifi ciality of the Iraqi 

state, cobbled together as it was by the British after World War I and 

encompassing antagonistic ethnic, religious, and tribal divisions. 

The most immediate obstacle to a successful democratic experiment 
26

in Iraq is, of course, the failure--so far--of the Coalition Provisional 

Authority and U.S. occupation forces to provide the necessary 

foundation of public security and basic services. The rapidity and 

scope of the postwar collapse of public order in Iraq clearly surprised 

the administration, whose tardy and hasty planning for postwar Iraq 

stood in stark contrast to its meticulous planning for the war itself.71

The administration did not anticipate the possibility that the forces 

it assembled to invade Iraq and destroy the Saddam Hussein regime 

would be insuffi cient to police Iraq once major military operations 

against the regime were completed. The result is continuing violence 

and insecurity.

Again, analogies to past experiences are misleading. Though the 

administration has repeatedly cited U.S. success in post-World War 

II Germany and Japan as evidence that the United States can do for 

Iraq what it did for those two former Axis Powers, the differences 

between 1945 and 2003 trample the similarities.72 First of all, the 

United States entered postwar Japan and its occupation zone in 

Germany with overwhelming force, which precluded the eruption 

of local resistance. Second, both occupations were almost universally 

regarded as legitimate; Germany and Japan had plunged the world 

into war, and the victors of that war had the right and obligation 

to defeat and occupy them. Germany’s and Japan’s neighbors, 

victims of their aggression, wanted the United States and its allies in 

control. In the case of Japan, the Emperor himself legitimized Japan’s 

unconditional surrender when he directly addressed the Japanese 

people over the radio, calling upon them to accept the end of the 

war, and he legitimized General Douglas MacArthur’s authority by 

repeated public appearances with him. (There was not a single act of 

politically-motivated violence against American occupation forces 

during the 7 years of U.S. military governance in Japan.) In contrast, 

most of the world, including key friends and allies, opposed the U.S. 

war on Iraq, and it is fair to say that the U.S. occupation of Iraq fails 

the test of legitimacy in the eyes of an overwhelming number of 

Arabs. 

Japanese society--ancient, homogenous, and conformist--was 

also completely different from that of Iraq, and both Germany and 

Japan, the former admittedly more so than the latter, had democratic 

antecedents in their political history. Additionally, the American role 
27

in Germany and Japan was facilitated by German and Japanese fear 

of the Soviet Union; the United States served as a guarantee against 

a much worse fate than occupation by the Americans. Lastly, in 

the case of Japan, the United States governed a country completely 

surrounded by water that the United States could control (i.e., no 

porous land borders like Iraq) and that contained no mineral or other 

resources that outsiders sought to exploit (i.e., no oil like Iraq). 

(5) Transform the Middle East into a region of participatory selfgovernment and economic opportunity. Even assuming the United States 

can convert Iraq into a stable democracy (a huge assumption), it is 

not clear how a democratic Iraq gets us to a democratic Middle East. 

National Security Adviser Rice argues that, “Much as a democratic 

Germany became a linchpin of a new Europe that is today whole, 

free, and at peace, so a transformed Iraq can become a key element 

of a very different Middle East in which the ideologies of hate will 

not fl ourish.”73 Leaving aside the inherent perils of making analogies 

between the hypothetical future experience of Iraq and the Middle 

East and the past experience of Germany and Europe, the assumption 

seems to be that democracy is so catching that the establishment of 

just one big one in the Middle East will trigger a rush to emulate. 

The basis on which this democratic domino theory rests has never 

been explicated, however. Is it hope? Neo-conservative ideological 

conviction? How would democracy spread to the rest of the region?

The problem with this new domino theory is the same as the 

problem with the old one: it assumes that states and societies are 

essentially equal in vulnerability to the “threat” (i.e., democracy in 

the Middle East today, Communism in Southeast Asia in the 1960s). 

It ignores local circumstance, societal differences, separate national 

histories, and cultural asymmetries. It also ignores the prospect of 

those opposed to democracy using the democratic process to seize 

power, as did Hitler in Germany in 1933. “One man, one vote, 

one time.” It was this very threat of Islamists using democracy to 

win power that provoked the suppression of budding democratic 

institutions in Algeria in the early 1990s. Indeed, fear of an Islamist 

electorate accounts in no small measure for the persistence of 

autocracy in Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Are U.S. 

strategic interests in the Muslim world really better served by hostile 

democracies than by friendly autocracies?
28

It is, in any event, not at all self-evident that anti-Western 

Islamist terrorism would cease or even signifi cantly diminish with 

the emergence of friendly democracies and economic opportunity 

in the Middle East. Home-grown terrorism is certainly no stranger 

to the democratic West (the second deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. 

history was Timothy McVeigh’s destruction of the Federal Building 

in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people), and at least one study 

concludes that the incidence of nonstate terrorism is higher in free 

societies than in nonfree ones.74 (Nonstate terrorism was notable for 

its absence in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.) Political extremism has a 

general though by no means exclusive association with the absence 

of democracy and economic opportunity, but with respect to 

individual terrorists and terrorist groups, there is no demonstrable 

cause and effect relationship. Left-wing terrorism in democratic 

Europe and the United States during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s 

attracted well-educated children of privilege; Osama bin Laden was 

born to great wealth; his chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a 

surgeon by profession; and most of the 9/11 attackers were educated 

and skilled. Moreover, for every politically and economically 

dispossessed Muslim who joins a terrorist organization there are 

tens of thousands who do not, although they may sympathize with 

the terrorists’ goals. Additionally, whereas satisfaction of political 

and economic grievances might assuage Arab terrorism conducted 

on behalf of clear political goals (e.g., Palestinian terrorism 

directed toward the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state), 

satisfaction of said grievances would probably do little or nothing 

to mollify Islamist extremist organizations motivated by religious 

ideology.75 For example, Osama bin Laden’s professed goal of doing 

away with the very institution of the state in the Muslim world and 

replacing it with a revived and fundamentalist caliphate governing 

all Muslims is simply beyond political satisfaction.

None of this is to argue that the likes of al-Qaeda will be perpetual 

threats. Persistent and successful counterterrorist operations could 

deter an increasing number of potential recruits from joining by 

simply advertising the grave personal risk involved. At some point, 

moreover, al-Qaeda’s failure to remake the Muslim world will 

become manifest to a growing number of its sympathizers. “As 

the United States improves its counter-terrorist performance, so a 
29

sense of futility should discourage both the candidate martyrs and 

their commanders,” argues Colin S. Gray. “It is one thing to die to 

advance a cause. It is quite another to die in an operation that will 

both probably fail tactically, and serve no obvious strategic, albeit 

apocalyptic, goal.”76 A counterterrorist strategy, moreover, that 

approaches al-Qaeda not as a lone organization, but rather as a 

system containing numerous components, some undeterrable but 

others deterrable, is likely to have a signifi cant payoff over time. A 

RAND study published in 2002 concluded:

It is a mistake to think of infl uencing al Qaeda as though it 

were a single entity; rather, the targets of U.S. infl uence are 

the many elements of the al Qaeda system, which comprises 

leaders, lieutenants, fi nanciers, logisticians and other facilitators, 

foot soldiers, recruiters, supporting population segments, and 

religious or otherwise ideological fi gures. A particular leader may 

not be easily deterrable, but other elements of the system (e.g., 

state supporters or wealthy fi nanciers living the good life while 

supporting al Qaeda in the shadows) may be.77

(6) Halt, by force if necessary, the continued proliferation of WMD and 

their means of delivery to hostile and potentially hostile states and other 

entities. The main feasibility issue with respect to this goal is whether 

the United States can, via threatened preventive military action, 

deter rogue states from pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons 

and, failing that, whether it can militarily deprive such states of the 

means of doing so. There is no evidence that successful deterrence 

of the use of nuclear weapons in wartime can be extended to their 

acquisition in peacetime. On the contrary, threatened preventive 

war may actually encourage proliferation. Moreover, considerable 

disagreement surrounds the potential effectiveness of proposed 

new nuclear weapons designed to destroy subterranean nuclear 

weapons facilities. In any event, the development and certainly the 

use of such weapons could in the long run prove catastrophically 

counterproductive to the goal of halting proliferation by undermining 

or demolishing the NPT regime and the now universally respected 

moratorium on nuclear weapons testing.

