http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4999114.html
I'm not convinced that Kerry can pull it off, but Nye is a pretty smart guy:
GOING IT ALONE Hard/soft power To fight terror requires allies
Joseph Nye
September 26, 2004 NYE0926
Joseph S. Nye Jr. is a professor at Harvard and author of "Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics."
Polls show that President Bush has a significant lead over Sen. John Kerry on the issue of terrorism. Despite the statement of the 9/11 commission that it found no evidence to link Saddam Hussein to the attacks on 9/11, the president talks about the Iraq war as part of the general war on terrorism.
Kerry has argued that the Iraq war made the struggle against terrorism worse by diverting resources and by reducing America's attractiveness in the world. Kerry's pledge to work with allies in a more sensitive manner has earned the scorn of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Stepping back from campaign rhetoric, where does our country really stand on this crucial issue? Terrorism is nothing new, nor is it a single enemy. It is a longstanding method of conflict frequently defined as deliberate attack on the innocent with the objective of spreading fear. The attacks on New York and Washington of 2001 were dramatic escalations of an age-old phenomenon. Terrorism today, however, is different from what it was in the past.
Nowadays, instruments of mass destruction are smaller, cheaper and more readily available. Hijacking an airplane is relatively inexpensive. Finally, the information revolution provides inexpensive means of communication and organization that allow groups once restricted to local and national police jurisdictions to become global. Al-Qaida is said to have established a network in 50 or more countries.
Terrorists in the mid-20th century tended to have relatively well-defined political objectives, which were often ill served by mass murder. Governments supported many covertly. Toward the century's end, radical groups grew on the fringes of several religions. Most numerous were the tens of thousands of young Muslims who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, where they were trained in a wide range of techniques and many were recruited to organizations with an extreme view of the religious obligation of jihad.
These technological and ideological trends increased both the lethality and the difficulty of managing terrorism. In the 1970s, the Palestinian attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and attacks by groups like the Red Brigades galvanized world attention at the cost of dozens of lives. In the 1980s, the worst terrorist incident killed 300 people. The attacks on America of September 2001 cost several thousand lives. All of this escalation occurred without using weapons of mass destruction. If one imagines a deviant group in some society gaining access to biological or nuclear materials, it is possible terrorists could destroy millions of lives. To kill so many people in the 20th century, a destructive individual like Hitler or Stalin required the apparatus of a totalitarian government. It is now all too easy to envisage extremist groups and individuals killing millions without the help of governments.
In that sense, President Bush was correct to make terrorism and weapons of mass destruction the central issue of our foreign policy. But Kerry agrees with that priority. His criticism is over the unilateralism of the administration's approach and the loss of American attractive or soft power that is so important in winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the majority of moderate Muslims in the world. The hard power of the American military was correctly used to remove the Taliban government that had supported Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, but the administration's use of hard power without a broad coalition of allied support in Iraq undercut our soft power.
If a campaign to suppress terrorism is based on broad coalitions that focus on de-legitimizing attacks on innocent noncombatants, it has some prospect of success. Indeed, one lesson of the efforts since 2001 is that there is no way to avoid broad cooperation. In that sense, the metaphor of war -- with its emphasis on military force -- is misleading.
The metaphor of war was understandable in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, but it creates as many problems as it solves. How long will the war last and how does it relate to civil liberties at home and to alliances abroad? Bombing is not an option for fighting terrorist cells in Hamburg, Singapore or Detroit. Only close civilian cooperation in intelligence sharing, police work across borders, tracing financial flows, and working to pre-clear cargo manifests and passenger lists can cope with such a threat. Countries cooperate out of self-interest, but a country's soft or attractive power, not only its military might, affects the degree of cooperation.
That is why critics argue that Bush's policy in Iraq was a mistake. It squandered American soft power, diverted attention from Afghanistan and Al-Qaida, and created a dangerous new haven for terrorists. If Kerry's appeal for a more sensitive approach to the fight against terrorism means that he would work more closely with other countries and combine American hard and soft power more effectively, then "sensitive" might best be translated as "smart."