America Must Set the Rules
A patient, calculated, and deliberate response.

By Andrew Apostolou, a historian at St. Antony's College, Oxford who has lectured on European security at the U.S. Army War College.
September 20, 2001 9:45 a.m.

merica has suffered blows as brutal as they were unexpected. She is regaining her balance, helped in part by a swelling anger in response to these massacres. So far little of this anger has been seen. Attention is still concentrated upon the scenes of devastation and the official response. In the coming days, however, the world will witness what has been called "fury of an aroused democracy."

President George W. Bush and his Cabinet have so far coped admirably with this unprecedented crisis. They have avoided the temptation to assuage this anger with an immediate response. It will be hard, humanly let alone politically, for President George W. Bush to keep telling the victims' families that they must wait for their grief and fury to be addressed. Yet that is precisely what he will have to do. A rapid American military response is unlikely to be effective. Above all, it is precisely what the terrorists want. Nothing would please those who organized the mass slaughter more than to see America flailing around in response. Nothing would give greater succour to their propaganda than for innocent Afghans, for example, to be killed by American cruise missiles. A counter atrocity, even if on a smaller scale or inflicted by accident, will allow the butchers of September 11 to justify their crime. There are no easy answers, no quick fixes delivered by cruise missiles.

The terrorist commanders, probably lead by Osama bin Laden, may well have a second wave of attacks ready to unleash in response to the expected American retaliation. They are expecting rapid retaliation, hoping that it will allow them to shift the focus from American suffering to the alleged "arrogance" of American power. The terrorists want America to use massive force against them, to show to those who publicly or quietly sympathise with their brutal tactics that not even the vast power of America can defeat them. Any military response, therefore, should aim to be as effective and targeted as possible, avoiding the needless devastation of which they terrorists are so enamoured. Above all, terrorists are by their nature paranoid. Nothing would unnerve them more than for the U.S. government to organize a patient, calculated and deliberate response. The time and the place of America's replies must be entirely of America's choosing.

The terrorists think that they have struck a blow at the global economy. They have not, as some have claimed, attacked the "symbols" of American power. Every New Yorker from age five upwards knew that the "World Trade Center" was simply the name for a pair of office blocks. Terrorists, however, live in a world of conspiracy theories. Arch conspirators themselves, they genuinely believe that the world economy is covertly controlled out of downtown Manhattan. Terrorists are not historians, sitting around in seminar rooms scratching their heads as to whether social forces or high politics ultimately shape human destiny. They do not waste their time wondering if history is événements or mentalités. For them history is not made through the tedium of elections and messy compromises of representative government, it is a series of audacious attacks and catastrophic events.

The attackers want to see global chaos, with America collapsing into recriminations. Instead, there has to be a determined effort not to play the terrorists' game. The citizens of New York and Washington know that they must recreate a sense of normality as soon as possible. The sooner New Yorkers are again expressing themselves at the many joys, and ample frustrations, of their great city, the better. Other Americans may sometimes have looked at New York with incomprehension. One survey indicated that Americans were more likely to want to visit Bosnia than New York — drawing the rasping riposte from Rudy Giuliani: "We'll kick your city's ass." The massacres of September 11 will go a long way towards erasing the alleged "cultural" gap between the rural, religious Midwest and the city slickers of the East Coast. New Yorkers have responded to being thrown into the frontline with courage, with Mayor Giuliani himself amply rising to the challenge.

There will be a minority in America who will seek scapegoats, but they must be ignored because such recriminations only embolden the terrorists. There is no easy way out of this crisis. The terrorists have no demands, no realistically attainable goals, simply the insane desire to destroy America. There will be mutterings that none of this would have happened had America not supported Israel, a crutch for the fringe to express its isolationism and anti-Semitism. Let there be no doubt: If Israel moved to Antarctica, the ice might bloom but the attacks would not cease. Others may try to blame Islam generally and Muslim Americans in particular. The opposite reaction is best. Muslim Americans are a diverse group, who do not wish to be seen as a potential shelter for terrorists. Palestinian Americans, for example, do not hide their views on the Middle East, but they have made a point of being law abiding. Muslim Americans, particularly from the Middle East, may well be able to provide the language skills, insights and the human resources so sorely lacking in America's intelligence agencies.

