Other Music from a... Different Kitchen

The report describes the struggle as "more than a war," but what the conclusions make plain is that it really means that it is different from war. Of the 27 recommendations in this chapter, only one can be seen as advocating the use of military force: attacking "terrorists and their organizations." And even that one, on closer inspection, is more complicated.

It is increasingly clear that the conflict in Afghanistan falsely fed the idea that the war against terrorism was a real war. In fact, Afghanistan was an exception. The reality of this threat, the very reason it is so difficult to tackle, is precisely that it cannot be addressed by conventional military means. Yet the prism of war has distorted the vision of important segments of Washington, especially within the Bush administration. This has produced bad strategy. The Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has written on the Bush administration's strategy and describes its three pillars as hegemony, preemption and unilateralism. All three approaches seem justifiable if you believe that we are in a war that can be won militarily. All are counterproductive in a struggle that seeks to modernize alien societies, win over Muslim moderates and sustain cooperation on intelligence and law enforcement across the world.

The issue of Iraq highlighted these choices. If you believed that this was truly a war, all that mattered was defeating the enemy. If you believed that a broader political struggle was key, then creating a new and modern Iraq was in many ways more important than defeating Saddam Hussein. The administration showed its colors with a brilliant war plan and no postwar planning. Even in Afghanistan, where the war succeeded and the postwar settlement is working (though fragile), the administration's superhawks (such as Donald Rumsfeld) were continually opposed to greater efforts at nation-building. It doesn't help the war on terror, they argued. But it does help the struggle against Islamic extremism. And there is no war on terror that is not fundamentally an ideological struggle.

The bulk of the commission's substantive recommendations are for a broad political and economic strategy toward the Muslim and Arab world. The report argues that the United States should "offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors." It recommends substantial resources being devoted to scholarship, exchange and library programs in the Muslim world, and has a specific, excellent recommendation to fund public education in these countries. Madrassas and other such religious schools have grown in the Muslim world because the secular educational system has collapsed under the weight of poverty and population growth.