Zbig on Bush’s Strategy Against Terrorism

Zbigniew Brzezinski is one of the few Soviet scholars to pass what we used to call the “1986 test.” In my corner of the intelligence analysis world, we coined this phrase to identify experts who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union before Gorbachev used the phrase “reasonable sufficiency” in his speech to the 27th Communist Party congress in February 1986. (This phrase indicated that Party leaders knew that defense spending was bankrupting the Soviet economy and that the military must accept a lower level of spending. It was the first clue of the coming change to be found in Party statements.)

Brezeznski was right about the Soviets before 1986. Nineteen years later, he offers this Washington Post op-ed piece on President Bush’s approach to combating terrorism. Here are a few extracts:

”…the president has repeatedly invoked the adjective "Islamic" when referring to terrorism and he has compared the "murderous ideology of Islamic radicalism" to the ideology of communism. Is the president historically right in his diagnosis of the allegedly similar dangers posed by Islamic extremism and by totalitarian communism? The differences between the two may be more telling than their similarities. And is he wise to be expounding such a thesis?

In response to the dislocations and injustices precipitated by the Industrial Revolution, communism offered a vision of a perfectly just society. To be sure, that vision was false and was used to justify violence that eventually led directly to the Soviet gulag, Chinese labor and "reeducation" camps, and other human rights abuses. Nonetheless, for a while, communism's definition of the future bolstered its cross-cultural appeal.

In addition, the intellectual and political challenge of the communist ideology was backed by enormous military power. The Soviet Union possessed a huge nuclear arsenal, capable of launching in the course of a few minutes a massive atomic attack on America. Within a few hours, upwards of 120 million Americans and Soviets could have been dead in an apocalyptic mutual cross-fire. That was the horrible reality.
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In al Qaeda's case, it is actively supported by relatively isolated groupings, and its actions have been condemned without exception by all major religious figures, from the pope to the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia.

Its power is circumscribed, too. It still relies largely on familiar tools of violence. Unlike communist totalitarian regimes, al Qaeda does not use terror as an organizing tool but rather, because of its own organizational weakness, as a disruptive tactic. Its members are bound together by this tactic, not by an ideology. Ultimately, al Qaeda or some related terrorist group may acquire truly destructive power, but one should not confuse potentiality with actuality.
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But in the meantime, is Bush smart to be making this comparison?
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Such phraseology can have unintended consequences. Instead of mobilizing moderate Muslims to stand by our side, the repetitive refrain about Islamic terrorism may not only offend moderate Muslims but could eventually contribute to a perception that the campaign against terrorism is also a campaign against Islam as a whole. They may note that the United States, in condemning IRA terrorism in Northern Ireland or Basque terrorism in Spain, does not describe it as "Catholic terrorism," a phrase that Catholics around the world would likely find offensive.

The Washington Post requires registration. If you haven’t done so already, please register and read the entire column. It sounds to me as if Brezeznski is right again.