The more broadly supported the eventual U.S. response is, the more continuously effective it can be. Much European support will prove to be pure rhetoric, but there is probably little that the Europeans can contribute. The British, unquestioningly, will assist. For Britain, treaties entail commitments, not meal tickets. Few Britons will sit and calculate when the lives of so many Americans have been so cruelly taken. The French too will participate, with their traditional last-minute shilly-shallying and wriggling. Other European nations have the usual excuses at the ready, that public opinion is hostile, domestic security too weak. While little is to be expected of our shabbier allies, they should expect few favors in the future.

It is vital that Arab and Islamic nations support the new antiterrorism campaign. This is not just because the canard of the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab America has to be slayed, but because America has longstanding alliances based on defending Islamic nations. Too many forget that Islam was almost wiped out in the Soviet Union, that it was, and is, the U.S. which has consistently stood for Muslim religious freedom. America's Islamic and Arab allies should not be publicly pressured, for that too would play into Bin Laden's hands. Many will claim that they dare not defy so-called "public opinion," but what assistance they are willing to offer should be accepted. A broad consensus means greater isolation for the terrorists. Even Iran, itself no friend of America, will require little prompting to observe a benevolent neutrality in the event of an American attack on the Taliban, should they prove to have been involved. The Taliban, by murdering Iranian diplomats and slaughtering Afghan Shi'a Muslims, have achieved the remarkable feat of displacing America as the main object of Iranian fear and hate. Pakistan, a close supporter and ultimately the creator of the Taliban, will need to be quietly reminded of its utter dependence on American assistance. With the U.S. increasingly willing to take India seriously as a potential ally, General Pervez Musharraf should have little difficulty in choosing between an alliance with Kabul and an alliance with Washington.

As for the Taliban themselves, they have repeatedly made it clear that they are uninterested in offers of diplomatic recognition in return for handing over terrorist suspects. Given the contempt in which the Taliban hold the rest of the world, recognition carries few benefits. On the contrary, recognition implies the presence of prying diplomats, questioning foreigners challenging the Taliban's brutal treatment of the long-suffering population of Afghanistan. The temptation should therefore be resisted to issue an ultimatum to the Taliban, as that will simply give them the opportunity to defy it. There are times when American policy can be a little too open, when discussions seem to take place as much in the columns of the Washington Post as in the White House. Openness with allies is vital, but enemies must be left in doubt. The terrorists must be forced to go through the same uncertainty as Americans themselves, to constantly ask themselves when and how the responses will come, until time and again it is too late.

Any assistance offered by Russia and China, normally unlikely and unpalatable allies, should also be accepted, even solicited. Both countries crave to be accepted as America's equal, to have their great power status, respectively declining and rising, acknowledged. Here is their opportunity to show that they can use their power responsibly.

The terrorists will in time learn the unpleasant lesson that they have fundamentally changed American military doctrine. No American officer will argue that retaliation operations are undesirable because they might lead to casualties. The absurd doctrine of "force protection," under which the prime goal of America's armed forces is to protect themselves, will wither away. Armed forces exist to win wars, not to keep out of trouble.

The responses of America and her allies must therefore be as cold, calculated, determined, focused, and unrelenting as the attacks launched by the terrorists' themselves. There will be considerable frustration at the lack of an immediate response, at the necessary diplomatic campaign of coalition building. America's leader may be accused of indifference, even cowardice. They must keep their heads and show a determination and a pragmatism which may even disgust themselves. They must accept the need for a campaign that will last years. The American public will naturally express a raging appetite for revenge. Satisfy it too soon, with half measures, and the terrorists will be confirmed in their belief that they setting the pace in their long war of attrition. Let it be the other way around. America must attempt to set the rules, the pace and the battles, to take the initiative. This will be a long campaign. America must get off on the right foot.