Can the United States deter, via implicit or explicit threat of 

preventive war, rogue state acquisition of nuclear weapons? The 
30

question is diffi cult to answer because the declared U.S. policy of 

“anticipatory self-defense” is so new and because the deterrent 

effects, if any, on other rogue states of the U.S. preventive war 

against Iraq are not yet evident. There are certainly those who 

believed that Operation IRAQI FREEDOM would send a chilling 

message to Teheran, Pyongyang, and other rogue state capitals. The 

prominent neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, for 

example, believed that removing Saddam Hussein would provide 

“a clear demonstration to other tyrants that to acquire WMD is a 

losing proposition. Not only do they not purchase you immunity 

[from U.S. attack] (as in classical deterrence). . . they purchase you 

extinction.”78 Preventive war, though a substitute for deterrence, 

would actually reinforce deterrence.

In fact, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM appears, at least so far, to 

have had the opposite effect on North Korea and Iran. Even before 

the war, North Korea, perhaps in response to having been declared 

an “evil” state and in anticipation of being second on the U.S. attack 

list after Iraq, announced that it was accelerating its nuclear weapons 

program. Iran also revealed a potential nuclear program more 

advanced than most suspected. Neither state seemed in the least 

bit deterred, although North Korea, under considerable pressure 

from China, fi nally entered into multilateral negotiations with as 

yet unknown results. The administration, however, did not take or 

even speak of military action against these states in part because of 

preoccupation with Iraq and in part because military action against 

Iran, and especially North Korea, would entail far greater diffi culties 

and risks than action against Iraq. Iran is much larger and poses a 

much greater terrorist threat than Iraq, and Iran’s location and 

terrain are logistically and operationally much more forbidding. 

North Korea is believed to have nuclear weapons capacity and holds 

Seoul hostage to thousands of forward-deployed long-range artillery 

pieces.

All of this suggests that the value of threatened or actual 

preventive military action may be limited to target states, like Iraq, 

that are incapable of either offering effective military resistance or 

placing at risk assets highly valued by the United States and its 

allies. States capable of doing so may indeed be deterring the United 

States rather than being deterred. “What North Korea shows is that 
31

deterrence is working,” observed Joseph S. Nye, Jr., in January 2003. 

“The only problem is that we are the ones being deterred.”79 Iraq, 

though dwarfed by North Korea as a proliferator and by Iran as a 

sponsor of terrorism, was selected because it was a military pushover. 

According to Robin Cook, the former British Foreign Minister who 

resigned over the decision to go to war with Iraq, “The truth is that 

the US chose to attack Iraq not because it posed a threat but because 

the US knew Iraq was weak and expected its military to collapse.”80

In any event, the very facts of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM and its 

unexpectedly burdensome aftermath severely constrain U.S. military 

resources for a second preventive war any time soon.

But what about “surgical” strikes targeted not at the rogue state 

regime but its nuclear facilities instead? Given suspected rogue-state 

burial of much of their nuclear weapons programs underground, 

such strikes probably would require earth-penetrating weapons 

armed with low-yield nuclear warheads of the kind whose 

development was reportedly recommended by an administration 

review of U.S. nuclear posture.81 Both the effectiveness and wisdom 

of such weapons, however, have been strongly questioned.82

Scientists are split on whether weapons can be developed that could 

do the job without excessive collateral damage, and defenders of 

the nuclear arms control status quo fear that for the United States, 

which ceased production of nuclear weapons over a decade ago, 

to initiate the development and testing of such a new category of 

nuclear weapons would undermine both the NPT regime and the 

Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which all nuclear powers have 

observed since 1998, and blur the critical distinction between nuclear 

and conventional weapons. Opponents of new “mininukes,” such as 

Joseph Cirincione, former nuclear arms control negotiator and now 

Director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Non-Proliferation Project, 

also point out that their actual use “would cross a threshold that has 

not been breached since the Truman administration. That in turn 

would encourage other nations to develop and use nuclear weapons 

in a similar manner. That’s not in the United States’ national security 

interests.”83 Finally, there is the unavoidable and overriding political 

question: Would any American president actually launch a nuclear 

attack on a non-nuclear, non-Western state with which it was not at 

war?
32

In short, threatened or actual preventive military action seems 

an inherently dangerous and potentially very counter-productive 

means to achieve the goal of halting the continued proliferation 

of WMD, which itself may simply exceed the limits of American 

power.

To sum up the realism of the GWOT’s six objectives, destroying 

al-Qaeda, or at least reducing it to a signifi cantly lesser threat, and 

transforming Iraq into a stable democracy certainly are not inherently 

unrealistic goals. Terrorist organizations can and have been defeated, 

although al-Qaeda is much more than an organization, and there is 

an impressive history of movement from autocracy to democracy, 

although the road from one to the other can be protracted, unstable, 

and violent. American competence and staying power will be 

keys to achieving both goals, and while these attributes have been 

on display in the fi ght against al-Qaeda, they are open questions 

in postwar Iraq. The United States has simply not invested the 

resources--troops (of the right kind), money, expertise--necessary to 

provide the basic security and material foundations for a successful 

political transformation. Failure to accept the costs and challenges 

of nation-building in Iraq would make the goal of transforming Iraq 

into a stable democracy unrealistic, and by extension the goal of 

politically transforming the Middle East. This larger objective may 

simply be beyond the power of any outside force to accomplish, 

but the reasoning behind the GWOT as defi ned by the Bush 

administration is that a Middle East transformation is possible but 

only via the triggering domino of an established democracy in Iraq. 

Thus the Middle East will remain a political mess if the United States 

messes up its opportunities in postwar Iraq.

Clearly in the inherently unrealistic category, for reasons already 

discussed, are the goals of destroying all terrorist organizations 

of global reach, including the nexus of their regional and national 

analogs, and terrorism itself. These goals not only lie beyond 

America’s means to achieve them, but also gratuitously pit the 

United States against “enemies” that have not threatened U.S. 

interests.

The goal of preventing rogue states from acquiring WMD, 

especially nuclear weapons, may be achievable but only at the risk of 

dangerous military action and even war. Paradoxically, explicit U.S. 

embrace of a forward-leaning doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense” 
33

followed by invasion of Iraq may infl ate the very threat that is the 

focus of U.S. policy. It is a mistake to assume that rogue states seek 

nuclear weapons solely for purposes of blackmail and aggression. 

Rogue states want such weapons for a variety of reasons, not the 

least of which is self-protection against enemies also armed or 

seeking to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. The United States 

is the greatest of those enemies. It is therefore not unreasonable to 

assume that rogue states view acquisition of nuclear weapons as a 

deterrent to U.S. military attack on them or at a very minimum as 

a means of raising the price of an American attack. Take Iran for 

an example. Iranian interest in nuclear weapons began under the 

Shah and was stimulated by having a hostile nuclear superpower 

(the Soviet Union) to the north, an aspiring hostile nuclear power 

(Iraq) to the west, and yet another nuclear aspirant (Pakistan) to 

the east. Throw in a nuclear-armed Israel and a history of violence, 

instability, and war in the region, and later, a U.S. declaration of Iran 

as “evil,” and you get a perfectly understandable explanation for 

Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The issue boils down to a choice of ends and means. If mere 

rogue state possession of nuclear weapons is deemed an unacceptable 

threat, then preventive war preventive war may be the only recourse. If, on the other may be the only recourse. If, on the other 

hand, the threat is defi ned as rogue state use of nuclear weapons, 

then deterrence becomes the preferred means. Because preventing 

rogue state acquisition of nuclear weapons is a much more diffi cult 

and risky challenge than deterring rogue state use of such weapons, 

and because there is no persuasive evidence that rogue states 

(as opposed to terrorists) are undeterrable, the question arises of 

whether it would be wiser to replace the goal of prevention with 

that of deterrence.

