*EPF507 10/26/01
Text: Shays Says U.S. Needs Long-Term Strategy to Fight Terrorism
(Rep. Christopher Shays' Oct. 25 speech to House) (2650)

The United States needs to articulate a long-term strategy on how it will defeat international terrorism, according to a lawmaker who has specialized in national security issues.

Global terrorism, says Representative Christopher Shays (Republican of Connecticut), "turns our strengths against us, exploiting the freedom, pluralism and openness we cherish to spread hate, fear and death."

In an October 25 speech before the House of Representatives, Shays, the chairman of the House Government Reform subcommittee on National Security, International Relations and Veterans Affairs, warned that each terrorist attack "is practice and prelude for the next."

Shays, who has chaired a series of hearings on the threats posed by biological weapons, noted that as the nation worries about access to crop dusters and anthrax exposures by mail, "a clear-eyed, fully informed view of the threat, particularly the threat posed by chemical agents and weaponized pathogens, is a national security imperative."

Assessing the threat of bioterrorism, Shays said, "requires a sober judgment about the motives, intentions and capabilities of people so intoxicated with hate and evil they would kill themselves in the act of killing others."

Criticizing the Clinton administration's "reactive" efforts to respond to the threat of terrorism, Shays warned that America's struggle against terrorism "will remain fragmented and unfocused until there is a thorough assessment of the threats we face and overarching national strategy articulated to guide planning, direct spending and discipline bureaucratic balkanization."

The Connecticut Republican noted that President Bush has instructed the Director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, former Governor Tom Ridge, "to formulate that strategy based on the most current threat intelligence."

Shays cautioned against overstating the threat of terrorism, as that could invite "overreaction, in which we waste scarce resources and terrorize ourselves with Draconian security restrictions."

According to Shays, the United States will have to change the way it implements its anti-terrorism policy. "We can no longer indulge the tidy, familiar mechanics of solving the crime and punishing individuals when the crime offends humanity and the individuals are eager to be martyred," Shays said.

"That approach," he went on, "has been compared to battling malaria by swatting mosquitoes. To stop the disease of modern terrorism, the swamp of explicit and tacit state sponsorship must be drained and disinfected," Shays told lawmakers.

The United States will have to find a way to isolate states that sponsor terrorism, and enlist other nations in that effort, he said.

Building a coalition to punish state sponsors of terrorism "is now being pursued in earnest," Shays said.

But, he added, that was not always the case, "and it is by no means clear what longer-term strategy should be pursued in this regard beyond Afghanistan."

The long-term strategy should be developed "with a high-level statement of national objectives," Shays said, and that statement "should be coupled logically to a statement of the means that will be used to achieve those objectives."

"Only then can we hope to resist the drift of the events thrust upon us by others and be prepared to confront terrorism in our time and on our terms," Shays said.

The struggle against international terrorism will not be easy, he said. Citing a statement by David Abshire of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Shays said the United States enters the fight with "a greatly weakened State Department, a traumatized intelligence community, a disorganized National Security Council, and a reactive national security posture left over from the Cold War."

According to Shays, America's economic, military, and cultural dominance also fosters "vocal, sometimes violent resentment to which we seem unaccustomed and unprepared to rebut." Citing remarks by former Senator Warren Rudman, the co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on National Security 21st Century, Shays said that the management of that resentment "would have to become a central element of U.S. public diplomacy in the years and decades ahead."

Following is the text of Shays' remarks from the Congressional Record:

(begin text)

LONG-TERM TERRORIST STRATEGY
SHOULD BE DEVELOPED WITH
HIGH-LEVEL STATEMENT OF NATIONAL OBJECTIVES

House of Representatives
October 25, 2001

Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Speaker, on September 11 we were brutally awakened to the harsh realities we dreamed might never reach our shores. With the thousands of dead, we buried forever any illusion the scourge of transnational terrorism could not strike here.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it our "wake-up call from hell." We have awakened to a recurring nightmare of escalating brutality and carnage unfettered by moral or political constraints.

Each attack is practice and prelude for the next. Global terrorism turns our strengths against us, exploiting the freedom, pluralism and openness we cherish to spread hate, fear and death.

