November 7, 2002
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Transcript follows.
Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Global Q&A. Today we are very pleased
to be speaking to Captain Reid L. Sawyer. Captain Sawyer is an instructor of
political science at the United States Military Academy. Captain Sawyer has
lectured on terrorism to various groups and is currently working on a research project for the Institute of National Security Studies on the efficacy of counterterrorism measures. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.
RS: Thank you.
Your book
deals with many facets of terrorism and
the impact recent activities have had on security
concerns for the United States. It’s been more than a
year now since the attacks of September 11th and many
Americans still feel unprotected and overly exposed.
These are some of the issues we heard about last night
which were reinforced by comments made by CIA Director
George Tenet last
week as well. What gains has the
U.S. made in protecting its citizens from terrorist
threats over the past year?
RS: That’s a great question because it’s one that
requires us to understand what the benchmark is in
which to measure from. Certainly we have paid a lot
more attention to the world outside of us. We have
gained a contextual understanding. It’s been an
awakening of the American public as well as the policy makers and decision makers in DC. It’s understanding the world and understanding that while privacy is a good thing, it cuts both ways. And I think that that
understanding has led to some re-organization within
government and the partisan nature in the department
of homeland security. I’m not sure which side is
right-the Republican or Democratic side. The second
thing is I think the intelligence services have done a
lot of re-organization internally and certainly the
FBI, from numerous candid comments, have indicated
that they themselves are re-organizing their culture,
looking at that and have made significant strides.
Really, how do we do that? We’re asking the
intelligence service to do something that we haven’t
asked them to do before and certainly the FBI. I
think we have made significant strides in how to
organize to defeat the threat and get at the
preemptive cycle of law enforcement like what you saw
in Buffalo a few weeks ago.
Definitely. The book attempts to compare what your
co-editor on the book, Colonel Russell Howard, calls “Old
Terrorism” of a sort of bi-polar, Cold War nature to
what he calls “New Terrorism”. Can you explain the
difference between the two?
RS: The “New Terrorism” differs from the “Old”
in that
the role of ideology within the terrorist groups has
changed. Previously, in what we saw mostly during the
Cold War, were the revolutionary terrorists (be it at
the extreme right or the extreme left) that were
motivated both by political goals and seeking some
sort of either change within the government or
ethno-national terrorists trying to set up their own
state-the proto-typical IRA model. What we’re seeing
now are groups where ideology plays a completely
different role, the religiously motivated terrorists,
which people have coined the “New Terrorism Model”.
There are certainly political aspects to what Osama
Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are after, removing the
U.S. from the Middle East. Nonetheless, it’s the fact
that their violence is justified by religion, which
significantly changes their decision calculus; their
acceptance of the violence and the pursuit of those
goals and the consequences for us. That’s why the
lethality that we’ve seen with this new terrorism is
increasing dramatically.
It also seems to be a broader ideology, in that it is
primarily opposed to U.S. dominance in a lot of ways
and as you mentioned, justified by religion.
RS: Very much so and which is dangerous. Religion doesn’t
have any national boundaries. While there are
sympathizers for the IRA around the world and in parts
of the U.S., it really was sort of a British problem
and was difficult to garner support. Because it is a
broader appeal and they can point to this monolithic
enemy of the U.S., religion doesn’t have any
boundaries. If you’re an extremist, you can hear that
calling no matter what country you’re living in.
Immediately following the terrorist attacks of
9/11, many people asked the question, “Why do they
hate us?” In your opinion, has this question been
adequately addressed and honestly answered?
RS: I think the question has been adequately
addressed. I’m not sure if we like the answers. I’m
not sure if there’s much we can do to change the
answers, which some people have called the Cultural
Imperialism of McDonalds and Starbucks on every corner
in every country. What’s necessarily good for our
economy isn’t always good for diplomacy. I think that
we know why they dislike us so much. For people in
the U.S., I think it’s difficult to understand why
people hate us so much to take 2,500 lives in a
terrorist attack. But, this is nothing new to places
like Sri Lanka or other parts of the world. I’m not
sure that there’s a lot that we can do about that
answer about why they hate us. We need to examine
what it means to be a responsible hegemon, how we can
do that and how we can win the war of ideas, as others
have coined it. It’s spreading the good words about
democracy and why we’re a good place. That’s a
phenomenal question. I think that we know the answer,
there’s just not much we can really do about it.
One challenge facing the international community
is the designation of groups that should be considered
foreign terrorist organizations. As the saying goes,
“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom
fighter”. This administration has been forced to
change its standings on a number of cases in Chechnya,
in Eastern China. I think the administration has gone
from not labeling certain groups as terrorists to
putting them on the list. In your opinion, is it
possible or even necessary to come up with a universal
definition of terrorism so that we can better
identify these groups and their modus operandi.
RS: This is the biggest problem in Terrorism studies.
