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Critique of the war on terror- US Army War College

LOSING PERSPECTIVE IN THE WAR ON TERROR

by Dr. Jeffrey Record, January 14, 2004

Dr. Jeffrey Record normally teaches strategy and tactics at the U.S. Air Force's Air War College. He is currently a visiting professor at the prestigious U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute.

In an article just published, Dr. Record delivers an extraordinarily blunt critique of where and why President Bush's "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) has gone wrong.

Record's assessment: "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 conflated 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 conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.

Of particular concern has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.This was a strategic error of the first 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 Global War on Terrorism, 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, fiscally, and militarily unsustainable.

Accordingly, the GWOT must be recalibrated to conform to concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American power…” (Dr. Jeffrey Record, The Strategic Studies Institute, The U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks)
http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/index.html#report