Sound and fury signifying nothing

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): No, of course it didn't have anything to do with diverting attention from semen-stained dresses and the like. Shame on you for even entertaining the thought. The U.S. attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan were motivated solely by the desire to strike at the roots of international terrorism.

U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen told us so at great length, and President Bill Clinton himself confirmed it. It was the purest coincidence that the strikes went in on the day that Monica Lewinsky testified once more before the grand jury, and to suggest otherwise would be unpatriotic, nasty, and just plain wrong.

Nevertheless, there is a little detail that has not been adequately addressed. Just how do the people who ordered these attacks think that they are going to achieve their stated goal?

Is Osama bin Laden going to decide that spending his billions on leading an 'Islamic jihad' against 'the Crusaders (the West) and the Jews' is too dangerous, and take up gardening instead? Is the fundamentalist Taleban regime in Afghanistan (which has lost over a million lives in the fighting of the past fifteen years) going to panic and throw him out because a few more bombs fell on their territory?

Is the Sudanese regime going to drop its militantly 'Islamic' ideology, expel all the foreign militants who live there, and beg Washington's pardon (if it was indeed implicated in any way in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania last week, which remains to be seen)? Is anything going to change as a result of a few American cruise missiles on a factory in north Khartoum and a few clusters of buildings in the hills south of Kabul?

No, of course not. Nothing will change. Nothing concrete has been achieved, nor could be, by this kind of strike, nor has any useful or seriously frightening 'message' been sent to the alleged sponsors of the terrorism. Moreover, the few people in the Clinton administration in Washington who can add and do joined-up writing (and the rather larger number of competent professionals in the Pentagon) understand this very well.

It's not that you can never fight terrorism with air power. When Reagan sent U.S. bombers into Libya a decade ago he scared the bejesus out of Moammar Qaddafi, who promptly lost his previous enthusiasm for acts of international terrorism and has yet to regain it. But that was a big, serious raid, and one of its explicit aims was to kill Qaddafi himself as he slept. (It did kill his adopted daughter, and a number of other people close to him).

This stuff, by contrast, is just spitting in the wind. The 'six sites' in Osama bin Laden's 'terrorist complex' in Afghanistan contained at most 600 people on a busy day (out of the 5-6,000 that the U.S. estimates are financed by bin Laden), and there were no heavy or exotic weapons there. If a few hundred foot-soldiers of his jihad have been 'martyred' by the raid, what has bin Laden lost?

The 'chemical weapons factory' in Khartoum may actually have been making what Washington says it was. (Or it may not: intelligence on these matters is always dodgy). But if the Sudanese government was truly complicit in this activity, then it will be a matter of mere months to start the work up again in another building. If the U.S was really serious about eliminating this alleged terrorist threat, it would have to go after the Sudanese government.

But that would be a very large undertaking, even against such a ramshackle and misgoverned state as Sudan. It would have huge military costs, and cause enormous political difficulties for the United States with its allies, with its friends in Africa and the Middle East, and with the United Nations.

Nobody loves the Sudanese regime, but it makes people uneasy when the United States just invades countries that annoy it (Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, etc.).

The 'Qaddafi' option -- trying to kill Hassan al-Turabi, the man who really rules Sudan -- is an obvious non-starter. Unlike Qaddafi, he doesn't sleep in isolated military camps. He lives and works in the middle of Khartoum, and even if you could find him, you'd have to bomb heavily built-up areas to have a chance of hitting him.

There is also the consideration that it would be a strategic error to remove a dreamy fantasist like al-Turabi from power if the long-term U.S. aim is to destroy Sudan's Islamic regime. His inept government controls only half the country in the daylight hours, and a good deal less at night. Give him five more years in power, and there will be no more Sudan, just smaller successor states.

As for 'getting' Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, that would require sending in large military forces to overthrow the Taleban regime that protects him. As previous invaders of Afghanistan like the British and Russians would freely attest, that would be suicidally stupid. The Pentagon, which now exercises an effective veto over American military adventures abroad, would never countenance such an enterprise.

I'm not saying that these options for much bigger military operations were considered and reluctantly dismissed. I'm saying they were so ridiculous that they were never considered at all.

Well, surprise! Any junior staff officer (and any political scientist) will tell you that there are relatively few political problems that can be solved with air power, even when applied in massive quantities. There are practically none that can be resolved by a couple of dozen cruise missiles.

Now, the question is this. If Clinton's professional military advisers were telling him that using massive military force to deal with this particular aspect of international terrorism was impracticable, and minimal force was just plain useless -- why did the man go ahead and order small symbolic strikes anyway?

Could it be, do you think, that he saw some political utility for them in a quite different context?