Special Issues/Other

December 2003
Measuring the War on Terrorism: A First Appraisal
by Daniel Byman
"How goes this war? Both Al Qaeda and the United States can claim some degree of success. In general, Al Qaeda has suffered operationally, but its broader support remains strong. The United States has greatly improved its ability to target Al Qaeda, but gaps remain."

December 2003
Radical Islam, Liberal Islam
by M. A. Muqtedar Khan
"It is in the battle for Islam's soul that the United States and liberal Islam share a common strategic goal: the systematic dismantlement and delegitimization of the rogue Islamist discourse that portrays America as an anti-Islam crusader and Islam as an ideology of hate and violence."

December 2003
Leaderless Resistance: The Next Threat?
by Jeremy Pressman
"What if the next generation of Al Qaeda has neither a central leadership nor a territorial base? If a terrorist organization could find a model for operating without its own Afghanistan, it would pose a different and perhaps more difficult set of challenges for counterterrorist forces."

December 2003
Nuclear Terrorism: Why Deterrence Still Matters
by Jasen J. Castillo
"Although policy makers worry about the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, we should recognize that terrorist organizations have shown a remarkable tendency to fall back on well-tested conventional methods of attack. . . . Deterrence, when measured against prevention, still maintains enough credibility to prevent rogue states from sharing nuclear weapons with terrorists."

December 2003
China's Dubious Role in the War on Terror
by Joshua Kurlantzick
"Although China has made some attempts to help the United States combat terrorist groups, its contributions have been limited and overpraised, and it has manipulated the war on terror for its own means."

November 2003
Is America an Imperial Power?
by Bruce Cumings
"That the United States would be hegemonic was inevitable from Bretton Woods onward. That it might also become an empire was not."

November 2003
Neither New nor Nefarious: The Liberal Empire Strikes Back
by Max Boot
"Compared with the grasping old imperialism of the past, America's ëliberal imperialism' pursues far different, and more ambitious, goals. It aims to instill democracy in lands that have known tyranny, in the hope that doing so will short-circuit terrorism, military aggression, and weapons proliferation."

November 2003
Bush's Revolution
by Ivo H. Daalder James M. Lindsay
"At heart, Bush is a revolutionary. Everything he has done in his first 32 months as president shows that he is committed to challenging the existing order. He has been audacious rather than cautious, proactive rather than reactive, risk-prone rather than risk-averse. In his actions as well as his doctrines, he has changed the course of American foreign policy."

November 2003
America and the Ambivalence of Power
by G. John Ikenberry
"While some policymakers want to use us supremacy to resist multilateralism and the rule of law, the lesson of history is that even powerful states-and certainly a unipolar America-gain advantage by supporting and operating within an international system of rules and institutions."

November 2003
The Empire's New Frontiers
by Michael T. Klare
"The United States . . . wants to enhance its own strategic position in south-central Eurasia, much as Great Britain attempted in the late nineteenth century. This effort encompasses anti-terrorism and the pursuit of oil, but many in Washington also see it as an end in itself-as the natural behavior of a global superpower engaged in global dominance."

November 2003
The Counsel of Geopolitics
by Parag Khanna
"America's 'exceptionalism'-its hope of defeating the cycles of historyóhinges on using power now to permanently change the rules of the geopolitical game in everyone's favor, including America's own."

December 2002
Confronting the Unipolar Moment: The American Empire and Islamic Terrorism
by James Kurth
"A dialectical and symbiotic connection, perhaps an escalating and vicious cycle, exists between the [growth of the American Empire and the growth of Islamic terrorism], and the world is about to witness a titanic and explosive struggle between them."

December 2002
Hard Choices: National Security and the War on Terrorism
by Ivo H. Daalder, James M. Lindsay and James B. Steinberg
"The administration's National Security Strategy forthrightly commits to 'fighting terrorists and tyrants' and 'encouraging free and open societies on every continent.' What it ignores is that these two goals often conflict. . . . Which should take priority: America's commitment to its ideals, or a concern for its safety? . . . The strategy offers no advice on how to answer these questions."

December 2002
The Deadly Nexus: Oil, Terrorism, and America's National Security
by Michael T. Klare
"If the United States wants to reduce its exposure to terrorism and avert further involvement in overseas conflicts, the choice is clear: it must eschew the use of military force to ensure access to foreign petroleum and rely instead on conservation, the market, and alternative sources of energy."

December 2002
Tilting at Dominos: America and Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia
by Joshua Kurlantzick
"American officials have turned their attention toward Southeast Asian policymaking-something largely ignored since the end of the Vietnam War-and have declared Southeast Asia the 'second front' in the global campaign against terror. . . . [But] backing Southeast Asia's often brutal and compromised militaries, which themselves contain elements linked to Islamist radicals, will only boost human rights abuses, breeding popular resentment and setting the stage for more terror."

December 2002
Same War, Different Views: Germany, Japan, and the War on Terrorism
by Peter J. Katzenstein
"The tendency of the Bush administration to frame terrorism as a threat posed equally by evil states and nonstate groups is . . . distinctive. It is easy to lose sight of how atypical, even among liberal democracies, are the American view of international life in Manichaean terms and the American emphasis on the military dimension of society. Germany's and Japan's very different approaches to counterterrorism are useful reminders of American exceptionalism."

December 2002
What Is Cyberterrorism?
by Maura Conway
"Are terrorist groups who operate in cyberspace 'cyberterrorists'? The answer hinges on what constitutes cyberterrorism. . . . Admittedly, terrorism is a notoriously difficult concept to define; however, the addition of computers to old-fashioned criminality it is not."

November 2002
America and the Islamic World
by P. W. Singer
"The underlying lesson of September 11 is that the United States can no longer defer the hard decisions. The overwhelming tragedy of the attacks has provided a mandate to change business as usual in American foreign policy and work on constructing a positive and enduring relationship between the United States and the Islamic world."

November 2002
Jihad and Political Violence
by Roxanne L. Euben
"Jihad is neither simply a blind and bloody-minded scrabble for temporal power nor solely a door through which to pass into the hereafter. Rather it is a form of political action in which . . . the pursuit of immortality is inextricably linked to a profoundly this-worldly endeavoróthe founding or re-creation of a just community on earth."

November 2002
Activism and Reform in Islam
by Augustus Richard Norton
"Largely missing from American discussions about Islam is any appreciation of the debates within Islam and the widely variant interpretations by Muslims of their own religion. Beyond the core belief shared by all Muslims that there is only one God and Muhammad was the messenger of God, there are many 'Islams,' depending on locale, education, custom, politics, and personal attitudes."