MANKATO -- For 24 hours in recent days -- until he flip-flopped -- President Bush was on record as saying it might not be possible to win the war on terror.

One of the axioms of military strategy is "Know your enemy." Bush has claimed that terrorists attacked us because they "hate freedom." What they really hate is U.S. policies: our unquestioning support for Israel and its settlements in the Palestinian areas; the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan; our support for repressive Arab governments, and our invasion of Iraq.

Arab public opinion mirrors these sentiments. A Zogby International poll recently showed that 98 percent of Egyptians hold a negative opinion of America, notwithstanding the $117 billion (in current dollars) of U.S. aid over the last 30 years. The disapproval rate in Saudi Arabia, a country we defended in the 1991 Gulf War, is 94 percent.

The crucial issue is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. As a New York Times editorial observed Sept. 2: "The West Bank is not just a breeding ground for terrorists; it is the perpetual wound Arabs use to justify supporting and financing violent extremists."

The current administration has exacerbated Arab hostility. It has abandoned our traditional evenhanded role as the honest broker in the Middle East peace process and -- for the first time in U.S. history -- endorsed Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

Previous administrations, including George H.W. Bush's, called the settlements "an obstacle to peace" and even deducted Israel's expenditures on West Bank settlements from the U.S. yearly aid payments.

Why would George W. Bush change our policy? The Guardian of London reports that almost one-third of Bush's electoral base favors war in the Middle East. This group of apocalyptic Christians reportedly believes that Israel must occupy all its "historic Biblical lands" as a precondition for the final struggle against the legions of the Antichrist in Armageddon. This in turn will bring on the end of days and the "rapture." Although this concept doesn't exist in the Bible, Attorney General John Ashcroft and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay are said to be among the believers.

To Arabs, the invasion of Iraq is another example of the United States defending Israel's interests. They know that the so-called neoconservatives had long advocated overthrowing Saddam Hussein in order to establish U.S. military bases in Iraq, ensure access to oil and improve Israel's strategic position. The same neocons devised the theory of preemptive war, giving us a permanent rationale to invade any country we choose.

Do the neocons remember when they condemned the Soviets' use of preemptive attack? It was called "aggression" back then.

Most Arabs would use a similar term to describe the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed or wounded so far, and for what? There were no Iraqis involved in 9/11, no WMD in Iraq, no 9/11 connection to Al- Qaida or Saddam, and to date no Al-Qaida members have been captured in Iraq. Could the administration's case for an invasion be any weaker?

An unprovoked, preemptive war conducted under false pretenses is not going to win Iraqis over to a pro-American democracy or gain hearts and minds in the Arab world. Neither is torturing Iraqi prisoners, as occurred at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

The administration has stirred up a hornet's nest in Iraq. The president belatedly admitted as much when he said that he had miscalculated the Iraqis' reaction to the invasion. Our response to the insurgency has been the application of ever more firepower. Following the murder and dismemberment of four American contractors last spring near Fallujah, U.S. retaliatory strikes damaged a mosque and, according to a press survey of Iraqi hospitals and morgues, killed 600 civilians. None of them was known to have been involved in the murders. How many Iraqis do you suppose rallied to our side because of the bombing of Fallujah? How about Najaf, Ramadi and Samarra? Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the coalition spokesman, explained with a non sequitur: "We had no choice."

The struggle against both terrorism and the Iraqi insurgency represents a war of ideas that the Bush administration is losing. It is the nationalists and the Islamists who have the ear of Muslims, not foreigners who bomb cities and mosques. Have we learned nothing since Vietnam about fighting insurgencies? The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, acknowledging that the fight is going badly, recently concluded that Iraq will be lucky if it avoids civil war and dismemberment -- like Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. We may have exchanged a brutal dictator who didn't threaten us for a chaotic situation that does. In addition, the invasion enraged other Muslims who responded by forming Al-Qaida clones, such as the Madrid train bombers.

The United States has lost 1,000 dead and suffered 7,000 wounded in a war projected to cost $200 billion so far. Coalition forces are still suffering scores of attacks every day. Eleven hundred Americans were wounded in the month of August alone. Losses of that magnitude to a terrorist attack in the United States would be considered catastrophic. Yet there is no careful analysis of the cost/benefit trade-offs of this occupation, no plan to win and no exit strategy. The president says we'll stay the course, we won't cut and run, but that's the quagmire formula of Vietnam, not an exit strategy.

The administration is currently planning for at least five more years in Iraq. Sen. John McCain thinks 10 or 20 years is more likely.

The president nonetheless refuses to put the economy on a sound footing to pay for a long-term war. His response is to borrow from future generations and claim he is returning "your money" through tax cuts.

Our long-term national security is far more dependent on a healthy economy than on fighting Iraqi insurgents. We face, by some accounts, almost $45 trillion in unfunded obligations.

Instead of preparing to meet these predictable expenditures, Bush has overseen a tripling of the growth rate of government spending and slashed revenue while running up huge budget and trade deficits, just like a banana republic. And like a banana republic, we are heading for a train wreck. It'll hit in five years after the baby boomers begin retiring in droves. At that point, the only solution to the financial crisis will be the Alan Greenspan solution: Cut Social Security and Medicare.

The administration's national security strategy also says we will strengthen alliances. But the Iraq invasion, and the manipulated intelligence used to justify it, have damaged our credibility so badly that we could not mobilize another international coalition. The result is that the administration has been paralyzed in the face of North Korea's openly defiant nuclear-weapons development and Iran's continued nuclear-weapons program.

Three years ago, Bush vowed he would capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." Yet Bin Laden and Al-Qaida are still at large. The administration bungled the search for them by putting only 11,500 men on the ground in Afghanistan. That's less than one-third the size of the NYPD. The United States and the international community have also failed to rebuild the country as they promised. A British parliamentary delegation warned in July that Afghanistan is likely to "implode with terrible consequences" unless more troops and resources are sent there. The Taliban and traditional warlords now control most of the countryside and, according to the U.N. office on drugs and crime, Afghanistan is once again the leading exporter of heroin in the world.

Is it possible, despite the chaotic situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the American homeland is somehow safer? The acting director of the CIA announced last month that the threat of an attack was the highest it had been since 9/11.

Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, Attorney General Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Republican congressional leaders have all warned of imminent terrorist attacks as well. If these constant warnings reflect a genuine threat and not a cynical effort to "scare up" votes for Bush, then we clearly are no safer than before.

Islamic terrorism won't begin to recede until we successfully mediate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, end our military occupation of Iraq and help the central government in Kabul establish control over Afghan territory. We are currently going backward in all three areas, and losing the drug war in Afghanistan to boot.

Three years after 9/11, the grim reality is that we are not safer from terrorist attack at home or abroad; American troops are being wounded and killed in record numbers in a misguided war; we are more isolated internationally than we have ever been; and our long-term national security is being undermined by Bush's reckless, wrongheaded economic policies.

Can the country survive four more years of this kind of leadership?

Tom Maertens served on the White House NSC staff under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. As a senior counterterrorism official at the State Department he helped plan the campaign against Al-Qaida.

© 2004 The Star Tribune

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