[Peace-discuss] a major failure of leadership

[ppatton at uiuc.edu]

Bush War on Terror Deemed ''Major Failure of Leadership" by 
Critics
by Jim Lobe
 

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's three-year "war on 
terrorism" has amounted to a "major failure of leadership and 
makes Americans more vulnerable rather than more secure," 
according to a new report by Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), 
a network of mainly progressive policy and security analysts.

The report, 'A Secure America in a Secure World,' concludes 
that Washington's invasion of Iraq in 2003 has proven counter-
productive to U.S. anti-terrorism efforts and that the 
administration has failed to protect likely future terrorist 
targets at home, such as seaports and chemical plants.

"Not only has Bush failed to support effective reconstruction 
in Afghanistan, but his war and occupation in Iraq have made 
the United States more vulnerable and have opened a new front 
and recruiting tool for terrorists while diverting resources 
from essential homeland security efforts," according to the 
50-page report.

Moreover, the administration has undermined "the very values 
it claims to be defending" by, among other steps, weakening 
the rule of both international and domestic law, restricting 
civil liberties at home, and supporting dictatorial allies 
abroad, according to the report, which was issued on the eve 
of the third anniversary of al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on 
New York and the Pentagon Saturday.

The report, which was compiled by a task force of 23 experts, 
including former government officials who served under Ronald 
Reagan and Bill Clinton, was authored by FPIF director John 
Gershman who teaches at New York University's Robert Wagner 
School for Public Service. FPIF, which calls itself a ''think 
tank without walls'', is a joint project of the Washington-
based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the 
Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) in New Mexico.

The task force included Robert Edgar, general secretary of 
the National Council of Churches (NCC); William Hartung, an 
arms expert at the World Policy Institute (WPI) in New York 
City; David Cortwright, the president of the Fourth Freedom 
Forum; Lawrence Korb, a senior Pentagon official under Reagan 
who is current with the Center for American Progress; and 
Michael Klare, a prolific author on U.S. foreign policy and 
conflicts in the Third World based at Hampshire College in 
Massachusetts.

In addition to criticizing the Bush administration’s counter-
terrorism initiatives, the report also offers detailed 
recommendations of its own, many of which overlap with those 
proposed by the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry.

The task force called generally for shifting many of the 
resources that have been channeled to the Pentagon to other 
departments consist with the report's views that the military 
and war itself may not be the most effective mechanisms for 
dealing with the many aspects of a comprehensive counter-
terrorism strategy.

According to one study by the Center for Defense Information 
(CDI), about two-thirds of the increase in last year's 
Pentagon's budget funded programs and activities that are 
largely irrelevant to either homeland security or counter-
terrorism operations.

In particular, the report urges shifting some US$5 billion a 
year in Pentagon funds to the Container Security Initiative 
to increase port container inspection tenfold, while doubling 
Coast Guard and Border Patrol programs at an additional cost 
of some $11 billion annually.

It noted that the government currently is spending more money 
every three days on the war in Iraq than it has spent on 
ensuring the security of the country's 361 commercial 
seaports over the past three years.

It also calls for adding $10 billion a year in federal 
support for local first responders, including local police, 
firemen, hospitals, while training National Guards units to 
work closely with emergency responders.

But much of the report is devoted to a critique of the 
administration's record over the past three years -- above 
all, its decision to invade and occupy -- a decision which, 
the London-based International Institute for Strategic 
Studies (IISS) concluded in a recent study, has ''accelerated 
recruitment'' for al Qaeda and like-minded groups in the 
Islamic world, an assessment widely shared by current and 
former U.S. intelligence officials, including Richard Clark 
and "Anonymous," the senior CIA official who recently 
published 'Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on 
Terror.'

The task force accuses the administration over-militarizing 
the response to al Qaeda not only in its invasion of Iraq, 
but also in enshrining ''preventive war'' in U.S. national 
security strategy, setting the stage for a sharp rise in 
tensions worldwide.

The White House, according to the report, has also failed to 
ensure sharing of critical intelligence both among 
intelligence agencies and between federal and local agencies, 
even while it cut by some $2 billion this year in crime-
prevention and public-safety programs.

The administration has also taken a "hands-off approach" to 
ensuring the security of much of the nation's basic 
infrastructure, about 85 percent of which is owned or 
controlled by the private sector. The chemical industry, for 
example, has successfully stalled efforts at enhancing 
security at the 123 plants and facilities where a release of 
chemicals could threaten the lives and health of more than 
one million people, the report charges.

According to a recent Council on Foreign Relations report 
cited by the task force, the administration's plans to fund 
federal, state, and local first responders will fall short by 
about $100 billion over the next five years.

On the foreign-policy front, the administration's clear 
hostility to multilateral institutions has not only increased 
resentment towards the U.S. among foreign governments and 
their publics, but has also undermined prospects for arms-
control efforts that are vital to efforts to control and 
reduce the global supply of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Washington must do far more to support the Chemical and 
Biological Weapons Conventions, the Missile Technology 
Control Regime, the Fissile Material Control Regime, the 
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and the Comprehensive Test 
Ban Treaty, according to the report which noted that Bush 
ambiguous, if not hostile positions on some of these treaties 
makes it more, rather than less likely that terrorists will 
acquire WMD.

Finally, Washington must enhance its ability to respond 
quickly to failed or failing states by expanding support for 
UN and other peacekeeping initiatives and devote more of its 
own forces to such missions, end U.S. financial and military 
backing for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, 
and reduce its dependence on oil imports from repressive 
governments in the Middle East and elsewhere, according to 
the report. 
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Dr. Paul Patton
Research Scientist
Beckman Institute  Rm 3027  405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  Urbana, Illinois 61801
work phone: (217)-265-0795   fax: (217)-244-5180
home phone: (217)-344-5812
homepage: http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ppatton/www/index.html

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
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