Barry Buzan - Will the ‘global war on terrorism’ be the new Cold.docx

Barry Buzan - Will the ‘global war on terrorism’ be the new
Cold War?
Will the ‘global war on terrorism’
be the new Cold War?
International Aff airs 82: 6 (2006) 1101–1118
© 2006 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2006 Blackwell
Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Aff airs
BARRY BUZAN*
Washington is now embarked on a campaign to persuade itself,
the American
people and the rest of the world that the ‘global war on
terrorism’ (GWoT) will
be a ‘long war’. This ‘long war’ is explicitly compared to the
Cold War as a similar
sort of zero-sum, global-scale, generational struggle against
anti-liberal ideolo-
gical extremists who want to rule the world. Both have been
staged as a defence
of the West, or western civilization, against those who would
seek to destroy it.
As Donald Rumsfeld says of the ‘terrorists’: ‘they will either
succeed in changing
our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs’.1 The
rhetorical move to
the concept of a ‘long war’ makes explicit what was implicit in
the GWoT from its
inception: that it might off er Washington a dominant, unifying

idea that would
enable it to reassert and legitimize its leadership of global
security. The demand
for such an idea was palpable throughout the 1990s. When the
Cold War ended,
Washington seemed to experience a threat defi cit, and there
was a string of attempts
to fi nd a replacement for the Soviet Union as the enemy focus
for US foreign and
military policy: fi rst Japan, then China, ‘clash of civilizations’
and rogue states.
None of these, however, came anywhere close to measuring up
to the Cold War
and the struggle against communism, which for more than 40
years had created a
common cause and a shared framing that underpinned US
leadership of the West.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 off ered a solution to this problem,
and right from the
beginning the GWoT had the feel of a big idea that might
provide a long-term
cure for Washington’s threat defi cit. If it could be successfully
constructed and
embedded as the great new global struggle, it would also
underpin the shaky legiti-
macy of US unipolarity, maintenance of which was a key goal in
the US National
Security Strategy (USNSS) of 2002, and is still visible, albeit in
more muted tones,
in the 2006 USNSS.2 Will this strategy succeed? Will the
GWoT become the new
Cold War?
* I am grateful to Ole Wæver and Lene Hansen and an
anonymous reviewer for International Aff airs for comments
on an earlier draft of this article.

1 ‘Rumsfeld off ers strategies for current war: Pentagon to
release 20-year plan today’ and ‘Abizaid credited
with popularizing the term, “long war”’, Washington Post, 3
Feb. 2006, p. A08, http://www.washingtonpost.
com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/02/AR2006020202296.html
and www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2006/02/02/AR2006020202242.html, accessed 17
Feb. 2006.
2 Morten Kelstrup, ‘Globalisation and societal insecurity: the
securitization of terrorism and competing strate-
gies for global governance’, in Stefano Guzzini and Dietrich
Jung, eds, Contemporary security analysis and Copen-
hagen peace research (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 106–16.
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International Aff airs 82: 6, 2006
These questions seem at fi rst to mark disagreement with the
recent argument
of Kennedy-Pipe and Rengger that 9/11 changed nothing
fundamental in world
politics.3 What it does pick up on is their idea that the only
thing that changed
is the belief that something had changed. This article is about
the strength and
durability of that belief, and whether as a social fact it can be
used to create a
new political framing for world politics. In addressing this
question I diff erentiate
between a traditional materialist analysis of threat (whether
something does or
does not pose a specifi c sort of threat, and at what level) and a
so-called securitization
analysis (whether something can be successfully constructed as
a threat, with this
understanding being accepted by a wide and/or specifi cally
relevant audience).4
These two aspects of threat may run in close parallel, but they
can also be quite
separate. States, like people, can be paranoid (constructing
threats where none
exist) or complacent (ignoring actual threats). But since it is the
success (or not)
of the securitization that determines whether action is taken,
that side of threat
analysis deserves scrutiny just as close as that given to the
material side.

Keeping this distinction in mind, the explicit ‘long war’ framing
of the GWoT
is a securitizing move of potentially great signifi cance. If it
succeeds as a widely
accepted, world-organizing macro-securitization, it could
structure global security
for some decades, in the process helping to legitimize US
primacy. This is not to
confuse the GWoT with US grand strategy overall, despite the
GWoT’s promi-
nence in the 2006 USNSS. US grand strategy is much wider,
involving more tradi-
tional concerns about rising powers, global energy supply, the
spread of military
technology and the enlargement of the democratic/capitalist
sphere. US military
expenditure remains largely aimed at meeting traditional
challenges from other
states, with only a small part specifi cally allocated for the
GWoT. The signifi cance
of the GWoT is much more political. Although a real threat
from terrorists does
exist, and needs to be met, the main signifi cance of the GWoT
is as a political
framing that might justify and legitimize US primacy,
leadership and unilater-
alism, both to Americans and to the rest of the world. This is
one of the key
diff erences between the GWoT and the Cold War. The Cold
War pretty much was
US grand strategy in a deep sense; the GWoT is not, but, as a
brief glance at the
USNSS of 2006 will show, is being promoted as if it were.
Whether this promo-
tion succeeds or not will be aff ected by many factors, not least

how real and how
deep the threat posed by terrorism actually is.
The next section surveys the rise of the GWoT as a successful
macro-
securitization. The one following examines conditions that will
aff ect the sustain-
ability of the GWoT securitization. The conclusions refl ect on
the consequences
of the GWoT should it become successfully embedded as the
new Cold War. The
argument is that it is unlikely, though not impossible, that the
GWoT will be
anything like as dominant and durable as the macro-
securitization of the Cold
3 Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Nicholas Rengger, ‘Apocalypse
now? Continuities or disjunctions in world poli-
tics after 9/11’, International Aff airs 82: 3, 2006, pp. 539–52.
4 Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and desecuritization’, in Ronnie
D. Lipschutz, ed., On security (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1995), pp. 46–86; Barry Buzan, Ole
Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: a new framework for
analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
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Will the ‘global war on terrorism’ be the new Cold War?
1103
War. One of the reasons for its fragility is precisely that it is
not representative of
US grand strategy as a whole. Another is that the means used to
pursue the GWoT
threaten two of the core things they are supposed to be
defending: liberal values
and the unity of the West.
The rise of the GWoT as the new macro-securitization
The Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States in 2001 brought the
post-Cold War
period to an abrupt end. It solved the threat defi cit problem for
the US, and
triggered a substantial shift in security defi nitions and
priorities in many countries.
The GWoT played strongly to the long-established propensity in
US foreign policy
to frame American interests as universal principles. This had
worked well during

the Cold War to legitimize US leadership. Washington saw
itself as representing
the future, and therefore having the right and the duty to speak
and act for human-
kind, and this claim was, up to a point, accepted in much of the
rest of the West.
Right from the start the GWoT was also presented in this way:
At the beginning of this new century, the United States is again
called by history to use
our overwhelming power in defense of freedom. We have
accepted that duty, because we
know the cause is just … we understand that the hopes of
millions depend on us … and
we are certain of the victory to come.5
So far, the GWoT has been a rather successful macro-
securitization.6 That Al-
Qaeda and its ideology are a threat to western civilization is
widely accepted
outside the Islamic world, and also within the Islamic world,
though there opinion
is divided as to whether or not this is a good and legitimate
thing. The US-led war
against the Taleban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan shortly after
September 11 was
generally supported at the time, and NATO is still playing the
leading role in the
(so far not very successful) attempt to stabilize and rebuild that
country. Beneath
its exaggeration, there is some real substance to President
Bush’s boast about the
coalition backing the GWoT:
the cooperation of America’s allies in the war on terror is very,
very strong. We’re grate-

