Five Years In, Bush Is Losing Terror War (Jim Lobe)

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Five Years In, Bush Is Losing Terror War
Analysis by Jim Lobe


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To many critics, Bush's expansion of his terrorist target list beyond al Qaeda, and particularly to Iraq and perceived enemies of Israel, has been one of the great strategic mistakes in the conduct of his war on terror by effectively transforming what was originally a terrorist criminal conspiracy led by al-Qaeda with the tacit support of the Taliban to a "wide war extending from Lebanon through Afghanistan," as Amb. James Dobbins, Washington's top envoy in negotiations during and after the Afghanistan war, recently put it.

"In a search for moral clarity, the administration has tried to divide the Middle East into good guys and bad guys," he told an audience at the New America Foundation (NAF) late last month. "America tends to treat Middle East diplomacy as a win/lose or zero-sum game in which Syrian, Iranian, Hezbollah or Hamas gains are by definition American losses and vice-versa."

"The result, of course, is the United States always loses, because if you insist that the population of the region choose between Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, on the one hand, or the United States and Israel, on the other, they are going to choose the other side every time," said Dobbins, who currently directs international security programmes at the RAND Corporation.

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