On that day, our world changed in ways we are still struggling to understand, our vision still blurred by disbelief and tears of grief.

Since then, there have been times I find myself longing for a return to the Cold War. The numbing calm of mutually assured destruction seems in retrospect more tolerable than the unnerving wait for the next random act of barbaric terrorist mayhem.

But if the global upheavals of the last century yield one lesson, it is this: the dynamic triumphs over the static, and we dare not indulge the urge to pause and reminisce.

To be sure, the post-Soviet Pax Americana is not quite what we expected. The Cold War is over, yet the world is a more dangerous place. Hard on the heels of hope, we are entering a new world order of growth and cooperation, intractable regional conflicts and the rise of radical Islamic militancy bringing, instead, the prospect of chronic, even cataclysmic disorder.

On the 50th anniversary of Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech at Westminster College, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher described these "other, less appealing consequences" of the global situation.

She said, "Like a giant refrigerator that had finally broken down after years of poor maintenance, the Soviet empire in its collapse released all the ills of ethnic, social and political backwardness which it had frozen in suspended animation for so long."

In 1996, she was prescient enough to warn of the threat posed by radical Islamic movements and the middle-income countries, Iraq, Iran, Syria and others, shopping for chemical and biological weapons in the post-Soviet toxic bazaar.

The Iron Curtain has been replaced by a poison veil that shrouds the world in dread and terror. We also find our economic, military and cultural dominance fostering vocal, sometimes violent resentment to which we seem unaccustomed and unprepared to rebut. Former Senator Warren Rudman, who served as the co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on National Security 21st Century, recently said acknowledging and managing that resentment would have to become a central element of U.S. public diplomacy in the years and decades ahead.

That is not all that will have to change. The Nation's fight against terrorism will remain fragmented and unfocused until there is a thorough assessment of the threats we face and overarching national strategy articulated to guide planning, direct spending and discipline bureaucratic balkanization.

President Bush instructed the Director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, former Governor Tom Ridge, to formulate that strategy based on the most current threat intelligence.

When pressed for a national strategy, the previous administration pointed to a pastiche of event-driven Presidential decision directives and the Department of Justice's 5-year spending plan. Reactive in vision and scope, that strategy changed only as we lurched from crisis to crisis, from Khobar Towers to the Cole, from Oklahoma City to Dar es Salaam.

President Clinton's National Security Council Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Richard Clarke, scoffed at our committee's request for a comprehensive threat assessment. He told us the threat came from the groups on the State Department's list of designated terrorists and the strategy was to hunt them down like criminals.

As recently as a month ago, threat assessment and security strategy were still viewed in some quarters as academic or bureaucratic exercises.

Today, as we worry about access to crop dusters and anthrax exposures by mail, a clear-eyed, fully informed view of the threat, particularly the threat posed by chemical agents and weaponized pathogens, is a national security imperative.

Assessing the threat of bioterrorism requires a sober judgment about the motives, intentions and capabilities of people so intoxicated with hate and evil they would kill themselves in the act of killing others.

These are the questions that confound the assessment process: When and where will terrorists use biological weapons against us? How will the agent be dispersed? For what type and magnitude of attack should we be prepared?

Available answers offer little comfort and less certainty in assessing the threat. Some conclude the technical difficulties of large-scale production and efficient dissemination reduce the likelihood terrorists will use lethal agents to inflict mass casualties any time soon. Others think those barriers have been or will soon be overcome. Stills others believe neither large quantities nor wide dispersion are required to inflict biological terror.

From this cacophony of plausible opinions, those charged with formulating a national counterterrorism strategy must glean a rational estimate about the irrational possibility of biological attack.

Perhaps the most difficult dimension of the threat to assess is the deep-seated, almost primal fear engendered by the prospect of maliciously induced disease. For the terrorist, that fear is a potent force multiplier, capable of magnifying a minor, manageable outbreak into a major public health crisis. Failure to account for this unique aspect of biological terrorism understates the threat, increasing our vulnerability. Overstating the threat based on fear alone invites overreaction, in which we waste scarce resources and terrorize ourselves with Draconian security restrictions.