THE GWOT: SUSTAINABILITY

The political, fi scal, and military sustainability of the GWOT 

remains to be seen. There is general agreement that the GWOT will 

be a protracted and costly undertaking. Additionally, the confl ation 

of rogue states and terrorism as an undifferentiated threat steered 

the GWOT into an invasion and occupation of Iraq and in so doing 

converted that country into a magnet for jihadists seeking to kill 
34

and destroy “crusader” targets. The administration did not expect 

to encounter irregular warfare in Iraq, much less sustained irregular 

warfare directed against not only U.S. troops but also friendly 

Iraqis, reconstruction targets, and even United Nations personnel. 

What started out as a short conventional war of choice has become 

an open-ended unconventional war of necessity. Yet by invading 

and occupying Iraq, the United States assumed responsibility for 

its future and therefore has no moral or strategic choice but to 

restore security and establish a functioning economy and stable 

government. Historians will debate the wisdom of attacking Iraq. 

But the issue for the United States now is whether it can and will 

deliver on its promises for Iraq’s future. Walking away would be 

catastrophic. Michael Ignatieff observes:

The foreign fi ghters who have crossed into Iraq from Syria, Iran 

and Palestine to join Hussein loyalists in attacks on American 

soldiers know how much is at stake. Bloodying American troops, 

forcing a precipitate withdrawal, destroying the chances for a 

democratic Iraq would infl ict the biggest defeat on America since 

Vietnam and send a message to every Islamic extremist in the 

region: Goliath is vulnerable.84

Political.

That said, neither nation-building nor political stamina in 

protracted confl icts with irregular enemies has been a hallmark of 

American statecraft since the 1960s. Indeed, the “primary problem 

at the core of American defi ciencies in post-confl ict capabilities, 

resources, and commitment is a national aversion to nation-building, 

which was strengthened by failure in Vietnam,” concluded a widelyread U.S. Army study on reconstructing Iraq published the month 

before Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was launched.85 The study went 

on to predict and warn:

If the war is rapid with few casualties, the occupation will probably 

be characterized by an initial honeymoon period during which 

the United States will reap the benefi ts of ridding the population 

of a brutal dictator. Nevertheless, most Iraqis and most other 

Arabs will probably assume that the United States intervened 

in Iraq for its own reasons and not to liberate the population. 
35

Long-term gratitude is unlikely and suspicion of U.S. motives 

will increase as the occupation continues. A force initially viewed 

as liberators can rapidly be relegated to the status of invaders 

should an unwelcome occupation continue for a prolonged time. 

Occupation problems may be especially acute if the United States 

must implement the bulk of the occupation itself rather than turn 

these duties over to a postwar international force.86

The study did not predict the emergence and persistence of 

irregular warfare or the administration’s inadequate preparation 

for the situation as it unfolded in Iraq after May 1, 2003, the day the 

President declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. By 

late August the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq surpassed the 

number lost before May 1, and some critics maintained that there 

was still insuffi cient force of the right kind on the ground in Iraq 

to provide the security necessary to permit Iraq’s economic and 

political reconstruction. (Defense Department spokesmen denied 

charges of force insuffi ciency.) The situation elicited comparisons 

with U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1982-8487 as well as calls from 

Capitol Hill on both sides of the aisle for the commitment of more 

money and manpower.88

If the U.S. effort in Iraq is viewed as a component in the GWOT 

(President Bush, in his September 7, 2003 address to the nation called 

Iraq “the central front” of the GWOT89), then it is certainly the largest 

component in terms of monetary cost, military manpower committed, 

and strategic risk. The sustainability of the GWOT therefore hinges 

very signifi cantly on the sustainability of present U.S. policy in Iraq. 

Will the American people and their elected representatives go the 

distance in Iraq?

The absence of signifi cant international participation (Great 

Britain excepted) in dealing with the challenges of postwar Iraq has 

compelled the United States to shoulder the brunt of the blood and 

treasure costs. (As of late summer 2003, about 185,000 U.S. troops 

were deployed in Iraq and Kuwait. Aside from the U.S. and the 

British deployment, the international coalition’s other 29 countries, 

none of them militarily signifi cant, contributed a total of 12,000 

soldiers, or an average of about 430 troops per national contingent.90) 

This situation is likely to continue as long as the U.S. Government is 

unwilling to share political and military authority over Iraq’s future 
36

with the United Nations or some other international consortium. 

U.S. troop losses in Iraq since May 1 averaged about one dead 

per day, and by the end of August the number of U.S. wounded 

was approaching 10 per day.91 Losses rose thereafter, however, as 

insurgent attacks grew in number and sophistication; during the 

month of November, 79 U.S. troops were killed in Iraq--more than in 

either of the two months of “major combat operations.”92

The dollar cost of maintaining U.S. forces in Iraq is currently 

running at $4 billion per month, or an annual rate of $48 billion. 

In early September 2003 the White House informed congressional 

leaders that it was preparing a new budget request of $60-70 billion 

to cover mounting military and reconstruction costs in Iraq.93 The 

President shortly thereafter announced an $87-billion request to 

cover Iraq and continuing U.S. costs in Afghanistan.94 Less than a 

week later, Secretary Rumsfeld reportedly informed U.S. senators 

that Iraq’s postwar reconstruction costs were likely to run another 

$35 billion above and beyond those contained in the announced 

$87 billion.95 These moves followed an earlier appropriation of $79 

billion to cover the costs of the war and its immediate aftermath. 

Both troop losses and dollar costs could rise or fall depending upon 

changes in the security situation, U.S. policy, and the willingness 

of the international community to shoulder greater responsibility 

for Iraq’s future. An early September 2003 assessment provided by 

the Wall Street Journal predicted further spirals in projected postwar 

Iraq costs attributable to gross overestimation of near-term Iraqi oil 

revenues; surprise at the decrepit state of Iraq’s basic infrastructure; 

extensive and continuing looting; sabotage of oil pipelines, electrical 

power lines, and other key reconstruction targets; downstream costs 

of fi nancing expanding Iraqi government and security forces; and 

poor prospects for signifi cant international donor support.96

At this juncture, 7 months after major combat operations 

were declared over, and notwithstanding continued U.S. military 

casualties, failure to discover any Iraqi WMD, and unexpectedly 

high occupation and reconstruction costs, public and congressional 

majorities continue to support the Bush administration’s objectives 

in Iraq. Americans don’t like to cut and run, especially when their 

soldiers are taking fi re. Public support for the war itself remains 

strong, in part because most Americans are convinced that the Iraqi 
37

WMD threat was real and that removing Saddam Hussein from 

power was integral to the war on terrorism. (A September 2003 

Washington Post Washington Post poll revealed that 69 percent of those polled believed poll revealed that 69 percent of those polled believed 

that it was “at least likely that Saddam Hussein was involved” in the 

9/11 attacks.97) There is also a sense that the United States simply 

cannot afford to fail in Iraq: too much political and military capital 

has been invested in this very controversial enterprise and there are 

too many foreign critics itching to say, “We told you so!”

There is certainly no evidence of intolerance of U.S. casualties at 

the rates that have been incurred so far. Elite civilian and military 

opinion has, in any event, tended to overestimate public sensitivity 

to incurring casualties; most Americans are willing to tolerate 

substantial casualties if they believe in the cause for which they are 

incurred and see visible policy progress.98 The problem, at least before 

9/11, was casualty phobia among the political and military elites, 

which produced a series of timid U.S. military interventions in Haiti, 

Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, only one of which committed 

U.S. ground forces to possible combat.99 But the interventions of the 

1990s were wars of choice; most Americans continue to regard the 

war against Iraq as a war of necessity, and therefore worth much 

greater risk in blood and treasure.

