PRESIDENT BUSH was right Wednesday morning when he looked up from his cabinet meeting to announce: "The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war." But war to what end? What do the initiators of this war seek to achieve? What must we accomplish in response?
The short answer is this: Our adversaries want to push the United States out of the Middle East. Our response must be to prevent that.
This will require more than a vague, unfocused "war on terrorism." Yes, there is an informal global network of terrorists. But no one believes that this week’s attacks came from Colombian "narcoterrorists," Southeast Asian drug lords, or the Russian mafia. The attacks came from the Middle East. They are the continuation of a long-running struggle to force the United States out of the region, and especially out of the Persian Gulf.
This struggle took on renewed life with the end of the Cold War, first with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and continuing through the 1995 Riyadh and 1996 Khobar Towers bombings in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the "millennium" plot to bomb the Los Angeles airport in 1999, and the attempt last year to send the USS Cole to the bottom of the harbor in Yemen. Last week’s strikes represent a new and more complex phase of this war. But this is not a new war. This is a
"theater war" in the classic sense. Neither Usama bin Laden nor Saddam cares much about America's role in Europe or East Asia. They want us out of their region.
Nor is this a generalized war on American values or political principles. Yes, Saddam and Usama bin Laden despise the ideas of individual freedom and democratic government. They see our way of life as a mortal threat. But what they hate most is that America and its allies prevent them from seizing control of Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region, whether to rule in triumph or fundamentalist glory.
So the war is a struggle for power in the Persian Gulf. How can we win it?
We win by reasserting our role as the region's dominant power; as the guarantor of regional security; and as the protector of Israel, moderate Arab regimes, and the economic interests of the industrialized world. These are enduring tasks for the United States.
Our position in the Gulf has been under attack since the end of Desert Storm and the decision not to remove Saddam from power in Baghdad. As Saddam has crawled back from defeat—evicting U.N. monitors, rebuilding his forces—bin Laden has grown increasingly bold. Meanwhile, our regional allies have begun to hedge their bets, not only with the terrorists and Iraq, but with Iran as well.
Any serious effort to reassert U.S. preeminence in the region must therefore be built upon a sustained campaign that addresses not just the problems of bin Laden and other terrorist organizations but the underlying strategic goal that animates them and their allied states.
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