Foreign Policy: War on Terror

Foreign Policy: War on Terror

President Bush has recently supported the idea that the United States is winning the global war on terror. To support this assertion, he pointed out to the fact that 9/11 was the only terrorist threat to occur on the American soil over the last five years and that, despite the initial bleak perspective, no other attacks occurred in the aftermath.

On the other hand, there are still numerous voices, from all parts of the civil society and including all political parties involved, that insist towards the fact that not only the war on terror is not won, but it is still far from being decided and far from being one. The article the Terrorism Index investigates some of the arguments brought forwards by those supporting this idea.

According to the persons questioned, there are two main flaws in the war against global terrorism. The first flaw is related to the policy initiatives that the Bush administration has decided to use in this war. First of all, the way that the U.S. has handled the other poles of terrorism, including North Korea and, possibly, Iran, as the so-called rogue states is deemed unacceptable. Further more, the U.S. administration have chosen a rather single-handed war rather than a closer collaboration with its European allies, while the detention of the suspected terrorists in Cuba (along with the CIA jails scandal currently under progress) did nothing but affect the American image over the world rather than gain new allies.

The second flaw is the national security apparatus, with almost all areas directly responsible for the organization of the war on terror and terrorism response deemed to be operating under their real capacity and underperforming.

Investigating the assertions of the article, we can draw several conclusions on its objectivity and applicability to real facts. First of all, the facts are indeed that the American soil has not been attacked since the 9/11 attacks. That is an undeniable fact and we can indeed base this on the successes of the Bush administration, especially on the informational community that was keen to gather the facts and react on them so as to stop any such attempts. It is difficult to state that the national security apparatus is underperforming when you have clear statistical results: no attacks in the last five years. This means that something must be functioning at full parameters there and that the informational community is also operating with those in other countries to obtain these results (the attacks planned for London and stopped are a good example in this sense).

On the other hand, a counter argument to this statement is that the war is not against national terrorism: it is a global war on global terrorism, the U.S. have pledged to wipe out terrorism on a global scale and this, as shown in the article, is not yet giving full results. Indeed, the attacks in London and Madrid are a good example in this sense, if we consider only some of the most important cases of extremist Arab terrorism.