Bush Works to Define a War Without Clear Lines

When President Bush declared war on terrorism immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, he warned Americans not to expect anything like the wars of the past.

“It is a different type of battle. It’s a different type of battlefield. It’s a different type of war. And that, in itself, is going to be a real challenge for America,” he said in words and phrases repeated many times.

In its first two weeks, the war on terrorism has indeed proved to be different--but not primarily in the ways Bush has been talking about. And the greatest challenge may be to the president himself.

By defining the fight as a unique, all-out war to eradicate terrorism, Bush scored large short-term gains with a public that was itching for a fight after the carnage of Sept. 11 in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. Yet he may have set the stage for long-term public disillusionment and a failure of leadership.

The Sept. 11 attacks were so horrific and claimed so many lives that a presidential response on the scale of Pearl Harbor was almost inevitable. Bush’s pledge to root out the “evildoers” and eradicate terrorism was in the tradition of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other great wartime leaders.

“It’s not surprising. It’s not unprecedented,” said historian Michael Sherry. “But it does set up extremely high expectations for what the war is supposed to accomplish. The risk comes if the achievement fails to match what was promised.”

Sherry, a Northwestern University professor who has studied the way Americans and their leaders wage war, notes that Bush’s father faced similar difficulties after painting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as a latter-day Hitler but failing to destroy him.

What distinguishes the younger Bush’s war on terrorism from other conflicts, and poses a potentially serious threat to his leadership, is the nature of the enemy. Unlike the Axis powers of World War II, the Communist foes of the Cold War or Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, Bush has not vowed to rid the world of a hostile country or a conquest-minded ideology.

Rather, he has promised to eliminate an old and extremely simple idea about using violence and fear. That may be a hard promise to keep. Individual terrorists can be caught, specific organizations destroyed, but the idea of terrorism seems certain to live on. So will U.S. vulnerability.

“A lot of people around the country think that they’re going to eradicate terrorism forever,” said Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant Defense secretary in the Reagan administration.

But in fact, said Korb, now a senior official at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations, “it’s like the War on Poverty or the War on Drugs. We’ll never get rid of poverty, we’ll never get rid of drugs, and we’re not going to get rid of terrorists.”

As far back as the 19th century, violent anti-colonial groups targeting Britain and other Western European countries employed terror to further their goals.

For more than a century, weaker groups and countries have resorted to stealthy, often random violence against powerful countries. Indeed, terrorism--while always horrendous in its impact--is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. Violence-prone members of the African National Congress, for instance, were terrorists to South Africa’s government but freedom fighters to some opponents of apartheid.

The State Department’s current list of foreign terrorist organizations, while heavily tilted toward such groups as Al Qaeda, Abu Nidal Organization and Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine, also provides a quick guide to terrorism’s global scope and sometimes ambiguous nature.

Peru’s Shining Path, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and Aum Supreme Truth--the group that released nerve gas in a Tokyo subway--also are on the list, as are the Real Irish Republican Army and the violently pro-Israel Kahane Chai, both of which have attracted support from Americans. (Cuban diplomats argue that anti-Castro extremists in South Florida have engaged in terrorism for years, while Washington looked the other way.)

Given such factors, neither terrorist tactics nor the temptation to use them will be easily eliminated.

In his speeches, Bush has suggested that what sets the war on terrorism apart is the lack of well-defined battle lines and military objectives. That, he says, demands new, more diverse U.S. tactics.

“In the past, there have been beaches to storm, islands to conquer,” he said on one occasion.

“The American people must understand this war on terrorism will be fought on a variety of fronts, in different ways. The front lines will look different from the wars of the past,” he told another audience.

The first five weeks, however, have looked remarkably familiar.

Using teams of Special Forces to carry out nearly invisible missions deep in enemy territory? That was done more than a decade ago in Panama and the Persian Gulf War for target spotting, tactical intelligence gathering and other assignments.

Sending cruise missiles, stealth bombers and wave after wave of land- and sea-based planes to establish control of the skies and destroy air defenses, communication systems and command centers before launching conventional attacks?