By late summer of 2003, however, there were signs of growing 

public dissatisfaction with the way things were going in Iraq. Two 

polls taken in late August suggested the disappearance of any 

expectations of an easy or cheap end-game in that country. A USA 

TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll found that 63 percent of Americans still 

believed the war was worth fi ghting, but 54 percent also believed 

that the administration “did not have a clear plan to bring stability 

and democracy to the country.” Respondents were almost evenly 

split over whether to “maintain current or increase U.S. force levels” 

in Iraq (51 percent) or “to cut or completely withdraw U.S. forces” 

(46 percent).100 A Newsweek poll found that 69 percent of Americans 

were “very concerned” (40 percent) or “somewhat concerned” (29 

percent) that the United States would be “bogged down for many 

years in Iraq without making much progress in achieving its goals.” 

Nearly half--47 percent--said they were “very concerned” that the 

cost of maintaining U.S. forces in Iraq would lead to “a large budget 

defi cit and seriously hurt the economy.” Sixty percent of those 
38

polled said that the estimated occupation cost of $1 billion per week 

was too high and believed it should be reduced. Only 15 percent said 

they would support the current level of occupation costs for 3 years 

or more.101 A subsequent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 

60 percent of all respondents did not support the President’s request 

for an additional $87 billion for U.S. military and civil operations 

in Iraq and Afghanistan.102 A late October, Washington Post-ABC 

poll revealed, for the fi rst time, that a majority--51%--of Americans 

disapproved of the way the administration was handling Iraq.103

Fiscal.

The Iraq-defi cit-economy connection could turn out to be a 

powerful infl uence on public and congressional attitudes. Even 

without Iraq costs, which so far have been fi nanced by off-budget 

requests, federal defi cits are expected to balloon government debt 

over the next decade. In August 2003 the Congressional Budget 

Offi ce (CBO) projected a $480 billion defi cit for fi scal year 2004 and 

a total cumulative defi cit for the decade of 2004-13 of $1.40 trillion.104

These numbers minimize the problem, however, because the CBO is 

legally required to base its projections only on existing laws. Thus, 

the CBO projection assumes the scheduled expiration of the huge 

2001 and 2003 tax cuts, although most observers believe they will be 

extended. (Both the White House and the Republican congressional 

leadership favor making the cuts permanent.) The CBO projection 

also predated the passage of Medicare prescription drug benefi t 

legislation and ignored likely passage of the reformed alternative 

minimum tax legislation. Altogether, these three measures could, 

according to a Washington Post budget analysis, add an estimated 

$1.93 trillion to the total 2004-13 defi cit.105 The CBO also assumed 

that discretionary spending will grow only at the rate of infl ation, 

projected to average 2.7 percent during the next decade, when in fact 

it has risen by an annual 7.7 percent over the past 5 years. Growth 

at the latter rate would add another estimated $1.39 trillion.106

According to the Washington Post analysis, the sum of all these 

additions, plus the additional interest on the debt, could produce 

an estimated total 2004-13 defi cit of $4.33 trillion,107 or almost four 

times larger than the CBO projection. An assessment performed by 
39

the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projected an even greater 

defi cit, $5.1 trillion.108

To be sure, these fi gures are estimates, and estimates are very 

assumption dependent. But they convey the magnitude of the 

federal fi scal crisis that lies ahead if the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are 

not rescinded, if minimum tax reform legislation is passed, and if 

discretionary spending runs signifi cantly above the infl ation rate. 

These estimates, moreover, do not include U.S. military costs in 

Iraq beyond fi scal year 2004 or the possible costs of a larger U.S. 

Army dictated by the impact of Iraq on that service’s ability to 

meet its obligations worldwide. Fiscally, something’s got to give 

in the coming years, and that something may well be a reduction 

of U.S. ambitions in Iraq. Such a reduction would be especially 

likely if more and more Americans come to see a cause and effect 

relationship between outlays for Iraq, spiraling federal defi cits, and 

bad economic news at home (such as sharply rising interest rates).

Military.

The GWOT’s fi scal sustainability is inseparable from its military 

sustainability. Unanticipated U.S. ground force requirements in 

postwar Iraq have stressed the U.S. Army to the breaking point (see 

discussion below). As it approached war with Iraq, the administration 

assumed a “liberation” scenario in which it would inherit a postSaddam Iraq with functioning government ministries and police and 

other security forces; it anticipated neither the government’s abrupt 

disintegration nor the emergence of irregular warfare against U.S. 

forces.109 The Pentagon reportedly had planned to withdraw most 

U.S. forces from Iraq by the fall of 2003. Anticipating a permissive 

security environment and major occupation force contributions 

from allies, it planned, within 6 months following cessation of major 

military operations, to cut U.S. force strength in Iraq to no more than 

70,000 and as little as 30,000.110

But by mid-May 2003 the security situation in Iraq compelled 

the Defense Department to suspend planned withdrawals, leaving 

in place an occupation force of about 150,000.111 In July the Pentagon 

unveiled a plan that assumed a U.S. force presence in Iraq of 156,000 

well into 2004, and U.S. Army planners, to sustain that service’s 
40

rotation base for Iraq, also increased most overseas deployments 

from 6-month to year-long tours of duty and activated at least two 

National Guard brigades.112 Clearly, unanticipated commitments 

in postwar Iraq had stretched the Army to the point where it had 

little in reserve for any other contingencies that might arise (e.g., a 

war in Korea). Indeed, the Army appeared incapable of sustaining 

a commitment of 16 of its 33 active-duty combat brigades in Iraq 

absent a reduction in commitments elsewhere or an expansion of its 

force structure. 

As of the fall of 2003, the Army had about 185,000 troops (onethird of the army’s active-duty end-strength) deployed in and 

around Iraq, another 10,000 in Afghanistan, plus an additional 

25,000 in South Korea and 5,000 in the Balkans. Altogether, some 

370,000 U.S. Army active and reserve component troops were 

deployed overseas, or more than one-third of that service’s total 

active-reserve force of just over one million. If the Iraqi deployment 

is signifi cantly reinforced to provide additional order and stability 

for reconstruction,112 some critics believe this will threaten the army’s 

ability to provide a rotation base for its overseas deployments and 

strip it of a strategic reserve for contingencies elsewhere.113

A September 2003 assessment by the CBO concluded that 

the “Army does not have enough active-duty component forces 

to simultaneously maintain the [Iraqi] occupation at its current 

size, limit deployments to one year, and sustain all of its other 

commitments.” According to the study, mobilization of additional 

National Guard and Reserve units provided the only way the United 

States could sustain current Army force levels in and around Iraq 

beyond March 2004;116 unless, of course, the occupation is genuinely 

internationalized, with major foreign troop contingents permitting a 

signifi cantly reduced U.S. force presence in Iraq. The administration 

was clearly moving in this direction by early September. The White 

House, after months of resisting a greater U.N. role in postwar Iraq, 

and reportedly at the insistence of the State Department and the Joint 

Chiefs of Staff as well as key congressional leaders,117 authorized 

circulation of a draft U.N. Security Council resolution calling for 

creation of a U.N.-authorized, U.S.-led multinational force to secure 

Iraq.118

In sum, the GWOT’s political, fi scal, and military sustainability 
41

is an open question. There are clearly lurking threats to its fi scal and 

its military sustainability, which in turn could threaten its political 

sustainability. The key is the future of the security situation and U.S. 

policy in Iraq, which the administration has made the centerpiece 

of the global war on terrorism. Little doubt remains about the 

sustainability of the relatively inexpensive war of necessity against 

al-Qaeda. The issue is the sustainability of the war of choice against 

Iraq and its aftermath. 

BOUNDING THE GWOT

The central conclusion of this study is that the global war on 

terrorism as currently defi ned and waged is dangerously indiscriminate 

and ambitious, and accordingly that its parameters should be readjusted 

to conform to concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American 

power. Such a readjustment requires movement from unrealistic to 

realistic war aims and from unnecessarily provocative to traditional 

uses of military force. Specifi cally, a realistically bounded GWOT 

requires the following measures:

(1) Deconfl ate the threat. This means, in both thought and policy, 

treating rogue states separately from terrorist organizations, and 

separating terrorist organizations at war with the United States 

from those that are not. Approaching rogue states and terrorist 

organizations as an undifferentiated threat ignores critical differences 

in character, threat level, and vulnerability to U.S. military action. AlQaeda is an undeterrable transnational organization in a war with the 

United States that has claimed the lives of thousands of Americans. 

