Conducted by Rebecca Yergin

Philip Gordon is a Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution where he focuses on the United States’ strategies for confronting global terrorism. Formerly a director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, Gordon’s expertise lies in Europe as well as in the Middle East. His most recent book, Winning the Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World, offers a new strategy for United States’ Foreign policy that challenges America to reconsider its understanding of the War on Terror.

What is the struggle termed the “War on Terror”? What people, groups, and ideologies does the United States confront, and who are America’s greatest allies?

Let’s start with the idea of a “War on Terror.” A lot of people have criticized this notion, and they’re right. That phrase is highly problematic because the word “war” implies that we can win mostly by military means—that is how you win a traditional war—and the concept of “War on Terror” is misleading because you don’t go to war against a tactic. And what “terror”? When we declared this, we didn’t imply that we would go equally after the Irish Republican Army, terrorists in Colombia and Islamist terrorists. So, there is a real problem with that terminology.

Personally, however, I have decided not to fight the rhetorical battle but a substantive battle. In other words, my criticism is not so much focused on what we call it, but what we actually do. “War on Terror” is shorthand for a set of policies that the United States will adopt in order to confront challenges from Islamist extremists and the violence they use to pursue their political aims. In reality, we are not going to say that whole complicated definition every time we refer to this. I think we should focus on how we go about this task much more than what we call it.

And, now, what is the task? Clearly there are groups and individuals out there who want to and are prepared to use violence in order to pursue political or in some cases even nihilistic, religious, and theological aims. The United States needs to do two things at once: protect against acts of terrorism, while undermining the motivation behind it. Now that is a hugely challenging task, but it is a serious one, and it’s clearly one of the most important priorities of America’s foreign policy today.

In your most recent book Winning the Right War, you present a new way of thinking about the War on Terror. You talk about the debates that take place around it, and you explain that there is no discussion of what a “victory” in the War on Terror would look like. How would you describe that victory?

Let me again start with the notion of war. My book is called Winning the Right War, so I am not rejecting this concept entirely, but rather focusing on how we go about it. By “right war” and “wrong war,” I first want to emphasize that the notion that this is a traditional war is highly counterproductive and will get us in trouble. And I have a real problem with these notions of World War III (or World War IV, as Norman Podhoretz’s book calls it, considering the Cold War to be World War III). I think that thinking about it like a traditional war, especially in the analogy to World War II, leads you down the wrong path. It leads you to believe that there is a single enemy out there that you can confront and defeat on a battle field with military force and then impose your political terms, and you win that way. That’s how you win a traditional war. And that is very different from what, I think, we’re facing now, and it leads to different conclusions about the way we go about it now.

I argue in the book that if there is any analogy that is useful, it is not at all World War II, but rather the Cold War because, like the War on Terror, the Cold War was mostly an ideological battle. We had to win over people, and it was much more about discrediting their ideology than defeating them on a battlefield. Thinking about this challenge that way is much more fruitful in terms of deciding what to do about it. Of course you protect yourself, you contain the threat, you deter as much as possible, and you try to undermine its underpinnings and win over people around the world to be on your side rather than on their side.

Last point on this, because you asked what victory looks like—I think it ends the same kind of way. It does not end when we defeat them on the battlefield, occupy their capital, and impose new leaders or something. It ends when they—whoever “they” are—decide that what they are fighting for is not worth it, and they way they are fighting for it is not the right way. And they give up. That is essentially what Communists and potential Communists did during the Cold War, and that, frankly, is what I think has to happen this time as well.

You just argued that we will achieve victory when “they” give up. Who is the “they”?

That is a good question because there is more than one “they.” One of the problems with the way the Bush administration has been going about this is it has acted and spoken as if there is a single enemy out there, lumping together Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Al-Qaeda under Bin Laden, Hamas, and Hezbollah. In other words, the administration has been mixing together Persians and Arabs, Shia and Sunni, State and Non-state actors,
all of which have different aims and agendas. We might not like any of them. So I’m not saying that you must pick and choose among Al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Hezbollah, and Hamas—none of them have to be good—but you do have to understand that they have different aims, and therefore you have to deal with them in different ways. It is a colossal mistake to assume that there is one enemy there. And that is the same mistake, by the way, that we made early in the Cold War when we assumed there was one monolith, one single enemy, the Communists, and that there were not differences between the Soviets, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the socialists in Central America. It took us a while to understand that you had to deal with them in different ways.

