Download - Winston Churchill

“ Would a special relationship between the United States and the BritishCommonwealth be inconsistent with our overriding loyalties to the WorldOrganisation? I reply that, on the contrary, it is probably the only means by which thatorganisation will achieve its full stature and strength. There are already the special UnitedStates relations with Canada which I have just mentioned, and there are the special relationsbetween the United States and the South American Republics. We British have ourtwenty years Treaty of Collaboration and Mutual Assistance with Soviet Russia. I agreewith Mr. Bevin, the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, that it might well be a fifty yearsTreaty so far as we are concerned. We aim at nothing but mutual assistance and collaboration.The British have an alliance with Portugal unbroken since 1384, and which producedfruitful results at critical moments in the late war. None of these clash with the generalinterest of a world agreement, or a world organisation; on the contrary they help it. ‘Inmy father’s house are many mansions.’” —WSC, Fulton, 1946FULTON AND TODAY’S WAR...African terrorists, and al Qaeda agents. Our few uniformedmen and women in that theater are engaged incivic action more than direct action; they do not oftenpull triggers. But every day their corpsmen do shoot vaccinesinto children, and antibiotics into sickly domesticanimals. Wells are dug, schools are built. This part of thebattle Churchill would have recognized from the oldforms of “hearts and minds” campaigns that the Britisharmy waged in places like Oman and Malaya.As this aid work suggests, kinetics is but one part ofthe grand strategy in the global war on terrorism. And,despite what critics may say, I think there is a grand strategy,and that it has been articulated. The problems comein execution, in the challenges of gaining foreign support,and in the task of meeting the concerns of the citizenry…and if all that were not enough, we have Iraq.Within our grand strategy for what we must call theLong War, economic elements of national power may betoo focused upon—and too drained by—resuscitatingIraq. The war has many costs and they mount up in othertheaters. Elsewhere we have aid programs, but there aresticks as well as carrots: the sanctions regimes begun underPresident Clinton and redoubled under President Bushare difficult to torque down, but they do constrict someof the financial lifelines in transnational terrorism. TheUnited Nations is actually engaged in financial counterterrorism:a new UN treaty took effect in 2002, and eventhough many states will not or cannot obey it, the conventiondoes help the U.S. Treasury and State Departments,and foreign partners, who work to freezeenemy assets.In the field of intelligence our record is mixed. Wehave made progress at the Central Intelligence Agencyand the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and yet both stillhave their difficulties—such as an out-flow of experiencedpeople worn down by the past five years, and the challengesof properly training new personnel. Reorganization,too, comes with new challenges. Churchill’s warlasted six years; he would have faced similar drains had itcontinued as long as this war might.There is a mammoth new bureaucracy—the Departmentof Homeland Security—which does not yet seem toproduce intelligence but always clamors for it from others.It is a cliché to say that intelligence is overwhelminglyimportant in counterterrorism, but it is a cliché because itis so true. For one thing, intelligence is a product of, and akey to, policing; at this stage of the Long War, police areperhaps even more important than soldiers.In diplomacy, the U.S. was swiftly supported by itsNATO allies after 9/11. The North Atlantic Treaty Organizationinvoked its Article 5 for the first time in a halfcentury of history, declaring that an attack on one is anattack on all. Countries such as Germany and Britain havedone a great deal, actually and symbolically. I am disappointedover Canada; I have a very smart Canadian graduatestudent in class and her disappointment in Canada’srole outruns mine. But for such ills there are tonics.Australia has been a most vigorous and impressive ally. AlQaeda knows it, too, which explains the overt threats,multiple bombings of holiday spots in Bali, and the otherplots within Australian cities more recently.There are certainly some diplomatic problems aswell—including stalemate in the Middle East, and declinein international support for global terror war. These problemsmerge into the realm of “public diplomacy.”A dimension of our power that is under-used andbadly used is the public effort to “tell our story abroad.” 9FINEST HOUR 135 / 28