284 pages Random House Publication Date: December 2003 Hardcover ISBN: 1400061946

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January 2004
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror
By David Frum and Richard Perle

While the U.S. campaign in Iraq has ended Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism and its weapons development programs, we must strengthen our resolve in the war on terror at home, abroad, and in the arena of ideas. This means enforcing immigration laws and identifying would-be terrorists among us; dealing realistically and forcefully with rogue regimes in Iran, Syria, and North Korea; and reforming U.S. institutions dealing with the war on terror.

David Frum and Richard Perle are resident fellows at the American Enterprise Institute. David Frum is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and author of several books, including The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush. Richard Perle is a member of the Defense Policy Board and a former assistant secretary of defense for international security policy.

The war on terror has come to its point of crisis. In the months since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the war has lost much of its momentum. The will to win is ebbing in Washington; bad old habits of complacency and denial are reasserting themselves.

Politics is partly to blame: for some Democrats, winning the war has become a less urgent priority than winning the next election.

Bureaucratic inertia is also a culprit. President Bush has demanded that the military fight new wars in new ways. He demanded that the intelligence services second-guess their familiar assumptions. He demanded fresh thought, strong measures, and clear language; all of these departures from the ordinary have generated resentment and resistance.

Many critics of the president's policies have complained that Americans have not been asked to "sacrifice" enough, but the sacrifice that is most urgently needed is an intellectual sacrifice--a willingness to sacrifice obsolete ideas in the face of new circumstances.

Really, it is no wonder that those few policymakers who have urged a strong policy against terror have been called a "cabal." To the enormous majority in any government who wish to continue to do things as they have always been done, the tiny minority that dares propose anything new will always look like a presumptuous, unrealistic, intriguing faction.

 In the two years since September 11, there have been enormous achievements, and perhaps the most important has been the overthrow of Saddam. The U.S. campaign in Iraq accomplished at least seven great objectives:

1. It put an end to the threat from whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam possessed as of 2003--and far more important, from those weapons he would have possessed had he been left in place.

2. The United States eliminated a Middle Eastern regime that had been a major sponsor of terror for thirty years--and that had reached out to Osama bin Laden as long ago as the early 1990s.

3. The United States denied its enemies in the Middle East the enormous victory they would have won had Saddam survived to boast that he had triumphed over America.

4. The United States has learned valuable lessons about how to fight wars in the region and how to reconstruct afterward.

5. The United States gave other potential enemies a vivid demonstration of America's ability to win swift and total victory over significant enemy forces with minimal U.S. casualties.

6. We aided the forces of democracy in the region by showing that even the most fearsome local dictatorships are more fragile than they look.

7. We eliminated the Arab world's cruelest and most aggressive dictator, liberating an entire nation and opening the way to a decent society in Iraq and reform throughout the region.

Of course there is much more to do. We must begin by recognizing our enemy. For many reasons, our leaders have been reluctant to give this enemy a name. Yet it is a fact that of the thirty-six organizations that the Department of State designates as "foreign terrorist organizations," seventeen purport to act in the name of Islam and six more are predominantly Muslim in membership. The United States has no proper quarrel with Islam, but a radical strain within Islam has declared war on Americans. Even more ominously, this radical strain draws appreciable support from public opinion in much of the Arab and Muslim world, both Sunni and Shiite, both religious and secular. It is capable as well of forming alliances with non-Islamic autocratic regimes like that of North Korea.

The war against these enemies has three fronts: at home, abroad, and in the realm of ideas.

The War at Home

At home, we need to deny potential terrorists access to American soil, curtail their freedom of action should they nevertheless enter the country, and deny them material and moral assistance from domestic and foreign supporters.

Islamic terrorism remains predominantly an imported threat--and one usually imported illegally. Of the forty-eight foreign-born Islamic extremists who have been convicted of or confessed to involvement in terrorist plots since 1993 (including the nineteen September 11 hijackers), twelve were present illegally in the United States, and nearly half had violated immigration laws at some previous point. In other words, more effective enforcement of existing immigration laws would go far to protect American security.

Those laws cannot be enforced, however, so long as the United States lacks mechanisms for quickly and readily identifying who legally resides in the country and who does not. The United States needs a national identity card based on the latest biometric technology that enables local police to verify the true identity and immigration status of every person with whom they come in contact.

Currently, U.S. law permits immigration authorities to bar the entry of persons implicated in terrorist activity, but only in rare cases may they exclude persons who have expressed terrorist sympathies. It's a sobering thought that Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, al Qaeda's number two leader, was able to enter the United States in 1995 for a crosscountry fundraising tour. Association with known terrorists should be grounds for the rejection of a visa application.

Inside the country, the United States must develop new profiling technologies that enable the authorities to pinpoint potential terrorist suspects. This can be done in ways that protect individual privacy and civil liberties. For example, computer data-mining can use publicly available records to create dossiers on individuals who have engaged in a pattern of suspicious activities. Those dossiers would be tracked by a computer-generated anonymous code; no human being would know to whom they belonged. Only when the dossier generated a high degree of probability of terrorist involvement would the computer alert law enforcement; at that point, officials would go before a judge to request a warrant to permit them to connect the profile to a name and carry out counterterrorist surveillance.

It is unfortunately true that some of this country's Islamic organizations and charities have been compromised by extremism. Some have raised money for foreign terrorist organizations. The administration now has authority to close terrorist-implicated charities.