ful to the more than 60 nations that are supporting the
Proliferation Security Initiative to
intercept illegal weapons and equipment by sea, land, and air.
We’re grateful to the more
than 30 nations with forces serving in Iraq, and the nearly 40
nations with forces in Af-
ghanistan. In the fi ght against terror, we’ve asked our allies to
do hard things. They’ve risen
to their responsibilities. We’re proud to call them friends.7
Immediately following 9/11 NATO invoked article 5 for the fi
rst time, thereby
helping to legitimize the GWoT securitization. Since then
leaders in most western
5 Dick Cheney, ‘Success in war is most urgent US task, Cheney
says: remarks to the Commonwealth Club of
California’, 7 Aug. 2002, http://japan.usembassy.gov/e/p/tp-
se1585.html, accessed 26 Dec. 2005.
6 Kelstrup, ‘Globalisation’, pp. 112–13.
7 George W. Bush, ‘President Bush discusses progress in the
war on terror’, White House, 12 July 2004, http://
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/07/20040712–5.html,
accessed 28 Dec 2005.
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countries, but also, conspicuously, in Russia, China and India,
have associated
themselves and their governments with the view that
international terrorism is a
common threat. In the case of Russia, China, Israel and India,
the move has been
to link their own local problems with ‘terrorism’ to the wider
GWoT framing.
Part of the GWoT’s relative success can be attributed to the way
in which it has
tied together several longstanding security concerns arising
within the liberal order,
most notably crime and the trades in drugs and the technologies
for weapons of
mass destruction (WMD). Within the frame of the liberal
international economic
order (LIEO), it is well understood that while opening state
borders to fl ows

of trade, fi nance, information and (skilled) people is generally
to be promoted,
such opening also has its dark side in which illiberal actors,
mainly criminals and
terrorists, can take advantage of liberal openness in pursuit of
illiberal ends. The
problem is that the liberal structures that facilitate business
activity cannot help but
open pathways for uncivil society actors as well. Concern about
criminal activity
(particularly the drugs trade) has—at least within the United
States—been framed
in security terms (the ‘war on drugs’) for some decades. And
concern about trade
in WMD is institutionalized in the nuclear non-proliferation
regime as well as in
conventions about chemical and biological weapons technology.
The securitizing
moves supporting the GWoT have linked all of these issues.
Within the United
States, the link between terrorism and drugs seeks to graft a
newer securitization
on to an older one.8 The link predates 2001, and its essence is
the charge that terror-
ists engage in the drugs trade as a principal source of funding
for their activities,
one of which is seeking WMD:
As we enter the 21st century, the greatest threats to our freedom
and security will come
from a nexus of new threats: rogue states, terrorism,
international crime, drug traffi cking
and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.9
And:

Structural links between political terrorism and traditional
criminal activity, such as drugs
traffi cking, armed robbery or extortion have come increasingly
to the attention of law
enforcement authorities, security agencies and political decision
makers. There is a fairly
accepted view in the international community that in recent
years, direct state sponsorship
has declined, therefore terrorists increasingly have to resort to
other means of fi nancing,
including criminal activities, in order to raise funds. These
activities have traditionally
been drug traffi cking, extortion/collection of ‘revolutionary
taxes’, armed robbery, and
kidnappings. The involvement of such groups as the PKK,
LTTE, and GIA in these activi-
ties has been established.10
8 Dan Gardner, ‘Terrorists get cash from drug trade: traffi
cking prime source of funds for many groups’, 14 Sept.
2001, http://www.cfdp.ca/terror.htm#trc, accessed 28 Sept.
2004; US Drug Enforcement Administration,
Drug Intelligence Brief, ‘Drugs and terrorism: a new
perspective’, Sept. 2002, http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/
pubs/intel/02039/02039.html, accessed 19 Aug 2004.
9 Fact sheet, 24 Sept. 1996, ‘Clinton initiatives on terrorism,
crime, drugs’, http://nsi.org/library/terrorism/
terrorcrimedrugs.html, accessed 20 Sept. 2004.
10 INTERPOL General Secretariat, written testimony of Ralf
Mutschke (assistant director, Criminal Intelli-
gence Directorate, INTERPOL) before a hearing of the
Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime,

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In the EU’s European Security Strategy document, organized
crime—especially
traffi cking in drugs, women, illegal migrants and weapons—
and its links with
terrorism, are given together as one of fi ve key threats to
Europe, along with
terrorism itself, proliferation of WMD, regional confl ict and
state failure.11 This
presentation has evolved from the pre-9/11 European pattern,
where the main
eff ort went into securitizing a threat package linking

immigration, organized crime
and drug—thereby depicting immigrants as the root problem.12
Even before 9/11,
these themes were echoed by some Third World spokespersons
seeking to increase
their leverage for reform of the LIEO. Nigerian President
Olusegun Obasanjo, for
example, argued:
We recognise the grave threat posed by the debt question,
poverty, corruption, looted
funds, terrorism and drug-traffi cking to the stability and
prosperity not only of the devel-
oping world but of all countries. They are essentially global
challenges for development
and peace, security, stability and development.13
In relation to the securitization of WMD, the new twist is the
addition of a
strong concern that not only ‘rogue states’, but also terrorist
organizations, might
acquire nuclear weapons or other WMD.
The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of
radicalism and technology.
Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking
weapons of mass destruction, and
evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination.
The United States will not
allow these eff orts to succeed … History will judge harshly
those who saw this coming
danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the
only path to peace and
security is the path of action.14
And, from Europe:

Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is potentially the
greatest threat to our se-
curity … The most frightening scenario is one in which terrorist
groups acquire weapons
of mass destruction. In this event, a small group would be able
to infl ict damage on a scale
previously possible only for States and armies.15
One benchmark for the success achieved in linking the GWoT to
WMD has
been the ability of the United States since 2003 to set up the
Proliferation Security
13 Dec. 2000, ‘The threat posed by the convergence of
organized crime, drugs traffi cking and terrorism’,
http://www.house.gov/judiciary/muts1213.htm, accessed 28
Sept. 2004.
11 Javier Solana, A secure Europe in a better world: European
Security Strategy (Paris: European Union Institute for
Security Studies, 2003), pp. 6–9.
12 Didier Bigo, Polices en Résaux: l’expérience européenne
(Paris: Presses de Sciences Politiques, 1996); Barry Buzan
and Ole Wæver, Regions and powers: the structure of
international security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), p. 359.
13 Agence France-Presse, ‘Nigerian president urges rich–poor
partnership’, Global Policy Forum, 20 July 2000,
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ff d/nigeria1.htm,
accessed 4 April 2005.
14 George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the
United States of America (Washington DC: White House,

Sept. 2002).
15 Solana, A secure Europe in a better world, pp. 7–8.
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Initiative (PSI). Despite reservations about US unilateralism,
opposition to its
invasion of Iraq and concerns about the legality of intercepting
trade, the PSI
has attracted participation from over 40 countries.16 Even
critics acknowledge the

GWoT’s success. An Action Aid report on the distorting impact
of the GWoT on
aid fl ows notes that ‘The war on terror is like a new Cold War
where everything is
subordinated to a single purpose.’17
On this evidence, there can be little doubt that during the half-
decade since
September 2001 the GWoT has achieved considerable progress
as a macro-
securitization. It has been successfully tied in to some pre-
existing securitizations
and has achieved a broad acceptance within international
society. The question
is: does its success to date give the GWoT the potential to
become embedded as
the successor to the Cold War? How will events from here on
either reinforce or
weaken the GWoT’s bid to be the new Cold War?
Will the GWoT securitization be durable?
As the recent furor over the Danish cartoons shows, events are
largely unpredict-
able: we cannot say who will die when, or get elected when, or
when some natural
disaster will occur. Nor can we forecast the impact of events,
which may depend
much on context and timing. Some events could be so big that
they wipe out most
or even all assumptions based on historical continuities and
trends (e.g. a large and
rapid rise in sea levels caused by a faster than expected
meltdown of the Greenland
and Antarctic ice sheets). Nevertheless, concentrating only on
the types of event

that are both plausibly probable and closely related to the
GWoT, it is possible to
think in a systematic way about their impact on the intensity
and durability of
the GWoT securitization. There are fi ve obvious types of event
that could signifi -
cantly reinforce or undermine the GWoT securitization:
ü the impact of further terrorist plans and/or attacks (or plans or
attacks success-
fully attributed to terrorists);
ü the commitment of the United States to the GWoT
securitization;
ü the legitimacy of the United States as a securitization leader
within interna-
tional society;
ü the (un)acceptability and (il)legitimacy of both the GWoT
securitization as a
whole or of particularist securitizations that get linked to it;
ü the potency of securitizations competing with the GWoT.
The impact of terrorist attacks and/or plans
Easily the most obvious type of event to infl uence the
durability of the GWoT
securitization will be the success of Al-Qaeda and its imitators
and successors in
16 Mark Valencia, The Proliferation Security Initiative, Adelphi
Paper 376 (London: International Institute for Secu-
rity Studies, 2005).
17 John Cosgrave, ‘The impact of the war on terror on aid fl
ows’, Action Aid, 1 March 2004, p. 1, http://www.

actionaid.org.uk/100235/our_research.html, accessed 24 Feb.
2006.
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sustaining a suffi cient level of attacks and provocations to
feed the securitization.
Analysts like Paul Wilkinson (who are themselves part of the
securitizing process)
argue that the struggle against Al-Qaeda is likely to endure for
‘some decades

ahead’—not least because, with networks in 60 countries, Al-
Qaeda is ‘the most
widely dispersed non-state terrorist network in history’.18
While it is impossible
to predict what terrorists will do, the spectrum of options ranges
from reduction,
through more of the same, to escalation. Reduction means that
the terrorist threat
fades into the background and becomes an acceptable part of
everyday life risks.
This could happen because the terrorist cause loses steam for
internal reasons, and/
or because countermeasures become eff ective enough to foil
most attacks. More of
the same means something like what we have had since 9/11,
with a fairly regular
drumbeat of medium-sized attacks suffi cient to cause local
disruption and some
general angst, but not on a scale suffi cient either to threaten
the operation of the
global economy or to cause major upheavals in the relationship
between state and
society. Escalation means that the terrorists’ motivation and
organization remain
strong, countermeasures are only partly eff ective, and
periodically, or even worse
regularly, some eff ective, high-casualty and/or high-cost
attacks are mounted on
soft targets, with the worst case being use of WMD. The
escalation option would
strengthen the GWoT securitization, and the reduction option
would weaken it.
More of the same does not look suffi cient to sustain the costs
of a long-term macro-
securitization unless the fear of escalation can be maintained at
a high level.

One cannot rule out the possibility that governments with a
strong vested
interest in maintaining the GWoT securitization (most obviously
Russia, China,
India and the Bush and Blair administrations) might resort to
agent provocateur
actions in order to strengthen a terrorist ‘threat’ that had itself
become too weak
to serve the political purposes of maintaining the GWoT
securitization. Since the
agencies that deal with counterterrorism are among the most
secretive in govern-
ment, and since these agencies control reporting of alleged
terrorist plots uncov-
ered and foiled, there is quite a bit of scope for manipulations
ranging from spin to
wholesale fabrication. There will always, of course, be
conspiracy theorists who
will think this anyway; but we have already been treated to
enough government
lying, secrecy, deception, and abandonment of legal and moral
principles during
the GWoT to give this option some plausibility. And, as will
become clear below,
what the terrorists do, or are thought to be capable of doing,
may well be the most
crucial variable aff ecting the sustainability of the
securitization. If done convinc-
ingly, such action could help to sustain the GWoT. But if done
and exposed, it
would help to undermine its legitimacy.
The commitment of the US to the GWoT securitization
Since the United States was the initiator of the GWoT after

9/11, and remains
its leader, its commitment will be a crucial factor in whether the
securitization
18 Paul Wilkinson, International terrorism: the changing threat
and the EU’s response, Chaillot Paper 84 (Paris: European
Union Institute for Security Studies, 2005), pp. 13–16, 25.
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fl ourishes or fails. On the face of it, there is every reason to
think that the US

commitment will stay strong. Legions of the commentariat on
both sides of the
Atlantic have observed how deeply the 9/11 attacks impacted on
the United States,
and this impact has been played to and strengthened by the
subsequent rhetoric of
the Bush administration.19 On the other hand, that same
administration could well
be the agency that delegitimizes the GWoT securitization. Its
gigantic strategic
error in invading Iraq, its incompetence as an occupier, its
appalling behaviour
over torture and prisoners of war, and the visible damage all
this has done to its
reputation abroad could be enough to discredit the GWoT
securitization simply
by its association with a particular administration, even within
the United States.
The campaign rhetoric and the outcome of the 2004 presidential
election would
suggest not, but the continuing catastrophe in Iraq, and the
shocking spectacle
of the US Vice-President defending the right to torture, might
yet be enough
to turn public opinion. The observation attributed to Alexis de
Tocqueville that
‘America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good,
America will cease to be
great’ plays strongly in US domestic politics, and politicians
seen to be violating
America’s goodness need to watch their backs.
The outcome of this is again impossible to predict, and is likely
to be strongly
aff ected by how the terrorist threat unfolds. Americans, like
most other citizens of

democracies, quite willingly surrender some of their civil
liberties in times of war.
But it is easy to see the grounds within American society for
reactions against the
GWoT securitization, especially if its legitimacy becomes
contested. One source
of such reactions would be civil libertarians and others opposed
to the reasser-
tion of government powers through a state of permanent fear
and emergency.
Another would be isolationists and ‘off shore balancers’ who
oppose the current
levels and logics of US global engagement. A Pew poll from
October 2005 found
42 per cent of Americans favouring a more isolationist policy,
on a steeply rising
trend that already surpassed the highest level on the question
reached immedi-
ately after the Vietnam War.20 There is also room for a
similarly informed dispute
over what kinds of emergency action are legitimized by the
GWoT, including
treatment of prisoners of war (aka ‘enemy combatants’), torture,
pre-emptive war,
regime change and unilateralism generally. It will be interesting
to see whether the
present substantial consensus on the need to improve ‘homeland
security’, both in
the United States and in many other countries, becomes
embedded or is increas-
ingly attacked. Grounds for opposition include its costs, in
terms of both money
and liberty, and the ineff ectiveness of a permanent increase in
the state’s surveil-
lance over everything from trade and fi nance to individual
patterns of travel and

