Good cop, bad cop: two approaches to terrorism.

The dramatic events of the past month in Spain and Iraq show the difference between two approaches to terrorism. The first is the police-and-intelligence response. The second, the American, is the military reaction.

Spain, relying on police and intelligence work, plus collaboration with police in Morocco, Germany, Britain, and France, has at this writing arrested fourteen people suspected of involvement in the train-station bombings in Madrid on March 11. International arrest warrants have been issued for several others believed implicated. In addition, four people identified by Spanish police as "the core" of the group responsible for the attacks were traced, and were surrounded in their apartment near Madrid and eventually blew themselves up rather than surrender.

This group was located when one of them used a mobile phone with a prepaid card from the same batch as one found in a telephone linked to an unexploded bomb on the scene of the train-station bombings. In short, these people were found through diligent police work, by a force experienced in antiterrorist investigations because of years combating the murderous Basque separatist movement, ETA.

The following week, French police and internal security agents detained thirteen people believed connected with the same Moroccan Islamist group that has been accused of responsibility for the Spanish attack. They had been under surveillance for some time. Their group, the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, is believed responsible for bombings in Casablanca last May, killing at least thirty-three people in addition to the twelve suicide bombers themselves.

Previously, a sweep by some seven hundred police officers in London and Southeast England arrested eight men believed to be connected to terrorist groups. Elsewhere in Western Europe, police working in collaboration with Turkish police made fifty arrests in four countries. French and British police, like the police in Spain, are experienced in terrorist surveillance and intelligence because of years dealing with terrorism, that of the IRA in Britain and, in France, Islamist movements of Algerian and Moroccan origin.

The United States reacted to the 9/11 attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan and ouster of the Taliban regime. Then it invaded Iraq. Many influences went into these strategic choices, but one of the most important, if not the most important, was the tyranny of means. Because the United States is the most heavily armed nation on earth--relatively speaking, the most heavily armed in history--its leaders automatically think first of military solutions to any problem that involves violence.

Then those leaders often find out, as they have now, that most of this military power is useless for doing what needs to be done. A year after conquering Iraq, U.S. forces still can't pacify it or provide security, and there is confidential but anxious talk in the Pentagon of a need to reactivate conscription, at least for specialists.

These leaders have also shown an obsession with the notion that a total solution to the problem is possible. (This has simply worsened the terrorist problem, as early April's chaotic events in Iraq amply attest.) They invaded Afghanistan because it harbored Al Qaeda terrorists. They had the illusory belief that by capturing the movement's leaders they could deal a decisive blow to terrorism. They failed to find the leaders; they left Afghanistan largely in the control of its warlords, and in deteriorating political, economic, and social conditions.

With the invasion of Iraq (as former White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke has written), they chose "as an object lesson for potential state sponsors of terrorism not a country that had been engaged in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not." They turned it into one. Iraq now is a generator of anti-U.S. terrorism, there and elsewhere. George W. Bush and his advisers show no sign of knowing how to get out of the desperate situation they have created.

They acted in the vain belief that killing or capturing Saddam Hussein would produce some dramatic change. They were also motivated by the determination to invade Iraq that the Bush people were demonstrating even before 9/11, something that is far from being fully explored by the press and Congress, but which some observers in Washington think could end in the biggest U.S. presidential scandal yet.

Police and intelligence work do not provide a solution to the current wave of terrorist actions by radicalized Muslims. There is no solution, as such. The problem can for the present only be contained. It is a political phenomenon connected both to a cultural crisis within contemporary Islamic civilization and to a conflict with the United States (and Israel) which has multiple sources.

Defenders of the Bush administration--and of the conventional foreign-policy wisdom--scoff at the idea that there are some things the United States can't constructively change, and some forces in current history that you have to live with. If anything positive comes out of the Iraq crisis, it will be to teach this lesson--once again.

[c] 2004, Tribune Media Services International