Fighting the long war

guardian.co.uk
Fighting the long war
The Guardian

No one ever accused Donald Rumsfeld of thinking small - except about the number of US troops needed to secure the peace after the war he helped mastermind in Iraq. So it is perhaps no surprise that the Pentagon's four-yearly defence review seeks no less than to define our era. The man who served as America's youngest defence secretary during the 45-year period we remember as the cold war argues that we are now living through the "Long War", and has set out his programme - a mixture of spin and strategy - for the next two decades.

Little of it is about the usual stuff of such reviews: plenty of ships, planes and other hardware survive intact, delighting defence contractors and Wall Street. US military thinkers are dismayed that one lesson of Iraq has not been learned and that there is no provision for putting more boots on the ground - though there are plans for smaller, agile, special forces units and better covert intelligence-gathering. This is linked to the perceived nature of the new threat: transnational terrorism - the "ism" that replaces the decades-long 20th-century struggles against fascism and communism.

It would be foolish to argue that the world's only superpower does not need to think about security in a coherent and integrated manner. In its more modest way the UK is doing something similar, as Gordon Brown showed this week. But beyond the $513bn annual price tag for US taxpayers, there are questionable assumptions and dangers in this review. America's enemies may be ruthless, but are they really trying to destroy its way of life? Are Osama bin Laden and co. truly on the same level as Hitler or Stalin? Elevating terrorism to the level of an ideology risks exaggerating the importance of a modus operandi - though the fear of an al-Qaida-type nuclear, chemical or biological attack cannot be avoided - and underplaying the need to tackle motivation. Above all is the danger that the concept of endless war will be self-perpetuating, a permanent recruiting sergeant for the jihadist cause. Root causes, it goes without saying, matter more than their symptoms, however menacing.

Many Americans who are angry about 2,200 dead soldiers in Iraq and the collateral damage caused by the "war on terror" to their own cherished liberties are unhappy enough that Mr Rumsfeld is still in charge at the Pentagon. European allies digesting his 92-page text are likely to be concerned by the likelihood of more pre-emptive attacks launched by Predator drones against suspected terrorists, killing innocents along the way. The document refers to the need to work with allies though Nato's post-9/11 experience shows that when the US is in the driving seat, it is very hard to get it to budge. Europeans now expanding their dangerous Afghan mission will need to make bigger efforts to wield the influence they should.

Some lessons have been learned: a global reach requires greater familiarity with far-flung corners of the world. The review sensibly acknowledges that future campaigns will require US personnel to "understand foreign cultures and societies ... to train, mentor and advise foreign security forces". Having more soldiers and spies who can speak Arabic and Farsi is fine, but Americans will have to think harder about Islam and democracy. Hamas is a problem in Palestine. But so was Mr Rumsfeld's recent security and energy-focused visit to an Algeria still scarred by a terrible civil war that erupted when free elections were scrapped.

Like globalisation and the weather, American dominance is just part of life, whether we like or not. Not much can be done about it, even by China, the biggest conventional threat to US hegemony. But Mr Rumsfeld's bleak view of the future begs the question of whether even the longest war against terrorism is winnable in any real sense - and whether our world can really look forward to the day when this 21st century "ism" becomes just another "wasm".