Our traditional policies: Lost in the rubble

The people in the World Trade Center and Pentagon were not the only casualties of the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the dead we can also count the comfortable American perception that we are immune from terrorist attacks and the viability of traditional American attitudes toward foreign policy threats. The reality of a borderless, compartmentalized, fanatically devoted enemy acting in complete defiance of all rules of international behavior poses a nightmare for American security analysts because it is unlike any threat we have had to face before. Some of our leaders have pointed to Osama bin Laden as a criminal who needs to be brought to justice; others have implicated several nations other than Afghanistan as national security threats and advocated attacking them as well. In addition to being divided on how to proceed on the international front, our leaders are also putting undue faith in the notion that "security upgrades" to American society can actually make us safe from terrorism.

In the past, American security analysts based their efforts on the premise that threats to America would come from foreign governments, headed by leaders who had an interest in maintaining their power. These assumptions are consistent with the principles of political realism, the dominant ideology driving American foreign policy. Political realism assumes that the primary actors in international relations are rational states and largely ignores the impact of international organizations and movements on state interaction. A foreign policy based on realism, coupled with reliance on deterrence and mutually assured destruction, worked wonders for the United States during the Cold War. In contrast, the emergence of international terrorism as a serious security threat calls into question the value of realism as a basis of foreign policy. It's not that realism is worthless or that it must be discarded as a policy guide. Rather, the assumptions underlying realism appear much less applicable in dealing with non-state threats like terrorism. Osama bin Laden neither commands a state nor seems motivated by an instinct for self-preservation, two norms we have relied on in previous conflicts. Instead of wanting to preserve his personal power, bin Laden has essentially punched a 900-pound gorilla in the face. Realists would assume that foreign governments would not want to provoke our country in such a way because of the severity of our presumed reaction; bin Laden has defied this key tenet of political realism.

Confusion about how to deal with terrorism has by no means been confined to international relations. Domestic leaders have been similarly confused about how to respond to the vulnerabilities made evident on Sept. 11. Their first instinct following the attacks was to start 'sealing off' any security holes in our society, but in truth our society is incapable of changing to the point where we are immune or even significantly resistant to terrorism.

The current batch of security changes does little to stop real terrorist attacks but instead just gives the public a false sense of security. In the last attack, our own airplanes were used to destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon, and it has since been revealed that airport security is painfully lax. So, our response has been to establish stricter safety measures at airport security checkpoints, to put air marshals on many flights and even to entertain the idea of giving pilots guns to defend themselves against hijackers.

Beyond preventing obvious opportunities to do spectacular damage in an attack, our "make America safe" attempt is a waste. America is not Achilles: There is no 'heel' that we can protect in order to achieve invincibility. One reason America is such a successful nation is that our society is as open and free as it is. Clamp down on one security hole and the terrorists will simply target another; stop airplane terrorism, and some other form of terrorism will evolve to take advantage of another weak point. Preventing hijackers from taking control of airplanes has obvious benefits, but many of our other responses to the terrorist attacks are simply propping up a false sense of security.

The fact that one deranged American with absolutely no state support could load up a U-Haul truck with fertilizer and gasoline and cause such tremendous damage in Oklahoma City provides stark evidence of this fact. Since it is perfectly legal to rent a U-Haul and buy fertilizer, what is stopping terrorists from renting 20 U-Hauls and simultaneously attacking 20 national landmarks? Even if you forget the U-Haul altogether, a simple plutonium-laced conventional bomb carried in a duffel bag is powerful enough to make the Capitol, State Department and Reagan Building ground zero. The bottom line is that trying to stop the physical act of terrorism is almost invariably futile; instead, we must put tremendous effort into destroying terrorism through extensive intelligence and far-reaching diplomacy. Strong-arm approaches rarely work in deterring terrorist sentiment, and even the most security-conscious societies remain open to attack, as evidenced by Israel's failure to protect its citizens from terror. I would personally rather live in a society that was relatively open to terrorist attacks and resembled America before Sept. 11 than one that had a false sense of security and resembled the state of Israel. We will have freedom without total security, or we will likely have fewer freedoms and no more security than before.

The recent attacks on the Taliban and terrorist bases within Afghanistan are consistent with the traditional prescriptions for what America should do when faced with a foreign policy threat, and they very well may successfully oust the Taliban and destroy much of the al-Qaida terrorist network. These are important first steps. By making the Taliban government an example of what will happen to governments that harbor terrorists, we can convince foreign leaders that in order to maintain their power they need to join our fight against terror. However, much more than bombs and soldiers are needed if we want to return to our former sense of security. Americans will have to face the fact that human intelligence is the key to destroying terrorist networks, and the methods employed by successful agents often clash with traditional American morality. The multinational alliance formed to root out and destroy terrorism and its supporters is another definite step in the right direction, but for the thrust to succeed we must ensure that every government in the world puts its full effort into exposing and eliminating terrorist organizations. We must attack terrorism where it festers. We cannot realistically hope to catch it when it arrives at our borders or our buildings, whether it happens to arrive by plane or by U-Haul. Closing our society in a futile attempt to make us safe from terrorism will bear little fruit. The very thing we attempt to protect will likely suffer most, for it will undermine the America that evil so wishes to destroy. David Sillers is from Potomac, MD. He can be reached at dsillers@princeton.edu.