North Korea is a (so far) deterrable (and destroyable) state that is not 

in a hot war with the United States. Similarly, lumping together all 

terrorist organizations into a generic threat of terrorism gratuitously 

makes the United States an enemy of groups that do not threaten 

U.S. security interests. Terrorism may be a horrendous means to any 

end, but do the Basque E.T.A. and the Tamil Tigers really threaten 

the United States? Strategy involves choice within a framework 

of scarce resources; as such, it requires threat discrimination and 

prioritization of effort.

(2) Substitute credible deterrence for preventive war as the primary 

policy for dealing with rogue states seeking to acquire WMD. This means 
42

shifting the focus of U.S. policy from rogue state acquisition of WMD 

to rogue state use of WMD. There is no evidence that rogue state 

use of WMD is undeterrable via credible threats of unacceptable 

retaliation or that rogue states seek WMD solely for purposes of 

blackmail and aggression. There is evidence, however, of failed 

deterrence of rogue state acquisition of WMD; indeed, there is 

evidence that a declared policy of preventive war encourages 

acquisition. Preventive war in any case alienates friends and allies, 

leaving the United States isolated and unnecessarily burdened (as 

in Iraq). A policy of fi rst reliance on deterrence moreover does not 

foreclose the option of preemption; striking fi rst is an inherent policy 

option in any crisis, and preemption, as opposed to preventive war, 

has legal sanction under strict criteria. Colin Gray persuasively 

argues against making preventive war “the master strategic idea for 

[the post-9/11 era]” because its “demands on America’s political, 

intelligence, and military resources are too exacting.” The United 

States:

has no practical choice other than to make of deterrence all that 

it can be. . . . If this view is rejected, the grim implication is that 

the United States, as the sheriff of world order, will require 

heroic performances from those policy instruments charged 

with cutting-edge duties on behalf of preemptive or preventive 

operations. Preemption or prevention have their obvious 

attractions as contrasted with deterrence, at least when they 

work. But they carry the risk of encouraging a hopeless quest for 

total security.119

Dr. Condoleezza Rice got it right in 2000: “[T]he fi rst line of 

defense [in dealing with rogue states] should be a clear and classical 

statement of deterrence--if they do acquire WMD, their weapons 

will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national 

obliteration.”120

(3) Refocus the GWOT fi rst and foremost on al-Qaeda, its allies, 

and homeland security. This may be diffi cult, given the current 

preoccupation with Iraq. But it was, after all, al-Qaeda, not a rogue 

state, that conducted the 9/11 attacks, and it is al-Qaeda, not a rogue 

state, that continues to conduct terrorist attacks against U.S. and 

Western interests worldwide. The war against Iraq was a detour 
43

from, not an integral component of, the war on terrorism; in fact, 

Operation IRAQI FREEDOM may have expanded the terrorist 

threat by establishing a large new American target set in an Arab 

heartland. The unexpectedly large costs incurred by Operation 

IRAQI FREEDOM and its continuing aftermath probably will not 

affect funding of the relatively cheap counterterrorist campaign 

against al-Qaeda. But those costs most assuredly impede funding of 

woefully underfunded homeland security requirements. 

Indeed, homeland security is probably the greatest GWOT 

opportunity cost of the war against Iraq. Consider, for example, 

the approximately $150 billion already authorized or requested 

to cover the war and postwar costs (with no end in sight). This 

fi gure exceeds by over $50 billion the estimated $98.4 billion 

shortfall in federal funding of emergency response agencies in the 

United States over the next 5 years. The estimate is the product 

of an independent task force study sponsored by the Council on 

Foreign Relations and completed in the summer of 2003. The study, 

entitled Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously 

Unprepared, concluded that almost two years after 9/11, “the United 

States remains dangerously ill-prepared to handle a catastrophic 

attack on American soil” because of, among other things, acute 

shortages of radios among fi refi ghters, WMD protective gear for 

police departments, basic equipment and expertise in public health 

laboratories, and hazardous materials detection equipment in most 

cities.”121 And emergency responders constitute just one of dozens of 

underfunded homeland security components.

(4) Seek rogue-state regime change via measures short of war. Forcible 

regime change of the kind undertaken in Iraq is an enterprise 

fraught with unexpected costs and unintended consequences. Even 

if destroying the old regime entails little military risk, as was the case 

in Iraq, the task of creating a new regime can be costly, protracted, 

and strategically exhausting. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that 

the combination of U.S. preoccupation in postwar Iraq and the more 

formidable resistance a U.S. attack on Iran or North Korea almost 

certainly would encounter effectively removes both of those states as 

realistic targets of forcible regime change. The United States has in 

any event considerable experience in engineering regime change by 

measures short of war (e.g., covert action); and even absent regime 
44

change there are means, such as coercive diplomacy and trade/aid 

concessions, for altering undesirable regime behavior. Additionally, 

even the most hostile regimes can change over time. Gorbachev’s 

Russia would have been unrecognizable to Stalin’s, as would Jiang 

Zemin’s China to Mao’s.

(5) Be prepared to settle for stability rather than democracy in Iraq, and 

international rather than U.S. responsibility for Iraq. The United States 

may be compelled to lower its political expectations in Iraq and by 

extension the Middle East. Establishing democracy in Iraq is clearly 

a desirable objective, and the United States should do whatever it 

can to accomplish that goal. But if the road to democracy proves 

chaotic and violent or if it is seen to presage the establishment of a 

theocracy via “one man, one vote, one time,” the United States might 

have to settle for stability in the form of a friendly autocracy of the 

kind with which it enjoys working relationships in Cairo, Riyadh, 

and Islamabad. This is certainly not the preferred choice, but it may 

turn out to be the only one consistent with at least the overriding 

near-term U.S. security interest of stability. Similarly, the United 

States may have to accept a genuine internationalization of its 

position in Iraq. A UN-authorized multinational force encompassing 

contingents from major states that opposed the U.S. war against Iraq 

would both legitimize the American presence in Iraq as well as share 

the blood and treasure burden of occupation/reconstruction, which 

the United States is bearing almost single-handedly.

(6) Reassess U.S. force levels, especially ground force levels. Operation 

IRAQI FREEDOM and its aftermath argue strongly for an acrossthe-board reassessment of U.S. force levels. Though defense 

transformation stresses (among other things) substitution of 

technology for manpower, postwar tasks of pacifi cation and nationbuilding are inherently manpower-intensive. Indeed, defense 

transformation may be counterproductive to the tasks that face 

the United States in Iraq and potentially in other states the United 

States may choose to subdue and attempt to recreate. Frederick A. 

Kagan argues that the reason why “the United States [has] been so 

successful in recent wars [but] encountered so much diffi culty in 

securing its political aims after the shooting stopped” lies partly in 

“a vision of war” that “see[s] the enemy as a target set and believe[s] 

that when all or most of the targets have been hit, he will inevitably 
45

surrender and American goals will be achieved.” This vision ignores 

the importance of “how, exactly, one defeats the enemy and what 

the enemy’s country looks like at the moment the bullets stop 

fl ying.”122 For Kagan, the “entire thrust of the current program of 

military transformation of the U.S. armed forces . . . aims at the 

implementation and perfection of this sort of target-set mentality.”123

More to the point:

If the most diffi cult task facing a state that desires to change the 

regime in another state is securing the support of the defeated 

populace for the new government, then the armed forces of 

that state must do more than break things and kill people. They 

must secure critical population centers and state infrastructure. 