Every book you pick up on Terrorism, including ours,
starts with the question of how to define Terrorism
because there is no universally accepted definition of
what Terrorism is. To a large extent, that’s really
at the root of what is precluded large-scale
international action by the UN against terrorism
because you can’t build a consensus about what the
correct definition of Terrorism is. It becomes
difficult to define who is and who is not a
Terrorist. The importance of defining terrorism comes
in that it defines your response to it. Whether you
build it as a judicial paradigm; are they criminals if
they blow up a building and how do you define that? Do
we prosecute them or do we consider them combatants?
Conferring some sort of legitimacy on them. So I think
it is important that we move and continue to get to a
definition. Even within the U.S. government there is
about five different definitions and although they are
fairly similar and they all share common elements, but
the department of defense’s definition is different
from that of the department of justice, etc.
The initial response on the war on terrorism, essentially eliminating the
infrastructure of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was a clear
and deliberate response that was widely supported not
only within the U.S., but also around the world.
Now as the Bush Administration tends to deal with what
it sees as two-armed members of the axis of evil, the
policies of driving the war on terrorism have been
questioned at home and abroad. How do the recent
examples of Iraq and North Korea fit into the war on
terror, if at all?
RS: Certainly the questions concerning Iraq and the
potential or development of weapons of mass
destruction and the questions of whether or not there
are ties of state-sponsored terrorism fit in. The
case of North Korea is somewhat more complex. I think
that the concerns there center much more on the
proliferation of missile technology and that sort of
element and with recent revelations about their
nuclear program. Also the fact that we know that they
like to help others out, that complicates it even
more. I’m not sure that there are strong terrorism
connections between North Korea and others nor really
has the Administration made that case. But I think it
is considering them in that group because of the
potential for weapons of mass destruction and the
grave dangers that those pose to the international
security environment.
You also suggest other elements of terrorism in the
book such as cyber-terrorism
and agro-terrorism.
Could you talk a little about the importance of
understanding these methods?
RS: I think the first reason why they’re important i
to understand that there are single-issue terrorists
out there like AGRO or the Environmental
Liberation
Front or even the Animal Liberation
Front. As we
focus on this war on terrorism, we almost have a
single-minded approach that we are starting to equate,
and certainly the American public is starting to
equate that all terrorism is Middle Eastern, they are
all Muslim extremists and they all look and act like
Al Quaeda. I think that that does a disservice and
can lead us to bad policy outcomes because there are a
lot of other single-issue groups out there and other
avenues. So the first is that there are single-issue
terrorist groups and that is what the agro-terrorist
article was addressing as well as there’s lots of
different spreads and vulnerabilities (especially like
what Randy was stressing last night) our matters
whether it be in the agricultural sector or in
cyber-terrorism. With the Internet attack, just what
was it, last week. Unbelievable if we had had that
going on for another couple of hours, we would have
seen significant impacts on the Internet.
I just wanted to ask if you could finish up with
some of the highlights of the book, maybe point to a
few of the essays that stick out or come to mind?
RS: I think that they’re all really good. Certainly
Mccaffrey’s and John Bouses’ which talks about
the convergence of narco-terrorism and international
crime is an important piece that is getting missed by
a lot of people in the popular press, certainly not
from an organization like yours, but sort of the
glossy coverage of other publications as well as by
the public and they don’t understand the complexities
of it so that’s a very important article, especially
coming from the former drug Czar. Richard Betts, he’s
a professor at Columbia, has a phenomenal article in
the book called "Soft Underbelly of American Primacy
and the Tactical Advantages of Terror", and he paints
out in very plain terms ways for us to think about why
terrorists have tactical advantages and why we’re so
vulnerable and really sets up a framework that I think
that would do well for decision makers to look at and
understand. There is also an great article by Richard
Schultz and an Andreas Voe, called
“The Real Intelligence Failure of 9/11”. They make a
case for preemptive attack. That’s really a
looking-forward essay on what we need to do and argues
this from a really edgy perspective. I think that the
last one that I would highlight would be Michelle
Malvesti’s. She’s also now on the National Security
Council and does this long case study of why the
United States decided to strike back at Terrorists in
the past, which is very informative.
So it sounds like the book spans a
wide time period. It gives some historical examples
and gives looking-forward pieces as well.
RS: Exactly. Fifty percent of the essays are
pre-nine-eleven and fifty percent are post-nine-eleven
and then with that about thirty percent were
originally commissioned for the book. This originally
started as a means of filling this gap in
undergraduate and graduate education where there’s
just not a textbook out there on this issue. There’s
really only one other book out there that does
anything like this. What we found, is there’s just a
lot larger appeal for this book than what the
publisher originally imagined.
It sets up sort of a pedagogical approach to here
is what we think about terrorism, here are the threats
presented by terrorism and here are different forms of
it (argo and cyber) and here is how we need to
organize to fight it. So it is a fairly broad
approach to the subject.
Excellent. Captain Sawyer thanks so much for
taking the time to talk to me today. I really
appreciate it.