Fighting Terror the Hard Way

While I was in Kurdistan, I picked up a bootleg DVD version of The Kingdom, the action movie with Jamie Foxx leading a band of maverick FBI agents into Saudi Arabia to hunt down a terrorist mastermind responsible for killing American oil service workers. The movie is good fluffy fun, despite (or perhaps because of) the improbable scenes where Saudi police allow hottie Jennifer Garner to run around the world's most conservative society in a tank-top.

Film reviewers have made much of the fact that one of the main characters -- a Saudi family man/supercop -- represents a more nuanced portrayal of Arabs than is typical of Hollywood racial typecasting. But at it's core, The Kingdom is an old fashioned celebration of American power. If the governments of sandy, Muslim countries don't tackle terror themselves, we'll do it for them -- the hard way.

Though the Iraq disaster may have humbled neo-conservatives and their cheerleaders, their interventionist spirit is still alive, and not just on the big screen. Today's New York Times Op-Ed by Max Boot, a defense analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, called for the U.S. to reorient itself for a global counter-insurgecy against Islamic terrorism that can't be won by force alone. Boot wants the State Department to focus on building foreign governments and developing institutions, while the Army should create a whole new corps of special advisors and police to train the security services of faithful allies in the war on terror.

All of this is sound advice, but I wish Boot had given it before the U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time however, he was busy praising Donald Rumsfeld and the new American way of war -- precision munitions, blitzkireg invasions, and few boots on the ground -- that made our military un-defeatable by any force in the world, except the bands of insurgents who we are actually fighting now.

Perhaps the U.S. still has time to put these new counter-insurgency doctrines to good use in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I'm not sure how these theories can be applied to the rest of the world. Just what new governments of which countries will the United States be building from scratch in the near future? Egads! Is he thinking about Iran? Barring another American invasion, the countries that need our help in the greater Middle East are ether very fragile such as Lebanon (where the arrival of American "advisors" could spark a civil war) or ruled by dictatorships such as Pakistan, where we can't exactly train President Musharraf's police to help maintain emergency rule.

It would be nice to think that special FBI teams can fly around the world and win the war on terror for us. In The Kingdom, the Feds get their man, pumping lead into the dastardly kaffiyeh-wearing Abu Hamza. But one wonders how many jihadis would be created if in real life machine gun-toting American police shot up a neighborhood in Riyadh. Perhaps the film aknowleges this, when the wounded Abu Hamza whispers to his grandson: "We won't stop until we've killed them all!" Or perhaps the filmmakers were just prepping us for a sequel.

The problem is that whether we send in the cops, or we send in State Department aid officers, a large number of people in the Middle East no longer trusts us. We can't just reorganize the government to fight the global Islamic insurgency. We also need to reorient our policies -- our support for dictatorships, our petro-politics, and our uneven role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- that weaken moderates and inflame the small but growing number of radicals. That might not be the "hard" way to fight terror, but it's the right way.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut