Ex-envoy assails Bush policy at Bangor forum

BANGOR – Four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation’s war on terror has been shortsighted, overwrought with bureaucracy, and incorrectly referred to by President Bush as “this generation’s functional analog of the Cold War,” according to Laurence Pope, a former U.S. ambassador and terrorism adviser during the Clinton administration.

“The president’s paradigm that this is a new Cold War is likely to mislead us very radically if we follow it to its logical conclusion, if we structure our operations around that paradigm,” he said Monday. “What we really need is a sophisticated, integrated response involving intelligence, involving diplomacy, the building of international relationships, the establishment of intelligence-sharing relationships with friendly folks who can help us deal with these problems. … It is not something we can spend our way out of by inventing new kinds of missiles and positioning them in Europe and doing all the things we did during the Cold War.”

Pope’s comments came during the Bangor Foreign Policy Forum, a monthly discussion program designed to offer a closer look at international issues.

During three decades with the State Department, Pope served as director of northern Gulf affairs, acting coordinator of counterterrorism, U.S. ambassador to Chad, and political adviser to Gen. Anthony Zinni, former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command.

He resigned in 2000 after the Senate failed to act on his nomination as ambassador to Kuwait.

Pope, who now lives in Portland with his wife, Betsy, said the governmental reorganization that followed the terrorist attacks of 2001 has created complicated layers of bureaucracy and multiple agencies for counterterrorism operations, each with its own acronym. The result, he said, has been “bureaucratic rivalry” and “a loss of senior government talent.”

“A lot of it sounds like new initials on top of old initials,” he said. “What worries me is not so much the new alphabet soup in the Beltway. It’s what appears to be a really remarkable brain drain out of the FBI, the CIA, and to some extent, I guess, the State Department. It’s more than a brain drain. It’s a hemorrhage. …We ought to worry about the competence of our institutions. We ought to worry about the fact that we are losing experienced people.”

The former foreign service officer acknowledged some successes from the war on terror. According to the Bush administration, nearly all of those responsible for plotting the Sept. 11 attacks have been captured or killed, and 10 plots against the U.S., including three on domestic soil, have been foiled since 2001.

“Some progress, clearly,” Pope said. “Central intelligence is clearly very active around the world. We’ve had some success. We’ve obviously had some failures as well.”

But the real beneficiary of the war in Iraq has been that country’s eastern neighbor, Iran.

“We’ve eliminated their principal rival in the region, Iraq, which waged a seven-year war against them, killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians,” Pope said. “It’s a good deal from the point of view of Iran.”

Rather than relying solely on our military strength, the focus of the war on terrorism should be on diplomacy, intelligence gathering and “the way in which we organize ourselves,” he said.

“There is certainly a real threat from the jihadists. There will be people who want to kill us. There always will be,” he said. “Fixing root causes of dysfunctional states, whether it is in Iraq or Indonesia or Egypt or in Saudi Arabia, is a task that is well beyond our capabilities. Can we encourage governance that is more responsive, that helps address root causes? Sure. Should we? Yes.”