For Bush, the hard part begins

With the Taliban defeated and the noose tightening around Osama bin Laden, President George W. Bush's job should be getting easier. After all, barely a month ago, naysayers doubted that the U.S. military could dispatch Afghanistan's dictators so quickly. But the truth is, targeting Al-Qa'ida and its host state was the easy part of America's war on terrorism. Now, the true test of America's war aims - and of Bush himself - begins.

The events of Sept. 11 constituted a clear and vicious act of war against the United States. The American people and their allies knew what needed to be done, and are doing it quickly, efficiently, thoroughly. So far, Bush has led a people united in grief and resolve. His astronomically high public opinion ratings - which no one would have predicted on Sept. 10 - testify to the breadth of the American consensus. Looking back over the past three traumatic months, it is hard to believe that any American would have acted very differently had he or she been president.

Ironically, complexity and confusion are all but guaranteed to follow these initial successes, this preliminary clarity. In Afghanistan, the military job is not yet finished, and postwar Afghanistan remains a challenge. The United States has to be careful to avoid getting too involved in what Bush derisively dismissed when Bill Clinton did it as "nation-building." At the same time, there is a Western consensus that the U.S. does have a responsibility to help ease Afghanistan into a more orderly, and more just, postwar government.

More broadly, the skirmishing among Bush advisers has intensified over what to do next. Since the Taliban retreat from Kabul, supposedly authoritative reports have each identified the "obvious" next target - or targets - in the war on terrorism. Competing bureaucrats and strategists each have their favourites, with an accompanying rationale. Somalia is a shell of a country, pocked with Al-Qa'ida strongholds. Iraq remains a thorn in the U.S. side - and has spent over two decades developing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Yemen is host to Al- Qa'ida training camps and has frustrated American officials investigating last year's bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Syria, despite its recent ascension to the United Nations Security Council, openly hosts Hezbollah and Hamas and has long used such terrorists as proxies to advance Syrian foreign policy aims.

Contrary to the Canadian penchant for understatement, Americans overstate. Bush's sweeping pronouncements against "terrorism" as a method of politics and against any nations that "harbour" terrorists - let alone deploy them - are characteristic, and in some ways problematic. Even if Bush and his administration were all willing to weed out terrorism that thoroughly, the sad fact is that over the last decades the nations of the world have allowed this plague to fester in too many corners of the globe. Such aims while noble, are unrealistic.

At the same time, such sweeping U.S. condemnations, for all their complexities, are preferable to the Canadian government's penchant for parsing. Half-measures do not work against fanatics. Trying to distinguish between say, Hamas's so-called charitable arms and its political/terroristic arms, as Jean Chrétien's Liberal government does, is farcical, not statesmanlike. Among the many disturbing lessons of Sept. 11 is how easily terrorists exploit Western freedoms, Western tolerance, Western live-and-let-live attitudes. Chrétien's foreign policy team should be too experienced to be taken in so easily.

Last week's horrific violence in Israel will test the applicability and universality of Bush's anti-terrorism doctrine. Israelis are justifiably having a hard time distinguishing the murder of secretaries and stock brokers in office towers and airplanes in New York and Washington from the slaughter of teenagers and commuters in pedestrian malls and public buses in Jerusalem and Haifa. If the United States has the right after such attacks not only to declare war on the terrorists but to crush the Taliban that "harboured" them, Israel should be able to declare war on the terrorists and to crush the Palestinian Authoritythat harbours them. (Whether Israel chooses to do that, is a different, and more complicated calculation).

Regardless of where one stands on the difficult questions of settlements and territories, of Camp David and Oslo, two facts in the Mideast morass seem clear. First, that since September, 2000, Palestinians, including Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, have systematically and consistently opted to advance their goals through violence rather than through negotiation. And second, that if terrorism is going to have any objective definition, suicide bombers wading into a crowd of young people with specially made nail-laden, flesh tearing, limb-ripping, lethal bombs qualify as terrorists, no matter what their motivations.

"No easy matters will ever come to you as president," Dwight Eisenhower warned his successor John F. Kennedy. "If they are easy, they will be settled at a lower level." Eisenhower was not completely correct. Bush's decision to go to war after Sept. 11 was psychically draining, strategically challenging, militarily complex, but it was in fact easy. Seeking to crush Al-Qa'ida was necessary. Narrowing "the noose" on bin Laden, as the president awkwardly put it, was obvious. Dispatching the Taliban was surprisingly simple. But now the once relatively harmonious voices at "the lower level" have turned cacophonous. The dilemmas intensify as the subtleties proliferate. So far, Bush has exceeded expectations. Now expectations are higher, the challenges steeper. Bush is in the hot seat. We will soon see just how comprehensive and successful his war on terrorism will be.

- Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University.