THE ZARQAWI RULES

 Artículo de DAVID BROOKS en “The New York Times” del 14-2-04

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi never graduated from high school, and he is one of the world's most brutal mass murderers, but he's written a brilliant guide on how to fight terrorism. It helps that he is a terrorist himself, so he's perfectly placed to know what tactics work against people like him.

He apparently wrote a 17-page planning memo from Iraq to his Al Qaeda colleagues that was obtained by U.S. forces and revealed this week in The Times. If you read the memo properly, you can extract what might be called "Zarqawi's Rules" — maxims for winning the war on terror.

Massive retaliation works. We now know that Saddam Hussein felt free to defy the international community because he thought that casualty-averse Americans would never actually invade his country. At worst, we'd drop a few bombs, which he could survive. Now our enemies know us better, and respect us more. "America, however, has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes," Zarqawi warns his colleagues. This shift in perceptions should deter some attacks all by itself.

Hard power isn't enough. The extensive coalition effort to hunt down terrorists is clearly making progress. "Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases. By God, this is suffocation!" Zarqawi laments.

But he also says only an indigenous Iraqi security force, backed by a legitimate democratic government, can truly put him out of business. Americans are easy targets. But when Iraqis take control, "you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance to people of the region. How can we kill their cousins and sons and under what pretext? This is the democracy; we will have no pretext."

Going into the war, many American planners assumed that first we would establish stability in Iraq, then introduce democracy. But it's now clear that democracy is the stability. You can't establish order unless locals are invested in their own self-rule and thus are eager to chase bad guys.

The lesson is that the so-called soft-power programs — the democracy-building seminars, the civil society efforts, the town hall meetings — are not the gooey icing on the cake of law and order. They are the substance of law and order itself.

Soft power isn't enough. Though Zarqawi senses that his time in Iraq is running out, he is already preparing for the next battle: "If, God forbid, the government is successful and takes control of the country, we just have to pack up and go somewhere else again, where we can raise the flag or die, if God chooses us."

There is a lot of talk this year about democratizing the greater Middle East. But wherever democratic reforms are initiated, Zarqawi, or people like him, will be there to kill and disrupt. Terrorists understand that democracy is the antithesis of the sort of Islamic totalitarianism they seek to establish. That means the road to democratization is not going to suddenly turn peaceful. The modernizers will always need to be backed by the sword as well as the seminar.

The Zarqawi memo's central message is that there is a symbiotic relationship between hard power — the sort of thing the Pentagon can do — and soft power, the sort of thing the National Endowment for Democracy and the United Nations can do.

We've just endured two years of bitter debate over the U.S. decision to lead a coalition into Iraq. But the post-Saddam world is different from the Saddam world. In this era, most responsible people understand the implications of Zarqawi's memo: the hard-power people and the soft-power people need each other.

That's why you now hear Senate Republicans praising Kofi Annan. That's why a hawkish senior administration official recently insisted, "I'm not anti-U.N." That's why responsible Democrats like Joe Biden, Evan Bayh and Hillary Clinton and Republicans like George Bush and Dick Cheney echo similar themes when they sketch out the years ahead. That's why Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may joust about who was right in 2003, but they generally agree on how to proceed in 2004. That's why, no matter how much they bicker, there's not a dime's worth of difference between neoliberals and neoconservatives over Iraq.

Despite all the partisan warfare, we're on the verge of a broad foreign policy consensus. Let's all give a shout out to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for clarifying it for us.