I think the core enemy in this conflict that we are talking about is the Al-Qaeda organization, which is, of course, very loosely defined. But it covers the mostly Sunni, non-state group that believes in this violent ideology with the goal of restoring the Caliphate, imposing Sharia law, destroying Israel, attacking the United States, and driving it out of the Middle East. That is a fairly coherent enemy that is top priority in terms of who we are going after in the “War on Terror.”

What would a victory look like for this amorphous enemy?

It is important to understand what victory looks like for opponents so we can prevent it. I think that victory for them is that their violence leads us, meaning the United States and its allies around the world, to become so weary and so afraid that we withdraw from the Middle East and support for Israel and allow them to impose on their societies—Middle Eastern and mostly Muslim societies—a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam with Sharia law and all that goes with it. I think their path to victory involves us getting provoked into military actions in the Middle East, alienating Muslim publics and turning them against us, so that there is more sympathy for their worldview than either ours or those of moderate and other Muslims. And, I think, it is important to understand their path to victory so that we do not fall into that trap and allow them to goad us and bate us into doing things like invading major Middle Eastern countries or employing torture and other detainee abuse, which we do in pursuit of our victory so we can protect ourselves, but the consequence is that it contributes towards their victory because we drive too many people into sympathizing with them. So, it is very helpful to think about what the path to our victory is, and what the path to their victory is, so that we can make sure the former is more likely.

You maintain that the United States and its allies can win the War on Terror because of the liberties our nation values and because we are able to learn from our mistakes, while organizations such as Al-Qaeda are not. What mistakes have the U.S. and its allies made so far, and what changes have they made in the face of such mistakes?

I have referred to a few already. I think the invasion of Iraq was a mistake; we thought this would be a relatively easy and straightforward way to spread democracy in the Middle East and show that people should be on our side. It turns out that it was a lot more difficult than that, a lot more costly, and with consequences that play into the hands of Al-Qaeda. I do not think we will make that mistake again. That is not to say that we will not consider using force again, but we will think about it differently next time, and most Americans have already come around to the view that it was a mistake.

I think we made mistakes in detainee treatment when we, again, took the view that we were attacked and therefore we are at war, and we are going to do all that we need to do. That was an understandable reaction, but it led to abuses in Guantanamo, Abu Gahriab, and, frankly, in our laws and interpretations that I think have also fueled support for our adversaries. That is a mistake I think we are learning from.

I think we made the mistake of thinking that because we were attacked, and we were powerful, we had the right to do whatever we wanted regardless of what the world thought of it. That lost us an awful lot of international support among traditional allies in Europe and potential allies in the Middle East. We’re learning from that too. I think the first Bush administration was guilty of that—in thinking that allies did not really matter. But, in the second, they have realized it is actually kind of important to do diplomacy with our allies, and they have changed a number of policies in that regard.

So, I think that ultimately, when historians look back on this, they will conclude that the U.S. was attacked in a horrible way on September 11, 2001. It reacted and probably overreacted but, for such a horrific event, maybe that was understandable. But then the U.S. started to think carefully about these things, started to make adjustments, and realized that in the end, our society and our values are far more appealing and should be far more appealing, and they should be weapons in this struggle. It is critically important that we preserve that society and those values if we are going to win. I think we did the same thing again in the Cold War when we were tempted, maybe, to have a military, industrial state, and even an autocracy in order to battle these Communists, but what we realized in the end that was most important was our values. Preserving them—that helped us win.

What successes have and the U.S. and its allies achieved thus far in the “War on Terror”?

There have been successes. I think it is wrong to conclude or assume that we have gotten everything wrong and that it is only a question of failure; that’s not the case. We have significantly set back the Al-Qaeda association by killing a number of its top leaders and interfering with its finances. It is much more difficult for them to operate as a global conglomerate than they once could. We got rid of a sanctuary in Afghanistan. The group that attacked us was training and planning unhindered in Afghanistan. At the time they were sheltered by the government of that country, the Taliban, and we got rid of that sanctuary. The reality is that there is an even greater sanctuary next door in Pakistan. But still, it has to be a plus to eliminate this place where they were training and planning freely. We sent a message to governments around the world that there is a price to pay for raising and blatantly supporting such a group.

The United States has not been attacked since 9/11. I think that this is a success you have to give the administration credit for. There are various possible explanations for that. I think we have improved our homeland security somewhat. Maybe it is just the case that it is very difficult for terrorists to infiltrate and act within the United States. Still, when the outcome is a relatively good one, I think you need to give the administration credit for that. I do not think that the balance sheet is unambiguously negative; I just think that it is more negative than it should be.

How would you assess the way in which the U.S. government allocates funds in its quest to fight terrorism? What would you recommend in the future for spending on terrorism?

