Wes Clark's article in the Washington Monthly to understand what fighting the war on terrorism could mean, aside from military action. There are lots of ways to fight this war... but, we have to continue to fight. It won't go away just because we pull our troops home.
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EXCERPT
Broken Engagement
The strategy that won the Cold War could help bring democracy to the Middle East-- if only the Bush hawks understood it.
By Gen. Wesley Clark
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Red herring
The first thing to remember about American policy towards the Soviet Union is that we never directly invaded any nation under Soviet control. In the early 1950s, some in America saw the expansion of communism as an inevitability which must not only be resisted by force but also rolled back. And for a time during the Eisenhower administration, there was brave rhetoric about such an effort. Struggling resistance movements survived from year to year in the Baltics, Romania, and the Ukraine. And immigrant dissident groups in the United States kept up the political pressure on Washington to consider a more confrontational strategy. But any real prospect of rollback died as Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.
Instead, the foreign policy consensus coalesced around containment, an idea which had been in the air since the early post-war period, when George Kennan, then a veteran American diplomat, published his seminal Foreign Affairs article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Kennan argued that the Soviet system contained within it "the seeds of its own decay." During the 1950s and 1960s, containment translated that observation into policy, holding the line against Soviet expansion with U.S. military buildups while quietly advancing a simultaneous program of cultural engagement with citizens and dissidents in countries under the Soviet thumb.
These subtler efforts mattered a great deal. The 1975 Helsinki Accords proved to be the crucial step in opening the way for the subsequent peaceful democratization of the Soviet bloc. The accords, signed by the Communist governments of the East, guaranteed individual human and political rights to all peoples and limited the authority of governments to act against their own citizens. However flimsy the human rights provisions seemed at the time, they provided a crucial platform for dissidents such as Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov. These dissidents, though often jailed and exiled, built organizations that publicized their governments' many violations of the accords, garnering Western attention and support and inspiring their countrymen with the knowledge that it was possible to stand up to the political powers that be.
With the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, it became clear once more that it would be the demands of native peoples, not military intervention from the West, that would extend democracy's reach eastward. Step by step, the totalitarian governments and structures of the East lost legitimacy in the eyes of their own citizens and elites. The United States and Western Europe were engaged, of course, in assisting these indigenous political movements, both directly and indirectly. Western labor unions, encouraged by their governments, aided the emergence of a democratic trade union movement, especially in Poland. Western organizations provided training for a generation of human-rights workers. Western broadcast media pumped in culture and political thought, raising popular expectations and undercutting Communist state propaganda. And Western businesses and financial institutions entered the scene, too, ensnaring command economies in Western market pricing and credit practices. The Polish-born Pope John Paul II directed Catholic churches in Eastern Europe and around the world to encourage their congregants to lobby for democracy and liberal freedoms.
Such outreach had profound effects, but only over time. In his new book, Soft Power, the defense strategist Joseph Nye tells the story of the first batch of 50 elite exchange students the Soviet Union allowed to the United States in the 1950s. One was Aleksandr Yakovlev, who became a key advocate of glasnost under Gorbachev. Another, Oleg Kalugin, wound up as a top KGB official. Kalugin later said: "Exchanges were a Trojan horse for the Soviet Union. They played a tremendous role in the erosion of the Soviet system...they kept infecting more and more people over the years."
Of course, military pressure played a vital role in making containment work. But we applied that pressure in concert with allies in Europe. In the 1980s, for instance, President Reagan began the deployment of intermediate range missiles in Europe as part of NATO. It was a political struggle in the West, but we engaged NATO and made it work.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.clark.html
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