consumption. The refusal of Congress in late 2005 to grant the
administration’s
request for a long-term extension of the Patriot Act, and the
political fi reworks
19 Pierre Hassner, The United States: the empire of force or the
force of empire?, Chaillot Paper 54 (Paris: European Union
Institute for Security Studies, 2002), pp. 8–9; Melvyn P. Leffl
er, ‘9/11 and the past and future of American
foreign policy’, International Aff airs 79: 5, 2003, p. 1049.
20 ‘Public unenthused by democracy push’, Pew Research
Centre, 3 Feb. 2006, http://people-press.org/commen-
tary/display.php3?AnalysisID=126, accessed 18 Feb. 2006.
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over unauthorized government wire-taps on US citizens,21 are
perhaps indicative
of a growing, though not yet decisive, reaction against the
domestic and interna-
tional eff ects of the GWoT securitization.
A possible straw in the wind was a recent shift of rhetoric by
some top offi cials
of the Bush administration in the way they talk about terrorism.
They stopped
talking about a ‘global war on terrorism’ and began to use
phrases such as a ‘struggle
against global extremism’, or a ‘global struggle against the
enemies of freedom,
the enemies of civilization’. This repackaging could be seen as
a retreat from the
GWoT securitization, with framings in terms of ‘struggle’
leaning towards more
normalized, politicized responses. But given the parallel use of
‘long war’ rhetoric,
it was more likely an attempt to reformulate the GWoT so as
both to justify a
broader response and to counter criticisms of the excessively
military focus gener-
ated by the ‘war’ framing.22 And in any event, the USNSS of
2006 reasserted the
‘war’ framing, which leans strongly towards maintaining the
securitization.
The legitimacy of the US as a securitization leader within
international

society
Even if the US itself holds to the GWoT securitization, will it
be able to hold
others in a suffi cient consensus to sustain it as a dominant
macro-securitization?
The answer to this question depends on several factors, not least
the importance of
the terrorist threat remaining strong enough, as discussed above.
It also depends on
the credibility and legitimacy of the United States as a leader
within international
society, which will be the subject of this subsection, and on the
acceptability and
legitimacy of the GWoT securitization itself, which will be the
subject of the
next.
The US successfully generated and led the macro-securitization
of the Cold
War against communism generally and the military power of the
Soviet Union in
particular. It was aided in this both by the broad acceptability of
its own qualities as
a leader in the West, and up to a point even in the Third World,
and by the fact that
other states, especially west European ones, plus Turkey, Japan
and South Korea,
shared the fear of communism and Soviet military power. The
GWoT has the
potential to draw together an even wider grouping, comprising
not just the western
states and Japan, but also other major states such as Russia,
China and India, all of
which have reason to bandwagon with the GWoT as a way of
addressing their

own internal confl icts. It is, however, hardly controversial at
this point to observe
that the legitimacy and acceptability of the United States as a
leader have declined
sharply under the stewardship of the Bush administration. The
embracing of
21 ‘Daschle: wiretaps never discussed with Congress: former
Senate Majority Leader domestic war powers were
also rejected’, CNN.com, 23 Dec. 2005,
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/23/domestic.spying.ap/
,
accessed 26 Dec. 2005.
22 Kim R. Holmes, ‘What’s in a name? “War on terror” out,
“struggle against extremism” in’, Heritage Foun-
dation Policy Research and Analysis, 26 July 2005,
http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecu-
rity/wm805.cfm, accessed 8 Dec. 2005; Eric Schmitt and Thom
Shanker, ‘Washington recasts terror war as
“struggle”’, 27 July 2005, New York Times as reprinted in
International Herald Tribune, http://www.iht.com/
articles/2005/07/26/news/terror.php, accessed 8 Dec. 2005.
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unipolarity as a justifi cation for unilateralism by that
administration shocked and
alienated many of its allies who had got used to working within
the multilateral
system largely constructed by the United States during the half-
century following
the end of the Second World War. Within that general reaction
there have been
a whole host of well-rehearsed specifi c disagreements about
issues ranging from
the International Criminal Court, through the environment and
arms control, to
the invasion of Iraq, torture and the treatment of prisoners of
war. A weight of
punditry agrees that the Atlantic has got wider, to the point
where even the idea
that there is a western community is now under serious threat.23
There are two linked questions in play here: one is about the
weakening of US
legitimacy as international leader generally, arising from its
unilateralist turn; the

other is about whether the GWoT itself, or more particularly the
specifi c way in
which the Bush administration has defi ned and pursued it, is
itself undermining
the legitimacy and attractiveness of US leadership. These
questions refl ect sets of
dynamics that are in principle separate, but which can easily
become linked. A
United States that had remained committed to multilateralism
might have weath-
ered better the disagreements, particularly those concerning
Iraq, that have arisen
over the GWoT. But a unilateralist United States that has made
itself unpopular
fi nds that this unpopularity and the disagreements over Iraq
become mutually
reinforcing.
This situation raises interesting questions about the position of
the United States
within international society, and about the nature of
international society; and it
is these questions that underpin the potential political signifi
cance of the GWoT
securitization. Tim Dunne argues that US unilateralism has been
taking it outside
international society, though he is uncertain about whether this
means that inter-
national society has, in eff ect, shrunk by losing a member, or
been pushed into a
more hierarchical form by the suzerain behaviour of its most
powerful member.24
Kelstrup reaches a clearer formulation.25 He sees that the
successful securitization
of the GWoT has created a ‘formative moment’ in the global
system in which the

United States is bidding for ‘a new strategy of governance in
the global system’ that
rejects the traditional multilateralism and favours a more
power-based unilateralism.
Such a shift would normally, as Dunne partly argues it is doing,
take the United
States outside international society. But Kelstrup’s concern is
that a successful and
durable securitization of the GWoT might be strong enough to
legitimize a shift
towards the more hierarchical form of international society also
pointed to by
Dunne, echoing the wider debate about whether the United
States is now a type of
empire. If the combined force of reactions against US
unilateralism and its conduct
of the GWoT take it outside international society, then both its
leadership position,
and international society at the global level, are gravely
weakened. If the GWoT
securitization is strong enough to legitimize a more hierarchical
inter national
23 Michael Cox, ‘Beyond the West: terrors in Transatlantia’,
European Journal of International Relations 11: 2, 2005,
pp. 203–33.
24 Tim Dunne, ‘Society and hierarchy in international
relations’, International Relations 17: 3, 2003, pp. 308, 314–
15.
25 Kelstrup, ‘Globalisation’, pp. 113–15.
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society, then the United States’ leadership position is greatly
strengthened. A
third option is explored by Press-Barnathan, who argues that in
several important
respects the classical institutions of international society have
been strengthened by
the GWoT, despite some appearances to the contrary.26 The
thrust of her argument
is that the United States will probably have to drift back into
line, having had its
unilateralist bid rejected, and not being able to aff ord to stay
outside for too long.
Its implication is that the United States will then be in a weaker

leadership position,
having broadly failed to translate its unquestioned power to
destroy into a basis of
legitimacy for a more hierarchical international society.
To the extent that the United States is unpopular apart from the
GWoT, its
attempt to use the GWoT securitization to consolidate its sole
superpower position
could encounter resistance simply because it could do so. In
other words, states
might support or oppose the GWoT not only on its merits, but
also because of
how it plays into the global hierarchy of power.27 The
unfolding of events at the
time of writing suggest that Press-Barnathan’s position is
closest to the likely
outcome, though successful escalation by the terrorists could
easily rewrite this
script to match Kelstrup’s scenario.
The unacceptability and illegitimacy of the GWoT securitization
as a
whole and/or of associated particularist securitizations
The durability of the GWoT securitization, and the ability of the
United States to
lead it, are also aff ected by the extent to which both the GWoT
securi tization as a
whole and/or particularist securitizations that get linked to it
become unacceptable
and illegitimate. Although the general GWoT macro-
securitization has in many
respects been rather successful, it has not gone entirely
unopposed, and it is not
diffi cult to imagine where additional lines of opposition might

come from. So far,
opposition is not so much to the general securitization itself as
to the framing of it
as a ‘war’ and, increasingly, to the practices that the US tries to
legitimize within
the GWoT frame. Even if the general securitization continues to
command wide
support, reaction against it could also grow from US attempts to
link to it issues
that are either related, but hotly contested (most obviously
Israel’s own WoT), or
hotly contested because the facts of the link to the GWoT are
themselves contro-
versial (most obviously the invasion of Iraq on the grounds of
its alleged possession
of WMD and its links to Al-Qaeda).
In terms of the GWoT securitization as a whole, some of the
lines of opposition
are the same in the rest of the world as they are in US domestic
debates, particu-
larly over what kinds of emergency action it legitimizes. To the
extent that the
GWoT becomes associated with actions that seem to contradict
the values that
the West seeks to represent against the likes of Al-Qaeda, the
legitimacy of the
securitization is corroded. If the GWoT means that prisoners or
war are denied
26 Galia Press-Barnathan, ‘The war against Iraq and
international order: from Bull to Bush’, International Studies
Review 6: 2, 2004, pp. 195–212.
27 I am grateful to Ole Wæver for this point.

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the rights of the Geneva Conventions; that some forms of
torture are used as
interrogation techniques; that the United States arrogates to
itself the right to
attack others on grounds of suspicion of links with terrorists;
that civil liberties
and economic freedoms are restricted in the name of homeland
security; then
many will think that the GWoT securitization is doing more
harm than good to

‘the civilized world’. Wilkinson, who has solid credentials as a
hard foe of the
terrorists, echoes a sentiment widely held across the political
spectrum when he
says that ‘If we undermine or destroy our hard-won liberties and
rights in the
name of security against terrorism we will give the terrorists a
victory they could
never win by the bomb and the gun.’28 In this respect it is of
more than passing
interest that all of the current strategies being used to pursue
the GWoT seem
actively to damage the liberal values they purport to defend. I
shall return to this
point in my conclusions.
It is also conceivable that the GWoT securitization will come
under attack
because of the way in which it facilitates the linkage of religion
and politics. Most
western leaders (the ever undiplomatic Berlusconi having been a
notable excep-
tion) have tried hard right from the beginning not to stage the
GWoT as a war
between the West and Islam. They have trodden the diffi cult
line of maintaining
that, while most of the terrorists speak in the name of Islam,
that does not mean
that most adherents of Islam are terrorists or supporters of
terrorists. But despite
this, the profoundly worrying relinking of religion and politics
in the United
States, Israel and the Islamic world easily feeds zero-sum confl
icts. This linkage
could help to embed the securitization of the GWoT, as it seems
to have done

within the United States and Israel. If religious identities feed
the growth of a
‘clash of civilizations’ mentality, as seems to have happened in
the episode of
the Danish cartoons, this too could reinforce the GWoT
securitization. It could,
equally, create a reaction against it from those who feel that
their particular
religion is being mis represented by fundamentalists, and/or
from those who object
to religious infl uence on politics. The latter is certainly part of
what has widened
the gap between the US and Europe.
Another weakness of the GWoT macro-securitization is that Al-
Qaeda and
its like, while clearly posing a threat to the West, do not
represent a plausible
political alternative to it, Islamist fantasies about a new
caliphate notwithstanding.
The contrast with the Cold War could not be more striking.
Then, the designated
opponent and object of securitization was a power that
represented what seemed
a plausible political alternative: one could easily imagine a
communist world. The
post-9/11 securitization focused neither on an alternative
superpower nor on an
alternative ideology, but on the chaos power of embittered and
alienated minori-
ties, along with a handful of pariah governments, and their
ability to exploit the
openness, the technology, and in some places the inequality,
unfairness and failed
states generated by the western system of political economy.
While serious, the

terrorist threat seems to lack the depth of the Soviet/communist
one. It therefore
has shallow roots, and could well be harder to sustain.
28 Wilkinson, International terrorism, pp. 17–18, 24–5.
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In addition to the general vulnerabilities of the GWoT
securitization, there
is the problem of controversial securitization linkages being
made to it. Like the
problem of GWoT-legitimized actions that go against western

values, contested
linked securitizations also threaten the legitimacy and
attractiveness of the wider
securitization. The most obvious, widespread and deepest
dispute of this kind has
been over the invasion of Iraq. The US and British governments
attempted to justify
the invasion by linking Saddam Hussein’s regime to both
terrorists and WMD.
This securitizing move was successful within the United States,
but vigorously
contested in many other places, resulting in serious and
damaging splits in both the
EU and NATO. Russia was generally very supportive of the
GWoT securitization,
seeking to link its own diffi culties in Chechnya to it, but Putin
joined Germany
and France in strong opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq.
The ill-prepared
occupation that followed the successful blitzkrieg against Iraq
only deepened the
splits, with many opponents of the war agreeing with Dana
Allin’s assessment that
‘Iraq was probably the war that bin Laden wanted the United
States to fi ght’,29
and Wilkinson’s that it was ‘a gratuitous propaganda gift to bin
Laden’.30 During
the 2004 US election, even John Kerry began to argue the point
that invasion of
Iraq was distracting eff ort away from the GWoT.31 As the
political disaster in Iraq
continues to unfold, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it
was both a tactical and
strategic blunder of epic proportions in relation to the problem
of global terrorism
represented by Al-Qaeda. The steady fl ow of bad news from

Iraq, and the lack of
sound options for either staying in or getting out, corrodes the
legitimacy of the
GWoT securitization by associating it with bad decisions and
unsuccessful, even
counterproductive, actions. Whether this type of association is
suffi cient to bring
down the GWoT securitization is an interesting question. If the
Vietnam War is
taken as an analogy, then the answer is probably no. Vietnam
weakened the United
States because, probably like Iraq, it came to be seen both as a
mistake and as a
defeat. But it did not much damage the wider macro-
securitization of the Cold
War, despite being closely linked to it.
Somewhat diff erent from Iraq, but similar in creating tension
over the broader
GWoT securitization, was Israel’s attempt to link its own war
against the Arabs to
America’s GWoT. This move was largely successful in the
United States, where it
increased the already strong US tilt towards Israel, and largely
rejected everywhere
else (where Israel’s problems were seen to be largely of its own
making because of
its expansionist settlement policy). Like the invasion of Iraq,
this particular securi-
tization divided the United States from many of its allies in the
GWoT, and so
weakened the consensus on the overall securitization of the
GWoT. This type
of linkage strengthened the view that the GWoT represents not
just a legitimate
response to a genuine threat, but also a manoeuvre by the Bush

administration to
manipulate the 9/11 trauma to create a climate of fear which
could help it achieve
the radical political goals which it brought with it to offi ce.
The attacks of 9/11
29 Dana H. Allin, ‘The Atlantic crisis of confi dence’,
International Aff airs 80: 4, 2004, p. 652.
30 Wilkinson, International terrorism, p. 21.
31 ‘Bush, Kerry clash on Iraq war’, Chicago Sun Times, 30
Sept. 2004, http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/
01bush.html#, accessed 26 Dec. 2005.
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off ered the Bush administration not only a huge opportunity to
pursue its domestic
agenda within the United States, but also, as it thought, an
opportunity to remake
the world.32 To the extent that links to Iraq and Israel reinforce
the view that the
GWoT is just a plot on the part of the Bush administration, the
legitimacy of the
GWoT securitization will be eroded.
The potency of securitizations competing with the GWoT
The fi nal obvious type of threat to the durability of the GWoT
securitization is that
it will be overtaken by a competing securitization and pushed
into the background.
Just as the GWoT pushed other concerns into the background
after 9/11, so too it
might be subordinated to more apparently urgent concerns.
Recall also that the
environment for the GWoT securitization was particularly
propitious, given that
the United States had been casting about during much of the
decade following the
end of the Cold War for some new threat around which to
organize its foreign and
security policies. The GWoT had no strong challengers and was
therefore easily
able to fi ll the vacuum.
There are quite a variety of possible candidates for competing
securitizations.
Rising sea levels or approaching asteroids, or the spread of a

new killer plague,
could easily put planetary environmental concerns at the top of
the securitiza-
tion agenda. But in conventional mode the most likely threat to
the GWoT as
dominant macro-securitization comes from the rise of China.
That the GWoT did
not eliminate other, more traditionally state-centric, US
securitizations is shown
by the 2002 National Security Strategy, which pointedly
reasserted the US inten-
tion to retain military superiority over all others: ‘We must
build and maintain
our defenses beyond challenge … Our forces will be strong
enough to dissuade
potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes
of surpassing, or
equaling, the power of the United States.’33 The idea of China
rising to superpower
status and becoming a peer competitor to the United States has
been strong in the
US since the end of the Cold War,34 and the empirical case for
China achieving
superpower capabilities within the next couple of decades is
plausible.35 It was
perhaps only the perceived remoteness in time of China
achieving superpower
status that prevented this securitization from becoming the
dominant rhetoric in
Washington during the 1990s. As time marches on, the rise of
China becomes more
real and less hypothetical.
32 Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America unbound: the
Bush revolution in foreign policy (Washington DC:
Brookings Institution Press, 2003), pp. 78–97.

33 Bush, The National Security Strategy, pp. 29–30.
34 Richard K. Betts, ‘Wealth, power and instability: East Asia
and the United States after the Cold War’, Interna-
tional Security 18: 3, 1993/4, pp. 34–77; Thomas J. Christensen,
‘Posing problems without catching up: China’s
rise and challenge for US security policy’, International
Security 25: 4, 2001, pp. 5–40; Adam Ward, ‘China and
America: trouble ahead?’, Survival 45: 3, 2003, pp. 35–56;
Robert S. Ross, ‘The geography of peace: East
Asia in the twenty-fi rst century’, International Security 23: 4,
1999, pp. 81–118; Denny Roy, ‘Hegemon on the
horizon? China’s threat to East Asian security’, International
Security 19: 1, 1994, pp. 149–68; David Shambaugh,
‘Containment or engagement of China? Calculating Beijing’s
responses’, International Security 21: 2, 1996, pp.
180–209.
35 Barry Buzan, The United States and the great powers
(Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
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Given an ongoing disposition within Washington to construct
China as a
threat, the likely increase in Chinese power, both relative and
absolute, and the
existence of tensions between the two governments over, inter
alia, Taiwan, trade
and human rights, it is not diffi cult to imagine circumstances
in which concerns
about China would become the dominant securitization within
the United States.
Certainly such a securitization would at least in part restore the
parallel to the Cold
War, inasmuch as China is a potential superpower plausibly
capable of becoming
a challenger to the United States’ self-understood unipolar
status. The Chinese
government is also authoritarian, though there is no longer any
parallel to the
ideological competition between the United States and the
Soviet Union. What
is interesting here is that it is the United States that is most
likely to be infl u-
enced by this competing securitization. Should this scenario
unfold, it would of

course impact strongly on the role of the United States as leader
of the GWoT
securitization. The two are not likely to merge because China
has no interest in
supporting Islamic terrorists. It is also entirely possible that if
competition with
China becomes the dominant securitization for the United
States, this securitiza-
tion will have little appeal or use as a macro-securitization to
audiences outside
the United States. Indeed, so long as China conducts its so-
called ‘peaceful rise’
in such a way as not to threaten its neighbours or the general
stability of interna-
tional society, many outside the United States might actually
welcome it. Europe
is likely to be indiff erent, and many countries (e.g. Russia,
China, India, Iran,
France, Malaysia) support a rhetoric of multipolarity as their
preferred power
structure over the predominance of the United States as sole
superpower. If played
cleverly, China’s rise might seem threatening only to the United
States, and not to
most other countries. If so, such a rise might well weaken the
GWoT as a macro-
securitization by lowering it in US priorities, while not
replacing it with any other
macro-securitization. Only if China rises in such a way as to
threaten its neigh-
bours would it provide the basis for a securitization that the
United States could
share with others.
In sum, the durability of the GWoT as a macro-securitization
looks quite doubtful.

