Nate Knows Nada

Yesterday, on one of the news programs (I think it was “Face the
Nation”), Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, in discussing links to Al
Qaeda in the terrorist attacks in Spain, noted, “The–the one thing I
would say is there seem to be growing connections between terrorist
organizations.”

It’s one line in a one-hour program, but it was noteworthy enough to
put on the evening news broadcast in my market (Boston).  And
so,
good political theorist and scientist that I am, I ask, “What does it
mean?”

Well, we know that this is an administration scrupulous about its control
of message to the press (to the extent that it is now
producing its own “news” segments for local news).  So it’s
hard to believe that anything is a throw-away comment.

The comment Rumsfeld made immediately struck me as the opening for
the
next phase of our national war on terror.  We’ve “dealt”
with
Iraq, we’re supposedly mounting a spring offensive against the
Pashtun
region of Pakistan-Afghanistan to find Osama, and we’ve aggressively
asserted the idea that we will root our terror wherever it
exists.

If terror groups are building linkages to one another, then there are
two consequences for American foreign policy and the world. 

1. We can further expand our presence around the world (at
   least
   theoretically, if not materially or militarily — even our military
   has
   limits).  If all fights are parts of the war on terror, then
   we
   become part of all of them.
    
2. Consequently, we can continue to not find Al Qaeda, because we
   will fight a proxy war with people acting at his behest.

What’s funny is that we’ve been to number one before — it greatly
resembles our anti-Communist policy of the Cold War — with a couple
of
important exceptions.  First, we’re fighting a set of
ideologies,
instead of one.  Yeah, there’s Islamist totalitarianism, but if
we
link all the terrorist groups together, we’re lumping Islamists with
nationalists with directionless rebels.  Second, unlike with
Communist states that we can arrive at some accommodation with after
negotiation, there’s no one to talk to in the case of
terrorists. 
So we’re constantly in a state of playing reaction games, rather than
being able to make initial moves of our own.