Column: Next president must confront international terrorism

No matter who wins Tuesday's presidential election, George W. Bush or Al Gore, one of the main foreign affairs issues he'll face when he takes office in January is the increasingly serious threat of international terrorism. The most recent example of this plague was the Oct. 12 terrorist bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in the Middle Eastern port of Aden, Yemen, which killed 17 young American sailors.

Both Bush and Gore have promised swift retribution against the terrorist bombers, if and when they are identified. To date, however, the investigation has been hampered by a lack of evidence and the Yemeni government's reluctance to cooperate with American investigators. Obviously, any Yemeni official who cooperates with "Yankee imperialists" will face a death sentence from the terrorists. You'll recall that our alleged friend and ally, Saudi Arabia, refused to cooperate with U.S. investigators after the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 American servicemen.

In short, the next U.S. president will be commander-in-chief of a high-stakes and increasingly deadly war against international terrorism. As Washington Post foreign affairs analyst Jim Hoagland wrote last week, "Americans can no longer turn away from the ugly realities of the shadow war directed against their nation. Nor can they ignore the ineptness of U.S. responses."

He termed the Cole bombing "an intelligence success of major proportions for at least one of America's enemies in the Middle East." Hoagland's main point was that successful terrorist attacks are no longer carried out by freelance fanatics who "get lucky"; rather, they are perpetrated by dedicated and determined groups of trained combatants who hate our country and everything it stands for.

"Not only are these anti-American warriors brave, they are increasingly well organized, well armed and well trained," observed anti-terrorism expert Tom Donnelly in the conservative Weekly Standard. "'Globalism,' it turns out, favors not only international businessmen, but also international drug lords and guerrillas." He added that new information technologies and old-fashioned weapons "make the resort to violence both tempting and effective."

The Cole bombing, as USA Today noted, "was the latest reminder that U.S. forces in the Middle East operate in the world's deadliest region and accept risks (such as that fatal Aden port call) that would be unthinkable elsewhere." This is because the American military must walk a fine line, safeguarding the world's oil supply while not offending Arab countries uncomfortable with the presence of U.S. forces. Overall, the U.S. maintains about 20,000 military personnel in the region at a cost of at least $1.5 billion per year. Since 1991, terrorist attacks have claimed the lives of 56 Americans in the Middle East, including the Cole's 17 victims.

So what can we do about this direct threat to our national security? The Washington Post's Hoagland asserts that the Clinton administration "has not made a serious effort" to combat international terrorism. He says the next president should start by naming a blue-ribbon commission headed by a "policy heavyweight" - someone like former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn - "to investigate the operational failures that exposed the Cole to disaster and the larger questions about terrorism."

The Weekly Standard's Donnelly advocates the use of "the instruments of war - intelligence gathering and military force - not only to avenge them (terrorist acts) ... but also to frustrate the political aims of our enemies." This will require a change in the thinking of the American military, which is geared-up to fight conventional wars. And we must attack the terrorists directly instead of relying on the toothless United Nations.

Accurate intelligence is hard to come by in the Middle East, however, because of the way terrorist groups are organized. It's one thing to analyze satellite imagery but it's much more difficult to penetrate small terrorist cells. That's virtually impossible in the case of the Afghanistan-based terrorist organization headed by Saudi fugitive Osama Bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Cole attack and the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

If and when a Bin Laden/Cole link is proved, we should retaliate immediately against the government of Afghanistan, which tolerates and protects him and his followers, just as the Israeli government retaliates against Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists in the Middle East.

Israeli anti-terrorist expert Ehud Springzak, writing in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine, believes that once a terrorist organization has been identified and located, "security services can strike against the commanders and field officers who recruit and train the assailants and then plan the attacks." He says that such an effort requires the formation of effective networks of informers, the constant monitoring of potential collaborators and close cooperation among international intelligence services.

Springzak reaches a semi-optimistic conclusion: "The present understanding of the high costs of suicide terrorism and the growing cooperation among intelligence services worldwide gives credence to the hope that in the future only desperate organizations of losers will try to use this tactic on a systematic basis."

We can only pray that he's right and that the next American president will organize U.S. intelligence and military services to effectively combat the continuing deadly threat of international terrorism.

TUESDAY'S ELECTION: If you don't vote on Tuesday, you have no right to complain about the election results. In fact, you'll deserve exactly what you get - big Government, higher taxes ... whatever. See you at the polls.

Guy W. Farmer, a semi-retired journalist and former U.S. diplomat, resides in Carson City.