The War of Unintended Consequences

How (Not?) to Fight Terrorism

Surprise, Surprise

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon:

Richard Falkenrath does not like our book The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right ("Grading the War on Terrorism," January/February 2006). He says it is "a disappointment" and "a polemic" filled with "sweeping assertions," riddled with "dubious claims," and tainted by "sloppy documentation." In parts, it is "superficial," "scattershot," and chock-a-block with "exaggerations, misinterpretations, and errors."

These charges do not surprise us. After all, The Next Attack sharply criticizes the Bush administration's conduct in the war on jihadist terrorism, and Falkenrath is a long-standing member -- albeit a junior one -- of the Bush inner circle. He worked on the administration's transition to power in 2000 and then in various positions dealing with weapons-proliferation issues and homeland security. According to an online biography, he was "one of the architects of the Department of Homeland Security and the principal author of the National Strategy for Homeland Security."

Since he left the government in 2004, Falkenrath has been a devoted defender of the administration and a reflexive critic of its detractors, including as a spokesman for the Bush campaign. Most recently, he criticized the final report of the bipartisan 9/11 Public Discourse Project (an organization created by the members of the 9/11 Commission) on the administration's counterterrorism and homeland security efforts. Falkenrath called the report, which gave the administration's performance mostly low to failing grades, "very superficial" and argued that its authors had "cheapened their own moral authority and reputation."

So it is hardly shocking that Falkenrath would loathe a book that reviewers for publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Economist have praised lavishly. Beneath the impasto of pejoratives, we cannot discern an argument in Falkenrath's review of our book. His article is reminiscent of the classic Monty Python skit about the man who goes to the argument store in search of debate but whose every claim is met with just flat contradiction. The Next Attack grapples with jihadist terrorism, a phenomenon deeply rooted in the social and political conditions of Muslims around the world and the debate over what it means to be Muslim. To our knowledge, Falkenrath has never published a word on terrorism per se, Islam, the politics and sociology of the Muslim world, or, for that matter, U.S. policy toward Muslim countries -- which may explain his fact-free fusillade.

FROM BAD TO WORSE

The Next Attack grew out of our conviction that the Bush administration has failed to understand two central lessons of 9/11. First, there are terrorist groups today that operate independently of state support and pose as serious a strategic threat as rogue states. Second, because of radical Islamism's ideological nature, Washington's approach to Islamist terrorists must be different from its approach to rogue states. Of course, Islamist terrorists must be captured or killed and their networks disrupted. But to stop their movement's growth, their ideology must also be undermined.

The Bush administration has insisted on seeing jihadist terrorism as dependent on rogue states such as Iraq. "Terrorist organizations cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long periods of time to do large-scale operations if they don't have support from states," former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith told The New Yorker in 2003, adding that this belief was "one of the principal strategic thoughts underlying our strategy in the war on terrorism." Armed with a few related contentions regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the United States invaded Iraq.

The Next Attack demonstrates how the war and the occupation have played, ideologically, tactically, and strategically, into the hands of the United States' enemies. The book documents how, for some Muslims, the invasion of Iraq confirmed Osama bin Laden's argument that the United States and its allies seek to occupy Muslim countries, steal their wealth, and destroy Islam. We describe in the book the emergence since 9/11 of a new generation of "self-starter" terrorists, among them Mohammed Bouyeri, who assassinated the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004, and the bombers who attacked Madrid's public transportation system in 2004 and London's in 2005. These terrorists have few or no connections to al Qaeda but are inspired by the group's ideology.

Falkenrath pooh-poohs our evaluation of this new phenomenon as "thoroughly mainstream ... [and already] purveyed by most outside experts as well as U.S. intelligence analysts and government officials, including President [George W.] Bush." Clearly, he has not understood the argument. We claim that most self-starters have been animated by the spread of jihadist ideology, which has been accelerated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. President Bush has gone to great lengths to deny these connections, and Falkenrath echoes him. Of our contention that Iraq is driving radicalization, Falkenrath says that it is "only a hypothesis: plausible but not proven."