Professor of International Politics Martha Crenshaw said that the Bush Administrations policies in the fight against terrorism are idealistic and manipulative in an address to over 100 students, parents and alumni last Saturday.
When Crenshaw first came to the University in 1974, terrorism was not a big issue for the American government or its citizens. Although a Cabinet committee in the State Department on terrorism had been formed two years earlier in the aftermath of the Munich Olympics attack, it was not until Sept. 11 that the U.S. had a clear strategy for fighting terrorism. The attacks on the World Trade Center spurred the most sweeping reorganization of the government since WWII, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and a total revamping of America’s intelligence agencies.
Now, Crenshaw explained that we live in an age increasingly defined by internal instability and technological advancement, where the fight against terrorism has become one of the main items on our foreign policy agenda as well as those of many other nations around the world.
Crenshaw set several criteria for measuring the probable effectiveness of U.S. strategy goal: clarity, congruence with other foreign policy objectives, and the feasibility of the proposed policy or course of action.
Soon after Sept. 11 President Bush began to refer to a “War on Terror.” Crenshaw explained the significance of this rhetoric and how it foreshadowed our combative strategies.
“It says that this is in fact a war and that, if this is a war, it is inconceivable that America could lose it,” Crenshaw said.
This framing of US policy toward terrorism was controversial from the beginning, she said. Bush’s metaphor signaled at the outset that this would be a long and difficult struggle, but the narrative promised that at the end, the United States would be victorious. A “War on Terrorism” Crenshaw explains, also implies a defined enemy, and yet terrorism is a method typically used by non-state actors who are much weaker than the government that they oppose.
“From the beginning,” Crenshaw said, “there was an effort to put a face on this war.”
The term “war” also allowed the Bush Administration to suggest a number of more specific analogies, particularly to WWII, including the comparison of Sept. 11 to Pearl Harbor. Over time, what Crenshaw called “the most favored analogy in American history” emerged—the analogy to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the Munich Agreement of September 1938.
Bush’s analogies to the Cold War, Crenshaw said, label the enemy as totalitarianism. A 2006 national security statement explicitly describes war as a generational struggle and explains that the enemy is an ideology; “Terrorism is a murderous movement united by an ideology of oppression, violence and hate, which wishes to establish totalitarian rule,” the statement said in part.
“Portraying organizations that engage in terrorist activities as totalitarian empires in the making is not an accurate portrayal of the threat. The enemy now is more homegrown, or self-generated terrorism,” Crenshaw cautioned.
She said that this is a more dangerous type of enemy because it is unaffiliated with larger, more visible groups. Crenshaw stressed that the easy availability of weapons and the low cost of terrorism when conducted on a small scale. Additionally, the Bush administration’s wartime rhetoric points to the use of military force as the only appropriate instrument for fighting terrorism.
2006 saw the Bush Administration staging a policy departure from the realist view of international politics that maintains an emphasis on national interest and power. Instead, they changed their rhetorical focus, presenting their foremost goal as the spread of “effective democracy.” Crenshaw noted problems with this liberalist view, which assumes that if all states were democratic, there would be no cause for terrorism.
Identifying the root cause of terrorism as a lack of democracy has the effect of dismissing arguments that consider terrorist grievances legitimate and acknowledge that opposition to U.S policy may be principled. This policy seeks to transform world politics by seeking internal regime changes, and yet, noted Crenshaw, the U.S. has been unsuccessful in creating democratic societies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“What if we create democracy and the result is the election of a non-democratic, violence-using regime?” she asked.
Problems arise when terrorism appears within transitional democracies and liberal functioning democracies, a situation that we experienced in Spain in March 2004 and in London last summer. The Bush Administration’s response to this danger was the radical shift to a preemptive strategy, Crenshaw explained, a policy based on the idea that “you cannot wait for your enemy to come to you.” This counter-terrorist strategy laid the groundwork for and justified the invasion of Iraq.
Bush’s often-repeated assertion that if America does not fight terrorists abroad, it will be fighting them at home is illogical, according to Crenshaw, an assertion that drew enthusiastic applause from her audience. She said that this justification for preemptive invasion is unfounded on several fronts: first, it presumes that the Iraq war is about terrorism, not about invading another country, and second, it is fundamentally an argument that appeals to fear since there is no reason to believe that Iraqi forces would attack America.
On the morning of the lecture President Bush met, for the second day in a row, with top generals to review current Administration strategies in Iraq. No definitive policy changes resulted from the talks, and the administration expects that these informal meetings will become more frequent in the months to come, amid increasing election-related pressure from the Democratic Party.
In the question and answer session, Crenshaw said that the Bush Administration’s secrecy made it hard to gauge the success of its anti-terror strategy.
“There has not been another attack on the US. We do not know why, but we are thankful,” she said. “But how can we judge the effectiveness of policy when there are so many secrets?”
She cited polls that showed that most Americans do not think our government is doing much in the fight against terrorism.
Crenshaw gave most of the credit for preventing terrorism not to military intervention, but rather to good police and intelligence work.
“Internal cooperation is taking place on a low level that most of us don’t see,” she said.
After the lecture had ended Crenshaw spoke with small group of audience members. Ann Zimmer, who received an MA from the University, said she was determined to attend the lecture, remembering her former professor’s words of wisdom from her time as an undergraduate.
“This is a pressing issue, and the more we know about it, the better we can deal with it,” she said.
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