Although outcomes for each of the factors above are diffi cult
to predict with any
certainty, the GWoT macro-securitization is vulnerable to being
derailed if any
one of them ceases to be supportive of it in a major way. In
other words, every-
thing has to go right if the GWoT is to inherit the mantle of the
Cold War. This
could, of course, happen, especially if the terrorists succeed in
escalating their
attacks. But given the number of things that could plausibly go
wrong for it, the
chance that the GWoT securitization will endure does not look
all that strong.
Conclusions
To conclude, I want to focus on the contradiction between
pursuit of the GWoT
macro-securitization and maintenance of both domestic and
international polit-
ical and (especially) economic orders based on liberal values.
The argument is that
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pursuit of the GWoT inevitably generates profoundly diffi cult
choices for liberal
societies between eff ective counterterrorism policies on the one
hand and quite
fundamental compromising of the principles of the liberal order
on the other. This
dilemma is made more poignant by the fact that terrorism is the
dark, uncivil, side
of liberalism’s much prized liberation and cultivation of
domestic and global civil
society as an antidote to excesses of state power. The GWoT is
mainly about the
state versus uncivil society. This is the traditional form of the
Hobbesian insecurity
agenda, where the state protects its citizens against each other
by creating a legal
framework, and enforcing a monopoly of legitimate violence
against warlords,
terrorists, organized crime and whatever uncivil elements seek
to disrupt the peace
or deploy force against the citizenry for private ends. But under
globalization a

wider dimension gets added. The openness of a liberalized
economy provides
opportunities for transnational criminals and terrorists and
extremists of all sorts
to operate on a global scale. As a consequence, the traditional
Hobbesian domestic
security agenda gets pushed up to the international level.
Because a world govern-
ment is not available, the problem pits international society
against global uncivil
society. An additional diffi culty, as Wilkinson notes, is that
Al-Qaeda and its ilk
have such profoundly revolutionist objectives that a negotiated
solution is not
really an option.36 Rumsfeld is quite right that the struggle is to
the death.
The dilemma arises out of the policy choices faced by liberal
societies in
responding to terrorism. The three options currently in play all
require that
terrorism be securitized and emergency action of some sort
taken to try to counter
and eliminate it. In each case, the necessary action requires
serious compromising
of liberal values.
Insulation
Insulation is exemplifi ed by homeland security and hardening
the state both against
penetration by terrorists and against vulnerability of
infrastructure to terrorist
attack. Pursuing the logic of homeland security quickly begins
to undermine some
core elements of the LIEO. The free movement of people for

purposes of business,
education and the arts is restricted by tighter controls on travel
and immigration.
The free movement of goods is restricted both by increased
requirements for
inspection and traceability, and by the imposition of more
controls on the export
of technology related to WMD. The free movement of money is
restricted by
the measures taken to disrupt the fi nancial networks of
terrorists. By hardening
borders, homeland security measures erode some of the
principles of economic
liberalism that they are designed to defend; and the same
argument could be made
about the trade-off between enhanced surveillance under the
GWoT and the civil
liberties that are part of the core referent object of western
civilization.37 At various
points insulation blends into the next option: repression.
36 Wilkinson, International terrorism, pp. 133–16.
37 Jef Huysmans, ‘Minding exceptions: the politics of
insecurity and liberal democracy’, Contemporary Political
Theory 3: 3, 2004, pp. 321–41. See also Stephen Gill, ‘The
global panopticon: the neoliberal state, economic life
and democratic surveillance’, Alternatives 20: 1, 1995, pp. 1–
49.
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Repression
Repression is about carrying the fi ght to the terrorists in an
attempt to elimi-
nate them by police and/or military action. It is the sharp end of
the GWoT, and
involves a wide spectrum of activities from, at one extreme,
taking down whole
states (e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq), through sustained occupations
(e.g. Israel in the
West Bank and Gaza) and military searches for and assaults on
terrorist bases (e.g.
in Pakistan, post-Taleban Afghanistan, the Philippines), to, at
the other extreme,
targeted assassinations (e.g. Israeli policy against Hamas and
the PLA) and arbitrary
arrests and detentions (the US extra-legal gulag in Guantánamo

Bay and elsewhere)
of individuals. War is seldom good for liberal values even when
fought in defence
of them. It undermines civil liberties, peace, the openness that
the LIEO requires
and, as US practice shows, the commitment to human rights.
Equalizing
Equalizing starts from the assumption that the root causes of
terrorism lie in the
inequalities and injustices that are both a legacy of human
history and a feature
of market economies. The long-term solution to terrorism in this
perspective is
to drain the waters in which the terrorists swim by redressing
the inequalities and
injustices that supposedly generate support for them. It is not
my concern here to
argue whether this contested cause–eff ect hypothesis is correct
or not. My point
is that if a policy along these lines is pursued, it cannot avoid
undermining the
foundations of a competitive market economy. Redistribution on
the scale required
would put political priorities ahead of market logics, and in
doing so quench the
fi res of the market which fuel the liberal project. A possible
liberal counter to this
view is that a liberal policy would be not so much redistributive
as ameliorative,
making the liberal system work better by, for example,
eliminating rich country
protectionism in agriculture. However, while this might reduce
inequalities in the
very long run, in the short and medium term it is likely to cause

huge amounts of
pain (as in the recent shift in the textile regime, which enabled
China to drive many
Third World producers out of the market). If inequality is the
source of terrorism,
neo-liberal economics does not provide a quick enough solution.
It thus becomes clear that terrorism poses a double threat to
liberal democratic
societies: open direct assaults of the type that have become all
too familiar, and
insidious erosion as a consequence of the countermeasures
taken. It is easy to see
how this dilemma drives some towards seeking a solution in
total victory that will
eliminate both the terrorists and the contradiction. But if it is
impossible to elimi-
nate terrorists, as is probably the case, then this drive risks the
kind of permanent
mobilization that inevitably corrodes liberal practices and
values.
If the priority is to preserve liberal values, one is pushed
towards the option
of learning to live with terrorism as an everyday risk while
pursuing counter-
measures that stop short of creating a garrison state. This choice
is not to securitize
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Barry Buzan
1118
terrorism, but instead to make it part of normal politics. Taking
this route avoids
a contradiction between counterterrorist policies and liberal
values. The necessary
condition for doing so is that state and society raise their
toleration for damage
as a price they pay for openness and freedom. Kenneth Waltz
long ago made the
point that ‘if freedom is wanted, insecurity must be
accepted’,38 though it has to
be said that this part of his analysis has made little impact on
US thinking about
national security.39 This is not to say that under this policy
nothing would be done
to counter terrorism; but the countermoves would stop short of
declaring war
and/or a state of siege. Terrorism would be treated like traffi c

accidents: a struc-
tural problem dealt with through normal politics, despite the
quite large number
of deaths and injuries involved. Citizens would have to accept
the risk of being
killed or injured by terrorists in the same way that they accept
the risk of accident
when they enter the transport system. In principle, this should
be possible—trans-
port accidents kill far more people than terrorists do—though
whether any form
of polity, and especially a democratic one, could in practice
sustain it is an inter-
esting and diffi cult question. Perhaps, with brave, honest,
charismatic and deter-
mined leadership, it could be done. But these qualities are not
abundant in political
life, and there is a question whether such a policy could or
should be sustained
if terrorist violence escalated beyond current levels. Short of
such escalation, a
strategy along these lines should be possible. But if terrorism is
a problem of the
long term, as it well might be for advanced industrial societies,
it would require a
level of democratic sophistication and commitment rather
higher than anything
yet seen.
If this is the way to go, then Europe, which has already learned
to live with
a degree of terrorism as normal politics, may have much more to
off er than the
United States, which is driven by much higher demands for
national security.
Robert Kagan had a point when he noted that the US and

European positions in the
world were determined by their respective power and
weakness.40 But in relation
to the GWoT, and the defence of liberal values, the positions
may be reversed.
Europe is more resilient and better able to defend its values
without resorting to
excesses of securitization. By comparison, the United States
seems a softer target,
too easily pricked into intemperate reactions that in themselves
work to under-
mine what it claims to stand for.
38 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of international politics (Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), p. 112.
39 Buzan, The United States and the great powers, pp. 172–3.
40 Robert Kagan, Paradise and power: America and Europe in
the new world order (London: Atlantic Books, 2003).
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UAE Hires American Ex-Soldiers To Kill Its Political Enemies.
This Could Be The Future Of War_.pdf
REPORTING TO YOU
Alvaro Dominguez for BuzzFeed News
A Middle East Monarchy Hired American Ex-Soldiers
To Kill Its
Political Enemies. This Could Be The Future Of
War.
“There was a targeted assassination program in
Yemen. I was running it. We did it.”
By Aram Roston
Posted on October 16, 2018, at 5:53 a.m. ET
Cradling an AK-47 and sucking a lollipop, the
former American Green Beret bumped along
in the back of an
armored SUV as it wound through the darkened
streets of Aden. Two othercommandos on
the mission were former
Navy SEALs. As elite US special operations
fighters, they had years of specialized training
by the US military to
protect America. But now they were working for a
different master: a private US company that
had been hiredby
the United Arab Emirates, a tiny desert monarchy on
the Persian Gulf.
On that night, December 29, 2015, their job was to
carryout an assassination.