But law must be reinforced by a clear public consensus that all Americans, whatever their background, are expected to support their country against its foreign enemies. Individuals who endorse or condone terrorism should never be welcome at any office of the U.S. government, and that same common-sense rule should apply to groups that employ such individuals as officers or have them on their boards of directors. The full force of public opinion should be deployed to persuade American Muslims to liberate their organizations from extremist influence. We urgently need an American Islam that feels at home on American soil, that is committed to American values and the defense of the American nation, and that may someday challenge Islamic extremism with the example of a democratic and pluralist Islam born in the USA.

The War Abroad

The war abroad must begin to focus on implicated regimes. Even so-called stateless terrorist groups depend heavily on the help and protection of states and heads of states. Without a base in Afghanistan and the acquiescence of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda could never have matured into the deadly menace that killed three thousand Americans. Without the backing of Iran and Syria, Hezbollah would not exist at all.

Our highest priority should be terror-implicated regimes that are nearing completion of deliverable weapons of mass destruction--above all, Iran and North Korea. In both cases, we should seek solutions short of war. For North Korea, we recommend a policy of isolation, backed by a credible defense posture--including the redeployment of American forces in South Korea beyond the reach of North Korean artillery. We must stand ready to use force as a last resort. We do not know where all the North Korean nuclear facilities are, but we know where the most important one is. The knowledge that the United States might strike North Korea will work mightily to persuade North Korea's Chinese sponsors belatedly to exert their influence to bring North Korea to its sense and avoid a conflict that would threaten China's vital interests.

 In Iran, we ought to back those Iranians seeking to overthrow the corrupt theocracy that misrules that country and wages terror war against the United States, in much the same way that we supported Polish Solidarity in the 1980s: with money, with technology, with information, and by directing international attention to the regime's denial of human rights to its own people.

American power has its limits, and the United States will often have to do business with regimes that the American people dislike or despise. But we should never concede the legitimacy of aggressive, undemocratic governments. The mullahs have no more right to rule Iran than any other gang of criminals has to seize the persons and property of any group of people. When such criminals threaten the security of the United States, we should eject them from power with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker.

Some of our most difficult problems in the war on terror involve our two-faced friends in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

What we should want from Saudi Arabia is obvious: full cooperation in the war on terror. We are not getting it. To induce greater cooperation, we should contemplate stiffer measures.

• As a starter, our leaders should tell the truth about the Saudi state and its record of lending aid and comfort to terrorists and terrorist paymasters.
•  Those individual Saudis who finance terror should be denied permission to set foot on American soil. It should be made a crime for any American to do business with them. And their assets should be subject to forfeiture under Trading with the Enemy acts.
• It is intolerable that the Saudis should finance global missionary campaigns on behalf of their Wahhabi form of Islam while themselves suppressing all religious liberty at home. They should be made to understand that the United States expects that either Saudi Arabia open itself to foreign faiths or else stop its own prosyletizing work.
• Terror must replace oil as issue one in the relationship with Saudi Arabia. Anything less than total cooperation against terror must carry the severest consequences for the Saudi state--including possible American support for secessionist movements for the severely oppressed Shiite people of Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern regions.

Pakistan presents some even more intractable issues. One-third of the world's Muslims live in the Indian subcontinent. The success or failure of Pakistani society--and the tensions between Muslims and others in India-may ultimately prove to be even more decisive to the future direction of the Islamic world even than events in the Middle East. Encouraging peace and prosperity in the subcontinent is becoming a high and potentially supreme American interest. One immediate step: Pakistan is seeking more generous access to the American market. Those wishes should be granted, but only on the understanding that freer U.S.-Pakistani trade must progress in tandem with freer trade between Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, restoring the openness and interdependence tragically destroyed by the partition of 1947.

The War of Ideas

Extremist Islam is an ideology--not a religion--and it must be countered in the realm of ideas. So far, America's efforts on this battleground have been strikingly unsuccessful.

A war of ideas is not necessarily a war of words. The United States will not change minds in the Middle East by broadcasting higher quality propaganda at them. Middle Eastern minds will respond to Middle Eastern facts, and the United States will succeed or fail in the war of ideas in proportion to its ability to alter those facts. Opening the Middle East to trade and investment is one way to alter those facts; another is to raise the status of women.

Many foreign-policy professionals insist that the single most important answer to terror is a Palestinian state. Such a state, if rightly constituted, could offer benefits to Palestinians and Israelis alike. But it is hardly likely to contribute much to the fight against terror. Worse, since the state is very unlikely to be either stable or successful, it will require massive American support to survive--not only economic support, but also military and intelligence backing against the radicalism of its own population. There is a very real risk that a Palestinian state could prove in reality to be a Middle Eastern South Vietnam.

One reason that the United States is not doing better in the war of ideas is that the U.S. government remains an institution stuck in the past. To win the war on terror will require massive reform of U.S. institutions, including the military, the intelligence services, and the foreign policy-making apparatus.

Among other urgent measures:

• The FBI's counterterrorism mission should end--
  and the job should be given instead to a new domestic intelligence service.
• The role of political appointees at the State Department should be dramatically expanded: foreign policy should be subject to the normal processes of political change.
• The work of defense transformation begun by Secretary Rumsfeld must be accelerated.
• The American alliance system must also be transformed. The United States must acknowledge that a closely integrated Europe has ceased to be an American interest, if it ever was one. It must face up to the fact that France has ceased to be a U.S. ally in any meaningful sense of the word and that the Russian government of President Vladimir Putin is playing some sinister double games.
• Above all, the time has come for reform of the U.N. Charter, to expand the Article 51 right of self-defense to include the pre-emption of imminent terrorist threats.

The war on terror is not just a metaphor, and it can be won. Indeed the United States has large and impressive advantages against its enemies. What will decide the outcome is less the correlation of forces than the will to win--and the imagination to accept new ideas.

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