They have to maintain order and prevent the development of 

humanitarian catastrophes likely to undermine American efforts 

to establish a stable new regime.124

These tasks require not only many “boots on the ground” for long 

periods of time, but also recognition that:

If the U.S. is to undertake wars that aim at regime change and 

maintain its current critical role in controlling and directing world 

affairs, then it must fundamentally change its views of war. It is 

not enough to consider simply how to pound the enemy into 

submission with stand-off forces. War plans must also consider 

how to make the transition from that defeated government to a 

new one. A doctrine based on the notion that superpowers don’t 

do windows will fail in this task. Regime change is inextricably 

intertwined with nation-building and peacekeeping. Those 

elements must be factored into any such plan from the outset. . . .

To effect regime change, U.S. forces must be positively in control of 

the enemy’s territory and population as rapidly and continuously 

as possible. That control cannot be achieved by machines, still 

less by bombs. Only human beings interacting with other human 

beings can achieve it. The only hope for success in the extension 

of politics that is war is to restore the human element to the 

transformation equation.125

Americans have historically displayed a view of war as a 

substitute for politics, and the U.S. military has seemed congenitally 
46

averse to performing operations other than war. But the Kagan thesis 

does underscore the importance of not quantitatively disinvesting 

in ground forces for the sake of a transformational vision. Indeed, 

under present and foreseeable circumstances the possibility of 

increasing ground force end-strengths should be examined.

The global war on terrorism as presently defi ned and conducted 

is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, 

and threatens to dissipate U.S. military and other resources in an 

endless and hopeless search for absolute security. The United States 

may be able to defeat, even destroy, al-Qaeda, but it cannot rid the 

world of terrorism, much less evil.

ENDNOTES

1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds., and , Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds., and 

trans., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 88.

2. Bruce Hoffman, “Defi ning Terrorism,” in Russell D. Howard and Reid 

L. Sawyer, eds., Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Understanding the New Security 

Environment, Guilford, CT: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2003, p. 22.

3. Daniel Byman, “Scoring the War on Terrorism,” The National Interest, 

Summer 2003, pp. 79-80. Also see John Arquilla, David Ronfelt, and Michael 

Zanini, “Networks, Netwar, and Information-Age Terrorism,” in Howard and 

Sawyer, pp. 96-119.

4. See the author’s The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam, Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 1998, pp. 73-85.

5. Strategic Survey 2002/2003, An Evaluation and Forecast of World Affairs, 

London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2003, pp. 9, 10.

6. Remarks by President Bush at the 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United 

States Military Academy at West Point, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/

2002/06/20020601-3.html (hereafter referred to as West Point Speech).

7. Donald Rumsfeld, “A New Kind of War,” New York Times, September 27, 

2001.

8. Colin S. Gray, Maintaining Effective Deterrence, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies 

Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2003, p. 5.

9. Hoffman, p. 19-20.
47

10. Alex P. Schmid, Albert J. Jongman, et al., Political Terrorism: A New Guide to 

Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, and Literature, New Brunswick, NJ: 

Transaction Books, 1988, pp. 5-6.

11. Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass 

Destruction, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 6.

12. George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of 

America, Washington, DC: The White House, September 2002, p. 5.

13. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 

Washington, DC: Department of Defense, April 2001, p. 428.

14. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, Washington, DC: The White 

House, February 2003, p. 1.

15. Conor Gearty, “Terrorism and Morality,” RUSI Journal, October 2002, pp. 

36-37.

16. Richard Falk, The Great Terror War, New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003, 

pp. xviii-xiv.

17. See James D. Kiras, “Terrorism and Irregular Warfare,” in James Baylis, 

James Wirtz, Eliot Cohen, and Colin S. Gray, Strategy in the Contemporary World, 

An Introduction to Strategic Studies, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 

208-232.

18. C.E. Callwell, Small Wars, Their Principles and Practice, Third Edition, 

Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, p. 21.

19. Martin Gilbert, Israel, A History, New York: William Morrow, 1998, pp. 

135-146.

20. Laqueur, p. 8.

21. Tony Judt, “America and the War,” in Robert B. Silvers and Barbara 

Epstein, eds., Striking Terror, America’s New War, New York: New York Review of 

Books, 2002, p. 21.

22. George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of 

America, Washington, DC: The White House, September 2002, p.5.

23. Ibid., p. 5.

24. Ibid., p. 13.
48

25. Ibid., p. 14.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., p. 15.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., p. iii.

30. West Point Speech.

31. Donald Rumsfeld, “The Price of Inaction Can Be Truly Catastrophic,” 

Asahi Shimbun, Japan, September 10, 2002, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Sep2002/

e20020910price.htm. 

32. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, p. 1.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., p. 2.

35. Ibid., p. 3.

36. Ibid., p. 8.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., p. 9.

39. Ibid., p. 13. Also see p. 9.

40. Ibid., p. 29.

41. Ibid., p. 30.

42. The National Security Strategy, p. 15.

43. Quoted in Mike Allen, “Bush: Hussein, Al Qaeda Linked,” Washington 

Post, September 26, 2002.

44. All excerpts from President Bush’s news conference of March 6, 2003, are 

extracted from the transcript reprinted in “’We’re Calling for a Vote’ at the U.N., 

Says Bush,” Washington Post, March 7, 2003.

45. Quoted in Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane, “Hussein Link to 9/11 

Lingers in Many Minds,” Washington Post, September 6, 2003.
49

46. The National Security Strategy, p. 15.

47. Ibid.

48. See Rolf Ekeus, “Iraq’s Real Weapons Threat,” Washington Post, June 29, 

2003; Bob Drogin, “The Vanishing,” New Republic, July 21, 2003, http://ebird.dtic.mil/

Jul2003/s20030716200811.html; John Barry and Michael Isikoff, “Saddam’s Secrets,” 

Newsweek, June 30, 2003, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Jun2003/s20030623194927.html; Walter 

Pincus and Kevin Sullivan, “Scientists Still Deny Iraqi Arms Programs,” Washington 

Post, July 31, 2003; Michael R. Gordon, “Weapons of Mass Confusion,” New York 

Times on the Web, August 1, 2003, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Aug2003/s20030804206015.html; 

David Kelly, “Regime’s Priority Was Blueprints, Not Arsenal, Defector Told,” Los 

Angeles Times, April 26, 2003; and Joseph Curl, “Bush Believes Saddam Destroyed 

Arms,” Washington Times, April 26, 2003.

49. Condoleezza Rice, “Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs, 

January/February 2000, p. 61.

50. See Richard K. Betts, “Suicide from Fear of Death?” Foreign Affairs, 

January/February 2003, pp. 34-43; and John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. 

Walt, “An Unnecessary War,” Foreign Policy, January/February 2003, pp. 50-59. 

Mearsheimer and Walt point out that Saddam’s record in starting wars in the 

region was no worse than that of Israel or Eqypt, and that his invasion of Iran 

in 1980 was in part a defensive response to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s attempted 

fomentation of an Iraqi Shiite rebellion to overthrow the Iraqi dictator. He also had 

reason to believe that Iran, then in the throes of revolutionary turmoil, was weak 

and vulnerable. In the case of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait a decade later, Saddam 

Hussein had little reason to believe that the United States would react the way it 

did; indeed, the George H. W. Bush administration may have inadvertently given 

Saddam a green or at least an ambiguous amber light. See the author’s Hollow 

Victory, A Contrary View of the Gulf War, Washington, DC: Brassey’s, U.S., Inc., 

1993, pp. 23-34; and Janice Gross Stein, “Deterrence and Compellance in the Gulf, 

1990-91,” International Security, Fall 1992, pp. 147-179. 

51. According to the Defense Department’s offi cial defi nition of the term, 

Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was a preventive war, which traditionally has been 

indistinguishable from aggression, not a preemptive attack, which in contrast to 

preventive war has international legal sanction under strict conditions. Preemption 

is “an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy 

attack is imminent.” Preventive war is “a war initiated in the belief that military 

confl ict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to delay would involve greater 

risk.” See Joint Publication 1-02, DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 

Washington, DC: Department of Defense, April 12, 2002, pp. 333, 336.