That’s been basic U.S. war-fighting doctrine and practice for years. It was the early air attacks on Hussein by Bush’s father that taught Americans to recognize the distinctive television images of smart bombs in action.

Somalia was the textbook case of commando raids aimed at decapitating the enemy by hitting top leadership, and of the grief such missions can entail.

Aerial gunships, nicknamed “Spookies” in earlier times, have provided flying artillery since the Vietnam War.

Nor is there anything new about conducting economic warfare, using humanitarian aid to woo the local population away from hostile leaders or forging impromptu alliances with opposition groups.

And in Bosnia-Herzegovina, one among many possible examples, the United States allied itself with an anti-Serbian guerrilla group whose tactics and values were as problematic as those of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance.

If the tactics and strategies seem familiar, some analysts say the breadth of the operations against terrorism, and the urgency of the threat, call for an unprecedented level of cooperation within the federal government and between Washington and state and local agencies.

“The most significant way in which this is different is that you are operating in an area where you need much closer military-civilian collaboration than in the past,” said Skip Williams, a senior analyst at the Santa Monica-based Rand Corp. think tank.

Though the responsibility and the expertise for handling the various facets of the challenge--military, intelligence, criminal, medical, economic, diplomatic, political, etc.--reside in different agencies and different levels of government, ways must be found to bring them all together.

“The requirement for coordination has always been there in the past, but this particular situation requires a lot more cooperation--and a lot more understanding of what we are trying to do,” Williams said.

However much the war on terrorism may or may not resemble America’s earlier wars at the operational level, the way Bush has defined the challenge and rallied the nation has deep roots in U.S. history.

“He’s taken all the normal steps that presidents take before starting into wars. Invariably presidents try to create a righteous position, a position of moral rectitude,” says James Hilty, a Temple University specialist on the presidency.

The traditional U.S. approach to war, from Abraham Lincoln to Roosevelt, has been maximum mobilization in a just cause, maximum application of force in all its aspects, and insistence on unconditional victory.

“Once we’re in it, it’s generally war to the end--that’s the American way of war,” Hilty said. “Bush has positioned us for almost exactly that kind of warfare with his language. . . . We are all part of the army now. We’ve all enlisted for the duration.”

To a considerable degree, events gave Bush few alternatives.

The Sept. 11 attacks brought destruction of civilian lives on American soil on a scale unmatched in U.S. history. As bloody as Pearl Harbor and the major battles of the Civil War were, almost all of those who died were in uniform.

For Bush to have suggested a U.N. “police action,” as President Truman did in Korea, would have been unthinkable. So would the slow, piecemeal tactics used in Vietnam by presidents from John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon.

Pain, sacrifice, bloodshed on a massive scale, even setbacks: The public has endured all these repeatedly in past wars.

But in the end, it expects victory. Voters have not been kind to presidents who committed the country to limited wars with ambiguous goals and less than all-out effort.

Bush, by issuing traditional calls to arms, has thus far avoided that pitfall.

And, by insisting that this will be a different kind of war, he has won a degree of freedom to control expectations. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other officials have frequently deflected reporters’ questions about specific accomplishments by saying the war on terrorism cannot be measured by traditional means.

That is a valuable gain while the administration is mobilizing.

Nor is it inevitable that terrorist attacks on the scale of Sept. 11 will be repeated.

Once fully committed, the United States has enormous resources, including economic and political leverage that other countries could find hard to resist. America is the indispensable market for many countries.

“In the short term, we’ll see most countries in the world cracking down,” said Korb, the former Defense official.

The problem may be in the long term.

On Thursday, in his first public appearance in several weeks, Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated Bush’s total-war stance, telling a New York audience that the war against terrorists “can only end with their complete and permanent destruction.”

And Cheney spelled out the alternative to anything less than success. “For the first time in our history,” he said, “we will probably suffer more casualties here at home in America than will our troops overseas.”

If that proves true, Bush’s current high standing with voters could be shaken.

“Let’s say we get Osama bin Laden and we get a new government in Afghanistan, and six months from now [another terrorist strike] happens,” Korb said. “You’re going to say, ‘We thought we’d won.’

“And now what do we do?”