The changes wrought by the events of September 11 have also brought into sharper focus just how much of our national security apparatus is now irrelevant or ineffective.

Last week, Ambassador Paul Bremer, our Nation's first diplomat in 1986 to combat the spread of global terrorism, and chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism, noted that two of the four pillars of U.S. counterterrorism policy were already obsolete.

The first, to make no concessions to terrorists and strike no deals, has been made irrelevant by the rise of radical Islamic groups. Their only demand being the demise of the West, there can be no deal to strike.

The second pillar of our policy, bring terrorists to justice for their crimes, has been rendered ineffective by perpetrators willing to die with their victims. We can no longer indulge the tidy, familiar mechanics of solving the crime and punishing individuals when the crime offends humanity and the individuals are eager to be martyred.

That approach has been compared to battling malaria by swatting mosquitoes. To stop the disease of modern terrorism, the swamp of explicit and tacit state sponsorship must be drained and disinfected.

That leaves the final two precepts of current policy, isolate state sponsors of terrorism and enlist other Nations in that effort.

Like its totalitarian forebears, terrorism is not incorporal. Its practitioners must make anchor and draw sustenance through contact with the people, places and institutions susceptible to the pressures of military and political statecraft.

So building a coalition to punish state sponsors is now being pursued in earnest. But that was not always the case, and it is by no means clear what longer-term strategy should be pursued in this regard beyond Afghanistan.

That long-term strategy should be developed with a high-level statement of national objectives. It should be coupled logically to a statement of the means that will be used to achieve those objectives. Only then can we hope to resist the drift of the events thrust upon us by others and be prepared to confront terrorism in our time and on our terms.

It will not be easy. David Abshire, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, recently noted this critical strategic discussion occurs in the context of a greatly weakened State Department, a traumatized intelligence community, a disorganized NSC, and a reactive national security posture left over from the Cold War.

With regard to our intelligence capabilities, I would add the observation their trauma is in part self-induced. Self-satisfied and for the most part self-policed, intelligence agencies tend to see information as an end, not a means. We are partially blinded by the lack of human intelligence in key parts of the world. Classification standards and jurisdictional stovepipes all but guarantee critical observations, and analysis will not reach those who need them.

Ironically, a community so heavily dependent on technical means of intelligence-gathering has not been able to embrace the data mining and threat profiling tools others are using to glean important knowledge from open-source material.

Increasingly sophisticated terrorists are becoming adept at hiding their secrets in plain view. Our intelligence agencies are too busy protecting Cold War sources and methods to find them.

Similar institutional dynamics were present the last time the United States was coming to grips with a profound strategic paradigm shift: the emergence of the Cold War and the nuclear threat. President Eisenhower wisely tasked the bureaucracies to do what they often do best, compete with each other. Strategic options were identified, studied and urged on the President. Conceived in the White House sunroom, the Solarium Exercise, as it came to be known, produced the long-range strategy that guided U.S. national security policy for the next 5 decades.

To meet the current threat, our strategy must be more dynamic and more open. Security is not a sedative, not a state of rest, but the level of vigilance required to protect, and advance, what we hold essential to life and liberty. Advocating for human rights and human freedoms is not cultural hegemony; it is our God-given right and duty.

Nor can we afford to be squeamish or patronizing in public discourse about the zealots who target us, or the weapons they wield. A naive or blurred perception of the threat fragments our defenses and leaves us avoidably vulnerable.

The inconveniences and sacrifices required to protect national security and maintain public safety will be more readily accepted if we are brutally honest about the true nature of our peril. The threat must be confronted with the same clear-eyed focus, steely intensity and unflagging vigilance with which the terrorists pursue their malignant cause.

Since September 11, we have shown we are up to the task.

In another age, another generation faced the prospect of another evil. Winston Churchill, addressing his besieged nation over the BBC in 1940, spoke to the timeless challenge of defending freedom. This is what Churchill said:

"And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant's might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened.

"We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone. Here in this strong city of refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen, we await undismayed the impending assault.

"Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come.

"We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock, or what is perhaps a harder test, a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy, we shall ask for none."

(end text)

(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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