52. See, for example, Brent Scowcroft, “Don’t Attack Iraq,” Wall Street Journal, 

August 15, 2002; and Madeleine K. Albright, “Where Iraq Fits In on the War on 
50

Terror,” New York Times, September 13, 2002.

53. Jessica Stern, “How America Created a Terrorist Haven,” New York Times, 

August 20, 2003.

54. Quoted in John Walcott, “Some in Administration Uneasy Over Bush 

Speech,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 19, 2003.

55. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, p. 15.

56. Ibid., pp. 23-24.

57. Quoted in Walter Pincus, “Wolfowitz: Iraq Key to War on Terrorism,” 

Washington Post, July 28, 2003.

58. Condoleezza Rice, “Transforming the Middle East,” Washington Post, 

August 7, 2003.

59. “In the President’s Words: ‘Free People Will Keep the Peace of the World.” 

Transcript of President Bush’s speech to the American Enterprise Institute, AEI, 

Washington, DC, February 26, 2002; New York Times, February 27, 2002. Also see 

Philip H. Gordon, “Bush’s Middle East Vision,” Survival, Spring 2003, pp. 131-153; 

and George Packer, “Dreaming of Democracy,” New York Times Magazine, March 

2, 2003, pp. 44-49, 60, 90, 104.

60. Excerpted from the text of President Bush’s September 7, 2003, speech, 

reprinted in “Bush: ‘We Will Do What Is Necessary’,” Washington Post, September 

8, 2003.

61. National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction, Washington, DC: 

The White House, December 2002, p. 1.

62. Ibid., p. 2.

63. The NPT regime is essentially a bargain between nuclear “haves” and 

“have-nots.” In exchange for foreswearing development of nuclear weapons, the 

have-nots obligate the haves to provide the knowledge and assistance to develop 

nuclear energy for nonmilitary purposes, and in turn the have-nots agree to have 

their programs inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Inspections 

are, however, conducted only at sites declared by the host state, thus permitting a 

determined violator to launch a nuclear weapons program at a secret site. The NPT 

regime and its associated efforts have been remarkably successful in retarding 

nuclear weapons proliferation. Since 1968, only fi ve states have acquired nuclear 

weapons. Of the fi ve, three (Israel, India, and Pakistan) were not signatories to 

the NPT, and one (South Africa) relinquished its weapons and joined the NPT. 
51

The fi fth (North Korea) has been twice caught cheating and has now entered 

negotiations. Additionally, the United States has successfully encouraged several 

states (Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan) to cease work on suspected 

nuclear weapons programs and other states (Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine) to 

give up nuclear weapons they inherited from the Soviet Union. The United States 

has also extended nuclear deterrence to such key allies as Germany and Japan that 

might otherwise have felt compelled to develop their own arsenals.

64. Quoted in Nicholas Lemann, “The War on What?” New Yorker, September 

16, 2002, p. 41.

65. Quoted in Hoffman, pp. 11-12.

66. Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God, Why Religious Militants Kill, New 

York: HarperCollins, 2003, p. 169.

67. Ibid., p. 14.

68. See Martha Crenshaw, “The Logic of Terrorism: Terrorist Behavior as the 

Product of Strategic Choice,” in Howard and Sawyer, pp. 55-67.

69. D. Robert Worley, Waging Ancient War: Limits on Preemptive Force, Carlisle 

Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, February 2003, 

p. 8.

70. See Fouad Ajami, “Iraq and the Arabs’ Future,” Foreign Affairs, JanuaryFebruary 2003, pp. 2-18; Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack, “Democracy in 

Iraq?” Washington Quarterly, Summer 2003, pp. 57-71; Adeed Darwaisha and Karen 

Darwaisha, “How to Build a Democratic Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, May-June 2003, pp. 

36-50; Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr., and Corine Hegland, “Reinventing Iraq,” National 

Journal, March 22, 2003. http://ebird.dtic.mil/Mars003/s200300323165443.html; Victor 

Davis Hanson, “Democracy in the Middle East,” Weekly Standard, October 21, 

2002, pp. 23-26; Efraim Karsh, “Making Iraq Safe for Democracy,” Commentary, 

November 2002, pp. 22-28; and Sandra Mackay, The Reckoning, Iraq and the Legacy 

of Saddam Hussein, New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.

71. See Frederick W. Kagan, “War and Aftermath,” Policy Review, August and 

September 2003, pp. 3-27; Anthony H. Cordesman, Iraq and Confl ict Termination: 

The Road to Guerrilla War? Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International 

Studies, July 20, 2003; Gerard Baker and Stephen Fidler, “The Best Laid Plans? 

How Turf Battles and Mistakes in Washington Dragged Down the Reconstruction 

of Iraq,” Financial Times, August 4, 2003; Thomas L. Friedman, “Bad Planning,” 

New York Times, June 25, 2003; Trudy Rubin, “Bush Never Made Serious Postwar 

Plans,” Philadelphia Inquirer Philadelphia Inquirer, June 26, 2003; and Peter Slevin and Vernon Loeb, , June 26, 2003; and Peter Slevin and Vernon Loeb, 

“Plan to Secure Postwar Iraq Faulted,” Washington Post, May 19, 2003.
52

72. For examinations of U.S. postwar occupation policies in Germany and 

Japan and their usefulness as analogies to postwar Iraq in 2003, see Robert Wolfe, 

ed., Americans as Proconsuls: U.S. Military Government in Germany and Japan, 1944-

1952, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977; John W. Dower, 

Embracing Defeat, Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: W. W. Norton 

and Company, 1999; Conrad C. Crane and W. Andrew Terrill, Reconstructing 

Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Confl ict Scenario, 

Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, February 

2003, pp. 13-18; Douglas Porch, “Occupational Hazards, Myths of 1945 and 

U.S. Iraq Policy,” The National Interest, September 2003, pp. 35-47; “Occupation 

Preoccupation: Questions for John W. Dower,” The New York Times Magazine, 

March 30, 2003, p. 9; and James Webb, “Heading for Trouble,” Washington Post, 

September 4, 2002.

73. Condoleezza Rice, “Transforming the Middle East,” Washington Post, 

August 7, 2003.

74. See Leonard B. Weinberg and William L. Bubank, “Terrorism and 

Democracy: What Recent Events Disclose,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Spring 

1988, pp. 108-118.

75. For examinations of religion-inspired terrorism, see Magnus Ranstorp, 

“Terrorism in the Name of Religion,” and Mark Juergensmeyer, “The Logic of 

Religious Violence,” in Howard and Sawyer, pp. 121-136, 136-155, respectively; 

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, New York: Random 

House, 2002; and Stern, Terror in the Name of God, op.cit.

76. Gray, Maintaining Deterrence, pp. 28-29. 

77. Paul K. Davis and Brian Michael Jenkins, Deterrence and Infl uence in 

Counterterrorism, A Component in the War on al Qaeda, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 

2002, p. x1. Also see Daniel S. Gressgang, “Terrorism in the 21st Century: 

Reassessing the Emerging Threat,” in Max G. Manwaring, ed., Deterrence in the 

21st Century, Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001.

78. Charles Krauthammer, “The Obsolescence of Deterrence,” Weekly Standard, 

December 9, 2002, p. 24. Also see Tod Lindberg, “Deterrence and Prevention,” 

Weekly Standard, February 3, 2003, pp. 24-28.

79. Quoted in Michael Dobbs, “N. Korea Tests Bush’s Policy of Preemption,” 

Washington Post, January 6, 2003. It is not clear that small and vulnerable nuclear 

arsenals deter superpower military action. See Lyle J. Goldstein, “Do Nascent 

WMD Arsenals Deter? The Sino-Soviet Crisis of 1969,” Political Science Quarterly, 

Number 1, 2003, pp. 59-79.
53

80. Robin Cook, “Iraq’s Phantom Weapons and Iran,” New Perspectives 

Quarterly, Summer 2003, p. 29.

81. See William Arkin, “Nuclear Warfare: Secret Plan Outlines the 

Unthinkable,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2002. Also see sources cited in footnote 

82.

