Third Way Dispatch

On March 6th, Assistant Majority Leader in the Senate, Dick Durbin, joined Third Way co-chairs Senator Evan Bayh and Senator Tom Carper in releasing a new Third Way report, Beyond Bush: A New Strategy of Constriction to Defeat al Qaeda and its Allies.

“This report puts the emphasis of US national security back where it belongs, on Al Qaeda,” Senator Durbin said. “How you define a problem dictates the policy response.”

We couldn’t agree more.

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The Bush Administration has defined the threat of the day in such a broad way as to be almost meaningless: “terror” is the enemy, and a “long war” is needed. In that definition, we don’t actually know who we’re fighting, and we don’t actually know what a victory would even look like, never mind when it might actually occur.

President Bush has been quick to say that the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are not, all told, our enemy – that “Islamofascists” are the bad guys. But recent polling among Mulims suggests that many do not get the distinction.

Public opinion across the Islamic world is uniformly and increasingly negative toward the United States. Consider that more than 70 percent of citizens of Jordan, a major non-NATO ally, see Americans as selfish, violent and greedy. More than 60 percent also believe we are immoral and fanatical. The public in Turkey, a full NATO ally, is about the same, only they also think we’re arrogant.

It might be tempting to say that this is just the result of xenophobia and that there’s nothing we can do about it. The Bush Doctrine takes the view that all we can do is kill off the violent ones before they can get here. But that laissez-faire attitude is very dangerous, as we make clear in Beyond Bush.

It’s a dangerous attitude because al Qaeda is a different, and in many ways graver threat than it was on 9/11. Intelligence reports suggest that al Qaeda’s headquarters element is reconstituting – it certainly appears to have no trouble putting out video and audio propaganda – and the movement is also energizing affiliated groups and individuals or small cells. The latter can be especially nihilistic – and especially hard to detect and combat. These are people who still want to kill Americans – and right here in America. They will continue to look for ways to do so, killing nationals of other countries around the world in the meantime.

In our report, we also note that the laissez-faire attitude is dangerous because the Bush Administration has gotten so much wrong. They’ve been fighting the first foe of the 21st century with a 20th century mindset. Beyond Bush goes into detail about three examples: the domino theory; state-on-state warfare instead of global counterinsurgency; and binary or us vs. them balance of power thinking. In each case, the Bush Administration is failing not just in the execution, but at a strategic and conceptual level.

Finally, we consider the laissez-faire approach dangerous because without a change in direction and a new strategy designed to meet the threat, we’re putting Americans at greater risk. We recommend a strategy of constriction, which will cut off the al Qaeda movement’s access to physical resources, propaganda, and people. This has to be a systematic and sustained approach in order for it to work.

And it will take some changes – in our government, our alliances, and in our ability to fight the war of ideas. The latter is especially important – and deeply neglected right now.

Last year’s Gallup survey of public opinion in the Muslim world, after all, points to a fundamental need to court the “moderate” majority in Muslim countries and separate them out from the radical fringe. The President’s strategy does just the opposite – and that runs the risk of being a self-fulfilling prophecy over time, with consequences too terrible to contemplate.

There are many national security challenges facing the United States right now, with Iraq, North Korea, and Iran at the top of the list. But we cannot afford to take our eyes off of al Qaeda even for a moment – or we will all face some terrible consequences. We hope Congress will push the President to adopt a more effective strategy – and we hope it’s a strategy of constriction.