Nothing But Words

Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine did a cover story on Kerry. It was a weird article. The first section was a fluff piece that played into the negative “flip-flopper” Kerry caricature. The middle section was badly put together, and has provided ammunition for the latest Republican attacks on Kerry, saying he doesn’t understand terrorism. Then the last section is very well put together and substantial: it clearly lays out just how differently Kerry would approach terrorism. It’s made me an even stronger Kerry supporter: as Richard Clarke (former counter-terrorism czar) put it, Kerry “gets it.” I’ve excerpted the key portions below.

…through his BCCI investigation [into international money laundering], Kerry did discover that a wide array of international criminals — Latin American drug lords, Palestinian terrorists, arms dealers — had one thing in common: they were able to move money around through the same illicit channels. And he worked hard, and with little credit, to shut those channels down.

In 1988, Kerry successfully proposed an amendment that forced the Treasury Department to negotiate so-called Kerry Agreements with foreign countries. Under these agreements, foreign governments had to promise to keep a close watch on their banks for potential money laundering or they risked losing their access to U.S. markets. Other measures Kerry tried to pass throughout the 90′s, virtually all of them blocked by Republican senators on the banking committee, would end up, in the wake of 9/11, in the USA Patriot Act; among other things, these measures subject banks to fines or loss of license if they don’t take steps to verify the identities of their customers and to avoid being used for money laundering.

Through his immersion in the global underground, Kerry made connections among disparate criminal and terrorist groups that few other senators interested in foreign policy were making in the 90′s. Richard A. Clarke, who coordinated security and counterterrorism policy for George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, credits Kerry with having seen beyond the national-security tableau on which most of his colleagues were focused. ”He was getting it at the same time that people like Tony Lake were getting it, in the ’93 -’94 time frame,” Clarke says, referring to Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security adviser. ”And the ‘it’ here was that there was a new nonstate-actor threat, and that nonstate-actor threat was a blended threat that didn’t fit neatly into the box of organized criminal, or neatly into the box of terrorism. What you found were groups that were all of the above.”

In other words, Kerry was among the first policy makers in Washington to begin mapping out a strategy to combat an entirely new kind of enemy. Americans were conditioned, by two world wars and a long standoff with a rival superpower, to see foreign policy as a mix of cooperation and tension between civilized states. Kerry came to believe, however, that Americans were in greater danger from the more shadowy groups he had been investigating — nonstate actors, armed with cellphones and laptops — who might detonate suitcase bombs or release lethal chemicals into the subway just to make a point. They lived in remote regions and exploited weak governments. Their goal wasn’t to govern states but to destabilize them.

The challenge of beating back these nonstate actors — not just Islamic terrorists but all kinds of rogue forces — is what Kerry meant by ”the dark side of globalization.” He came closest to articulating this as an actual foreign-policy vision in a speech he gave at U.C.L.A. last February. ”The war on terror is not a clash of civilizations,” he said then. ”It is a clash of civilization against chaos, of the best hopes of humanity against dogmatic fears of progress and the future.”

This stands in significant contrast to the Bush doctrine, which holds that the war on terror, if not exactly a clash of civilizations, is nonetheless a struggle between those states that would promote terrorism and those that would exterminate it. Bush, like Kerry, accepts the premise that America is endangered mainly by a new kind of adversary that claims no state or political entity as its own. But he does not accept the idea that those adversaries can ultimately survive and operate independently of states; in fact, he asserts that terrorist groups are inevitably the subsidiaries of irresponsible regimes. ”We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients,” the National Security Strategy said, in a typical passage, ”before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends.”

By singling out three states in particular- Iraq, North Korea and Iran — as an ”axis of evil,” and by invading Iraq on the premise that it did (or at least might) sponsor terrorism, Bush cemented the idea that his war on terror is a war against those states that, in the president’s words, are not with us but against us. Many of Bush’s advisers spent their careers steeped in cold-war strategy, and their foreign policy is deeply rooted in the idea that states are the only consequential actors on the world stage, and that they can — and should — be forced to exercise control over the violent groups that take root within their borders.

Kerry’s view, on the other hand, suggests that it is the very premise of civilized states, rather than any one ideology, that is under attack. And no one state, acting alone, can possibly have much impact on the threat, because terrorists will always be able to move around, shelter their money and connect in cyberspace; there are no capitals for a superpower like the United States to bomb, no ambassadors to recall, no economies to sanction. The U.S. military searches for bin Laden, the Russians hunt for the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev and the Israelis fire missiles at Hamas bomb makers; in Kerry’s world, these disparate terrorist elements make up a loosely affiliated network of diabolical villains, more connected to one another by tactics and ideology than they are to any one state sponsor. The conflict, in Kerry’s formulation, pits the forces of order versus the forces of chaos, and only a unified community of nations can ensure that order prevails.

One can infer from this that if Kerry were able to speak less guardedly, in a less treacherous atmosphere than a political campaign, he might say, as some of his advisers do, that we are not in an actual war on terror. Wars are fought between states or between factions vying for control of a state; Al Qaeda and its many offspring are neither. If Kerry’s foreign-policy frame is correct, then law enforcement probably is the most important, though not the only, strategy you can employ against such forces, who need passports and bank accounts and weapons in order to survive and flourish. Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler and Stalin — and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind of stature that might actually work in their favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits.

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The neo-conservatives have advanced a viral theory of democracy. In their view, establishing a model democracy in the Arab world, by force if necessary, no matter how many years and lives it takes, would ultimately benefit not only the people of that country but also America too. A free and democratic Iraq, to take the favorite example, will cause the people of other repressive countries in the region to rise up and demand American-style freedom, and these democratic nations will no longer be breeding pools for nihilistic terrorists. Like so much of Bush’s policy, this kind of thinking harks directly back to the cold war. The domino theory that took hold during the 1950′s maintained that an ideological change in one nation — ”going” communist or democratic — could infect its neighbor; it was based in part on the idea that ideologies could be contagious.

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Those who know Kerry say [his beliefs are] in part a reaction to his own experience in Vietnam, where one understanding of the domino theory (”if Vietnam goes communist, all of Asia will fall”) led to the death of 58,000 Americans, and another (”the South Vietnamese crave democracy”) ran up against the realities of life in a poor, long-war-ravaged country. The people of Vietnam, Kerry found, were susceptible neither to the dogma of communism nor the persuasiveness of American ”liberation.” As the young Kerry said during his 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: ”We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace.”

Biden, who is perhaps Kerry’s closest friend in the Senate, suggests that Kerry sees Bush’s advisers as beholden to the same grand and misguided theories. ”John and I never believed that, if you were successful in Iraq, you’d have governments falling like dominoes in the Middle East,” he told me. ”The neo-cons of today are ‘the best and the brightest’ who brought us Vietnam. They have taken a construct that’s flawed and applied it to a world that isn’t relevant.”

In fact, Kerry and his advisers contend that the occupation of Iraq is creating a reverse contagion in the region; they say the fighting — with its heavy civilian casualties and its pictures, beamed throughout the Arab world, of American aggression — has been a boon to Al Qaeda recruiters. They frequently cite a Pentagon memo, leaked to the media last year, in which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wondered whether Al Qaeda was recruiting new terrorists faster than the U.S. military could capture or kill them. ”God help us if we damage the shrine in Najaf,” Richard Holbrooke told me on a day when marines surrounded insurgent Shiites inside the shrine, ”and we create a new group of Shiites who some years from now blow up the Statue of Liberty or something like that, all because we destroyed the holiest site in Shiism.”