The 9/11/01 attacks on American soil provided the Bush Administration with a truly historic opportunity to unite the civilized world in common purpose against Afghanistan-based al Qaeda and its deadly offspring in 60 other countries.  The 3/11/04 Madrid train attacks opened another window for national policy makers to advance a meaningful counterterrorism strategy.

Now, the 7/07/05 "London Calling"--coming as it does on the heels of Britain's 2012 Olympic award and during the G-8 summit in nearby Scotland--cries out for an urgent answer to international terrorism.  The United States has an awesome responsibility that we must now embrace.

After 9/11/01, instead of destroying al Qaeda's forward base in Afghanistan and capturing Osama bin Ladin, strengthening America's homeland security, supporting moderate leaders and pro-democracy elements in Islamic nations, fostering international collaboration against Islamic radicalism, extending and improving our intelligence-gathering capacity across the world, and renewing our nation's credo that governments exists to protect individual liberties, the Bush Administration and extremist leaders in Congress took our nation in precisely the opposite direction.

Rather than a forward-looking counterterrorism strategy, here's what we got: a slow and ineffectual military response in Afghanistan that allowed bin Ladin and company to escape, a political and bureaucratic consolidation of 22 government agencies with no clear mission, dismissive and militarized responses to key leaders' pleas for nation-building economic assistance, an arrogant and misleading foreign policy (Bush) doctrine that openly antagonizes our friends and Cold War allies, a largely unilateral war against an Islamic, oil-producing, sovereign nation (Iraq) that posed no
threat whatsoever to the United States, and "Patriot Act" legislation that assaults basic American liberties of privacy, due process of law, and governmental checks and balances.

The Bush Administration's Iraq War claim that "we need to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" is completely discredited.  As Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism chief under Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43, said, "Invading Iraq after 9/11 is like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor."  Even more to the point of this essay, the "fight 'em there" mantra is a feel-good, ham-handed, talking point that obscures the FACT that our great nation still does not have a
counterterrorism strategy.

George W. Bush's post-9/11 campaign to militarize select portions of the globe is, in reality, a counterproductive series of tactical maneuvers that undermines American security, in particular, and global security, in general.  Unthinking, misplaced, unilateral military responses are not the way to win a world war, let alone a global war against an enemy that wants to destroy the United States and all of western civilization.

America's war on Iraq continues to weaken the United States at home and abroad, and strengthen al Qaeda in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa,the Americas, and beyond.  But these alarming trend lines can be reversed, and must be reversed.  Otherwise, we will continue to face the spiraling dangers of a Taliban-like government in Pakistan armed with nuclear weapons, a reborn Taliban satellite next door in Afghanistan that exports al Qaeda ideology and terror, a nuclear-armed Iran with an openly radicalized Hezbollah-style ideology, and a fragile Saudi Arabia that--after the often-predicted fall of the House of Saud--could easily morph into an anti-U.S. Islamic state.

Out of crisis comes opportunity.  Like the 9/11 attacks on New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. that robbed more than 3,000 American lives, and like the Madrid train attack of March 2004 that killed 191 and injured more than 1500, this morning's terrorist attack news out of London provides our national government with yet another crisis moment to transform
into opportunity--the opportunity to focus on and galvanize support around an aggressive and effective counterterrorism strategy.

Who are we fighting in the war on terrorism?  We're fighting Islamic radicals and they are drawing people from the youth of the Islamic world into hating us.  What should be the building blocks of a counterterrorism strategy?  Instead of playing right into the hands of al-Qaeda our entire government must reengage over the battle of ideas. We can best avoid the public relations and human rights disasters of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and the loss of 17,000 sons and daughters and 100,000 more Iraqis by pulling our troops out of harm's way in as rapid and orderly a manner as possible.  They can be replaced simultaneously with security forces from responsible Islamic nations.

The time sensitive troop withdrawal will help address security problems here by returning our national guard and military reserves to the home-protection mission.

The government needs to clarify and streamline its data collection and analysis functions.  We must rebuild those military, economic, and intelligence-gathering alliances and relationships that forged global victories in 1918, 1945, and 1991.

We must wean ourselves from a fossil fuel diet that endangers our national security, threatens our economic well-being, and undermines our capacity to play an effective role in building a two-state Israeli-Palestinian solution to the most perplexing problem in the Middle East.

On the home front, the lessons of history are abundantly clear: liberty and security are very difficult to balance.  Yet the forfeiture of one almost certainly guarantees the loss of the other.  Liberty and security are inextricably bound together.  Freedom without order is chaos.  And order without freedom is authoritarianism.  Let's make sure we get the balance correct in this year that congress reconsiders crucial sunset clauses due to expire or due to renew.

Chuck Pennacchio

Charles Pennacchio, Ph.D.,
History and Poli. Sci. Assoc. Prof.,
University of the Arts;
2006 U.S. Senate candidate, Pennsylvania