I think that it has not gotten the balance right between military spending and other types of spending in what, again, is going to be a long and not exclusively military conflict. It is impossible to calculate precisely the numbers, but we know that our annual military budget, aside from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is moving up towards 500 billion dollars a year. We know that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq themselves have cost at least another 500 billion dollars. At a minimum, we are talking hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars on the military side compared to tens of billions at most, in terms of diplomacy, development, international relations, things we can do to win over people to sympathize with the United States and so on. That balance just seems wrong to me. It is impossible to make the calculation exactly. We do know, for example—this sounds trivial, but I think it underscores the point—we have more members of our military marching bands than we have members
of our foreign service. That strikes me as an imbalance. If you just shifted the balance, if you took ten percent of the Pentagon’s budget and put it into efforts of the sort that we did during the Cold War to win people over to our side, I think that would be much more helpful in the long run.

I will just take one example of many from that. In Pakistan we have given over ten billion dollars to the Musharraf government almost exclusively for military ties and military use. That is fine, but in the end, if we do not persuade the Pakistani people that we are on their side, we will lose Pakistan, and we will lose important cooperation. A reallocation of that funding, even if we do need to give military assistance that entails doing more on the non-military side, is strongly in our interests.

In your book, you talk about the political and economic stagnation in the Middle East from the War in Iraq, from the Arab-Israeli conflict, and other conflicts from Kashmir, Chechnya, etc., that leads to the humiliation and frustration that helps the terrorist cause. What specific policies can the US and its allies implement to combat this political and economic stagnation?

That is a hard one, but there are things we can be doing. It is hard because simply giving economic aid doesn’t deal with the problem, especially in regimes where such a disparity between the elites and the people exists because of oil revenues. I also think it is too simple to argue that there is a direct link between economic development and terrorism. There is not. Clearly, Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri, Mohammed Atta—these are middle class, wealthy people who are not acting because they are poor. Many of them come from rich countries too, even if the wealth is unequally distributed. I do not want to buy into the simplistic notion that poverty leads to terrorism.

I do think, though, that the role of humiliation is important, and that is at a personal and a societal level. At a personal level, individuals from the Muslim world, who look at their countries, either feel the personal shame of falling behind, or they feel that on behalf of their whole country or civilization or religion. There, frankly, the Middle East, compared to all other regions of the world is being humiliated. They have looked around; their former colonial oppressors in America and Europe dominate them and dominate the geopolitical situation in Asia. They have seen Asian countries rise from poverty to become world players economically. Israel pops up in the region sixty years ago and then becomes far more successful and wealthy than they are. That is a factor of humiliation for many of these people. Therefore, efforts to help them develop, especially in a balanced way, would help ease some of that frustration and humiliation that they feel. So, I do think there is an economic component in all of this. Things we can do include developing industrial zones, creating jobs for Palestinians or Egyptians, lowering trade barriers so that their exports can come into this country, and Pakistani textile workers can do that and have jobs and feel good about themselves and develop that country in a gradual balanced way; it’s not a quick fix, but it is certainly a helpful part of this long-term plan.

Anything that moves them away from where most of them are, which is just relying on digging oil out of the ground and letting the state to distribute that as it sees fit, would be good. One of the things we know about democracy is that it is helped by a balanced economic development and is hindered by these frontier states that just get their money from one commodity. There, too, any economic development not oil-based, would be good.

You have written about a backlash among Muslims who do not want to be associated with terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda. Although anti-American sentiments run high in many of the places in which these Muslims live, do you foresee the US working with such Muslim groups to fight terrorist organizations?

One of the more promising paths towards the undermining of the Al-Qaeda ideology is the fact that it will generate backlash within Muslim society. In the end, they have no positive vision for the future that they are offering. Their violence not only kills Westerners, but it also kills Muslims and their fellow citizens.
I do think in the long run, as we are already seeing some signs of it, Muslims, themselves, will get fed up with this and turn against it. We have seen that in some responses to some of the terrorist attacks in Jordan and Indonesia, for example, where people protested against these attacks that also killed Muslims and innocents, both of which are against principles in the Koran. We have seen it in places like Anbar province in Iraq, where the locals and the tribes got fed up with Al-Qaeda coming in and telling them who should marry whom and how their society should be run. We have seen it in opinion polls that show support for Bin Laden and suicide bombings declining. That is particularly the case in Pakistan, where there had been high support for suicide bombings. Now, especially, since you see more of them in Pakistan, there is opposition to it.