82. See, for example, James Kitfi eld, “The Pros and Cons of New Nuclear 

Weapons,” National Journal, August 9, 2003, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Aug2003/

s20030811207449.html; Robert W. Nelson, “Lowering the Threshold: Nuclear 

Bunker Busters and Mininukes,” in Brian Alexander and Alistair Millar, eds., 

Tactical Nuclear Weapons, Emergent Threats in an Evolving Security Environment, 

Washington, DC: Brassey’s, Inc., 2003, pp. 68-79; and George Perkovich, “Bush’s 

Nuclear Revolution, A Regime Change in Nonproliferation,” Foreign Affairs, 

March/April 2003, pp. 2-8.

83. Quoted in Kitfi eld.

84. Michael Ignatieff, “Why Are We in Iraq?” New York Times Magazine,

September 7, 2003, p. 71.

85. Conrad C. Crane and W. Andrew Terrill, Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, 

Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Confl ict Scenario, Carlisle 

Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, February, 2003, 

p. 17.

86. Ibid., pp. 18, 19.

87. See, for example, Robert Baer, “Where Do They Go From Here? We Pulled 

Out of Beirut. We Can’t Abandon Iraq,” Washington Post, August 24, 2003; and 

Foaud Ajami, “Beirut, Baghdad,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2003.

88. See Carolyn Skorneck, “GOP Starting to Waver on Support for Iraq,” 

Congressional Quarterly Weekly, September 6, 2003, pp. 2134-2140.

89. “Bush: ‘We Will Do What Is Necessary’.”

90. Trudy Rubin, “More Than Soldiers Needed in Iraq,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 

August 29, 2003.

91. Vernon Loeb, “Number of Wounded in Action on the Rise,” Washington 

Post, September 2, 2003.

92. Bradley Graham, “November Deadliest Month in Iraq,” Washington Post, 
54

November 29, 2003.

93. Glenn Kessler and Mike Allen, “Bush to Seek $60 Billion or More for 

Iraq,” Washington Post, September 4, 2003. Also see Richard W. Stevenson, “78% of 

Bush’s Postwar Spending Plan is for the Military,” New York Times, September 9, 

2003; and Warren Vieth and Esther Schrader, “Iraq Estimates Were Too Low, U.S. 

Admits,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2003.

94. “Bush: ‘We’ll Do What Is Necessary’.”

95. Soni Effron, Robin Wright, and Janet Hook, “Quick Help with Iraq 

Unlikely,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2003.

96. Neil King, Jr., and Chip Cummins, “The Postwar Bill for Iraq Surges Past 

Projections,” Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2003.

97. Milbank and Deane.

98. See Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Willpower,” New Republic, September 8-15, 

2003, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Sep2003/s20030902212602.html; and Christopher Gelpi 

and Peter Feaver, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the 

Use of Force. (Forthcoming)

99. See the author’s “Force Protection Fetishism: Sources, Consequences, and 

(?) Solutions,” Aerospace Power Journal, Summer 2000, pp. 5-27.

100. Data contained in Richard Benedetto, “Most Say Iraq War Was Worth 

Fighting,” USA Today, August 28, 2003.

101. Data contained in Jennifer Barrett, “When is Enough Enough?” MSNBC 

http://www.msnbc.com/m/pt/printthis_main.asp?storyID+956458. 

102. Rick Morin and Dan Balz, “Public Says $87 Billion Too Much,” Washington 

Post, September 14, 2003.

103. Judy Keen, “Attacks Make It Hard to See Light at the End of the Tunnel,” 

USA Today, November 3, 2003.

104. The Budget and Economic Outlook: An Update August 2003, Washington, 

DC: Congressional Budget Offi ce, August 2003, p. 1, http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cf

m?index+4493&sequence+0.

105. “Defi cit Delusions,” Washington Post, August 29, 2003. Also see Edmund 

Andrews, “Congressional Defi cit Estimate May Exceed a Half-Trillion,” New 

York Times, August 26, 2003; Walter Shapiro, “Fiscal Recklessness Means More 

Danger Ahead,” USA Today, August 27, 2003; Jonathan Weisman, “2004 Defi cit 
55

to Reach $480 Billion, Report Forecasts,” Washington Post, August 27, 2003; and 

David Firestone, “Dizzying Dive to Red Ink Poses Stark Choices for Washington,” 

Washington Post, September 14, 2003.

106. “Defi cit Delusions.”

107. Ibid.

108. Cited in Weisman.

109. See Peter Slevin and Dana Priest, “Wolfowitz Concedes Errors on Iraq,” 

Washington Post, July 24, 2003; Thomas L. Friedman, “Bad Planning,” New York 

Times, June 25, 2003; Trudy Rubin, “Bush Never Made Serious Postwar Plans,” 

Philadelphia Inquirer Philadelphia Inquirer, June 26, 2003; and Anthony H. Cordesman, , June 26, 2003; and Anthony H. Cordesman, Iraq and Confl ict 

Termination: The Road to Guerrilla War? Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and 

International Studies, July 20, 2003.

110. Michael R. Gordon with Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Plans to Reduce Forces in 

Iraq, With Help of Allies,” New York Times, May 3, 2003; and Michael R. Gordon, 

“How Much Is Enough?” New York Times on the Web, May 3, 2003.

111. Michael R. Gordon, “Fear of Baghdad Unrest Prompts a Halt in Sending 

U.S. Troops Home,” New York Times, May 15, 2003; and Michael R. Gordon, “Allies 

to Retain Larger Force as Strife Persists,” New York Times, May 29, 2003.

112. Vernon Loeb, “Plan to Bolster Forces in Iraq is Unveiled,” Washington 

Post, July 24, 2003.

113. Thom Shanker, “Offi cials Debate Whether to Seek a Bigger Military,” 

New York Times, July 21, 2003.

114. See Mark Thompson and Michael Duffy, “Is the Army Stretched Too 

Thin?” Time, September 1, 2003, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Aug2003/e20030825211191.html; 

and John Hendren and Chris Kraul, “More Troops Needed, Analysts Insist,” Los 

Angeles Times, August 20, 2003.

115. See Michael O’Hanlon, “Breaking the Army,” Washington Post, July 

3, 2003, and “Do the Math: We Need More Boots on the Ground,” Los Angeles 

Times, August 12, 2003; Fareed Zakaria, “Iraq Policy is Broken. Fix It,” Newsweek, 

July 14, 2003, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Jul2003/e20030707198234.html; Michael Kramer, 

“W and Rummy in Denial,” New York Daily News, July 7, 2003; Fred Kaplan, 

“Blow-Back in Baghdad,” July 8, 2003, Slate.msn.com, http://ebird.dtic.mil/Jul2003/

s20030710199201.html; and Ron Hutcheson, “Bush Says Troop Size in Iraq Just 

Fine,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 2003.
56

116. Thomas E. Ricks and Jonathan Weisman, “Army Lacks Forces for Iraq 

Mission, CBO Warns,” Washington Post, September 3, 2003; and Christopher 

Cooper and John D. McKinnon, “U.S. Is Facing Tough Decisions on Iraq Troops,” 

Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2003. Also see An Analysis of the U.S. Military’s 

Ability to Sustain an Occupation of Iraq, Washington, DC: Congressional Budget 

Offi ce, September 3, 2003, pp. 3-7, http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=4515&se

quence=0. 

117. See Dana Milbank and Thomas E. Ricks, “Powell and Joint Chiefs 

Nudged Bush Toward U.N.” Washington Post, September 4, 2003.

118. Felicity Barringer with David E. Sanger, “U.S. Drafts Plan for U.N. to 

Back a Force for Iraq,” New York Times, September 4, 2003.

119. Gray, Maintaining Effective Deterrence, p. 10.

120. See note 41.

121. Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared, 

New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2003, p. 1.

122. Frederick W. Kagan, “War and Aftermath,” Policy Review, August and 

September 2003, p. 4.

123. Ibid., p. 5.

124. Ibid., p. 10.

125. Ibid., p. 27.