So, I think in the long-run, Muslims themselves will step forward and say this is not what they want to be associated with; it is not what they want to support and they will take it in their own hands to reject it. Frankly, in the end, I think that is the only solution because we Americans, especially, like to think that we can solve any problem because we are so powerful. But, this in the end has to be done by the Muslims themselves. We cannot go in and do it for them; we cannot create the democracies; and we cannot turn the people against this ideology. We can help; we can do what we can on the side, but in the end, they are going to have to decide that their seventh-century Sharia law is not exactly what they want for themselves.

You have argued that all wars eventually end. But you also maintain that the War on Terror is not a traditional war. What makes you so confident that this war will end, and what timeline do you foresee for obtaining this end?

That does sound like a flippant comment when I say that all wars eventually end. The truth in that comment is not just that it is true historically, but that the world changes. There are so many political, social, and economic factors that go into conflict, and in a world where those factors are changing all the time, it is reasonable to expect that things will change and lead to a new set of factors. It always has, and it always will, even when it takes a long time. That is why it is useful, as we said, to discuss this in terms as things change, whose victory looks more plausible, and how do we push things in that direction.

The Cold War also felt for a long time that it would never end. I point to an essay by John Lewis Gaddis in a 1987 Atlantic Monthly essay called, “How the Cold War Might End,” which even at the time—40 years into the Cold War—was an exercise in great imagination. As Gaddis wrote in that essay, it just felt like, we were so used to it that we did not even think the world could be different. People who were adults by that time had lived their whole life during the Cold War and just never imagined that it could possibly go away. Of course, in that case, it did just two years after Gaddis was saying how used to it we had become. The great irony there, of course, is that for the thirty years before that, we were focused on how to win the Cold War. It was only when we gradually got around to concluding that it would never end, that it did. As I point out in the book, as late as mid-November 1989—that is to say after the Berlin Wall had fallen—public opinion polls here said Americans still did not believe the Cold War was over. They got in this mindset that things would never change.

Right now it feels like the War on Terror will never end. There are extremists from Morocco to Indonesia, and there is a sense of possible attack any day. We know that this could be a generational thing. And it might be. It might be one generation or two generations, and I think we have to accept that reality. But we also have to be open to the prospect that things will change, and if we do the right thing and discredit the ideology of terror, this war will end that way. And we have already spoken about some of the reasons why that might happen—backlash against violence in the Muslim world, a new opportunity for Muslims to change what is currently a feeling of anger and humiliation or resentment—and if we pursue these paths together, deny them their aims, give them other opportunities to pursue what they want out of life, and let them take actions that will backfire
and undermine themselves, it is not that hard to imagine ten years from now or 20 years from now a new generation of Muslims coming along, looking at what Bin Laden’s efforts have wrought and saying, “This is not the future.”

Look at Communism, again, as one example. It was vibrant; it was rising. People believed it was the future everywhere from Buenos Aires to Paris to Beijing. But, over time, they started to conclude that this wasn’t working, and it wasn’t attractive. They gave other options, including liberalism and Western Capitalism that ended up being more attractive. So, I am confident of this. You cannot put a date on it; I guess it would happen sooner than many people may now feel—this sort of feels like it is going to be many generations—but I think there are sound reasons to believe that eventually that extremist, violent ideology will start to crumble and be replaced by something else.

If you speak of winning the War on Terror sooner, rather than later, what effect do you think the next election will have on the War on Terror with a new administration in office?

I think we’re going to face a real choice in the next election. Some people argue that candidates on both sides are more or less the same, that it does not much matter, but because of all the differences being drawn between Democrats and Republicans, there is generally going to be, regardless of who wins each primary, a Democratic view of the “War on Terror” and a Republican view, and there will be differences between the two.

The Republican view will much more emphasize more of a willingness to use force, a commitment to stay in Iraq, and pushing the bounds of detainee treatment as necessary in order
to win what they see as an offensive struggle on the War on Terror against a big, single enemy. I think Democrats will generally emphasize the need to re-establish moral authority, win over allies, use force when necessary, but in a very limited way, and create careful policies on Guantanamo, adhering to the Geneva Conventions.

These are entirely legitimate debates. This is a really hard issue, and it is good for the country to have such a debate between these two contrasting approaches to the War on Terror. My own view is that the Bush approach has been mostly counterproductive, and we need to rethink it and some of the elements of this offensive, militarized War on Terror. That would, actually, accelerate ultimate victory more than a continuation
of the Bush approach would do.

But, let the country decide. We will have a year to debate these issues. We will have a year to reflect on the outcome of the Bush approach so far, and hopefully we will get it more right than wrong.

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