Their armed attack, described to BuzzFeed News
by two of its participants and corroborated by
drone surveillance
footage, was the first operation in a startling for-
profit venture. For months in war-torn Yemen,
someof America’s
most highly trained soldiers worked on a
mercenary mission of murky legality to
kill prominent clerics and Islamist
political figures.
Their target that night: Anssaf Ali Mayo,
the local leader of the Islamist political party
Al-Islah. The UAE considers
Al-Islah to be the Yemeni branch of the
worldwide Muslim Brotherhood, which the
UAE calls a terrorist
organization. Many experts insist that Al-Islah,
one of whose members won the Nobel Peace
Prize, is no terror
A Middle East Monarchy Hired American Ex-Soldiers
To Kill Its Political Enemies. This Could Be
The Future
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/author/aramroston
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/07/tawakkul-
karman-profile
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/
group. They say it's a legitimate political partythat
threatens the UAE not through violence but by
speaking out

against its ambitions in Yemen.
If you want to see more reporting like this, become a
BuzzFeed News supporter.
The mercenaries’ plan was to attach a bomb
laced with shrapnel to the door of Al-Islah’s
headquarters, located near
a soccer stadium in central Aden, a key
Yemeni port city. The explosion, one of the
leaders of the expedition
explained, was supposed to “kill everybody in
that office.”
When they arrived at 9:57 at night, all seemed
quiet. The men creptout of the SUV, guns at
the ready. One carried
the explosive charge toward the building. But just as
he was about to reach the door, another
member of the team
opened fire, shooting back along the dimly lit
street, and their carefully designed plan went
haywire.
Drone footage of the operation in Yemen to
assassinate a Yemeni leader of Al-Islah, an
Islamist political party.
Obtained by BuzzFeed News
The operation against Mayo — which was
reported at the time but until now was not known
to have been carried
out by American mercenaries — marked a pivot
pointin the war in Yemen, a brutal conflict
that has seen children
starved, villages bombed, and epidemics of cholera

roll through the civilian population. The
bombing was the first
salvo in a string of unsolved assassinations
that killed more than two dozen of the group’s
leaders.
https://bzfd.it/mercenaries
The company that hiredthe soldiers and carried out
the attack is Spear Operations Group,
incorporated in Delaware
and founded by Abraham Golan, a charismatic
Hungarian Israeli security contractor who lives
outside of Pittsburgh.
He led the team’s strike against Mayo.
“There was a targeted assassination program in
Yemen,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I was running
it. We did it. It was
sanctioned by the UAE within the coalition.”
The UAE and Saudi Arabia lead an alliance of
nine countries in Yemen, fighting what is largely
a proxy war against
Iran. The US is helping the Saudi-UAE side by
providing weapons, intelligence, and othersupport.
The pressoffice of the UAE’s US Embassy, as
well as its US public affairs company,
Harbour Group, did not respond
to multiple phone calls and emails.
The revelations that a Middle East monarchy hired
Americans to carryout assassinations comes at
a moment when

the world is focused on the alleged murder of
dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi
Arabia, an autocratic
regime that has closeties to both the US and the
UAE. (The Saudi Embassy in the US did
not respond to a request for
comment. Riyadh has denied it killed Khashoggi,
though news reports suggest it is considering
blaming his death
on a botched interrogation.)
Golan said that during his company’s months-long
engagement in Yemen, his team was responsible
for a number of
the war’s high-profile assassinations, though he
declined to specify which ones. He argued
that the US needs an
assassination program similar to the model he
deployed. “I just want thereto be a debate,” he
said. “Maybe I’m a
monster. Maybe I should be in jail. Maybe
I’m a bad guy. But I’m right.”
Spear Operations Group’s private assassination
mission marks the confluence of three
developments transforming
the way war is conducted worldwide:
Modern counterterrorism combat has shifted away
from traditional military objectives — such as
destroying
airfields, gun emplacements, or barracks — to killing
specific individuals, largely reshaping war into
organized
assassinations.

War has become increasingly privatized, with many
nations outsourcing most military support
services to
private contractors, leaving frontline combat as
virtually the only function that the US and many
other
militaries have not contracted out to for-profit
ventures.
The long US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have relied
heavily on elite special forces, producing tens of
thousands
of highly trained American commandos who can
demand high private-sector salaries for defense
contracting or
outright mercenary work.
With Spear Operations Group’s mission in Yemen,
thesetrends convergedinto a new and incendiary
business:
militarized contract killing, carried out by skilled
American fighters.
Experts said it is almost inconceivable that the
United States would not have known that
the UAE — whose military
the US has trained and armed at virtually every
level — had hiredan American company staffed by
American
veterans to conduct an assassination program in a
war it closely monitors.
One of the mercenaries, according to threesources
familiar with the operation, used to work with the
CIA’s “ground
branch,” the agency’s equivalent of the military’s

special forces. Another was a special forces
sergeant in the
Maryland Army National Guard. And yet another,
according to four people who knew him, was
still in the Navy
Reserve as a SEAL and had a top-secret
clearance. He was a veteran of SEAL Team
6, or DEVGRU, the sources told
Got a tip? You can email [email protected] To
learnhow to reach us securely, go to
tips.buzzfeed.com.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/un-probe-details-
fallout-of-proxy-war-in-yemen-between-saudi-coalition-and-
iran-/2018/01/11/3e3f9302-f644-11e7-9af7-
a50bc3300042_story.html?utm_term=.c64bf6a1c93e
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/verabergengruen/khasho
ggi-congress-yemen-saudi-arabia-military-aid
https://www.odwyerpr.com/story/public/9954/2018-01-02/uae-
extends-harbour-groups-10m-pact.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-politics-dissident-
minister/saudi-arabia-denies-allegations-regarding-murder-of-
khashoggi-interior-minister-idUSKCN1MM2PM
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/middleeast/khashoggi-saudi-
pompeo-intl/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/us/politics/trump-saudi-
king-journalist-
khashoggi.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=
Homepage
https://tips.buzzfeed.com/
BuzzFeed News. The New York Times once described
that elite unit, famous for killing Osama bin
Laden, as a “global

manhunting machine with limited outside oversight.”
The CIA said it had no information about the
mercenary assassination program, and the Navy's
Special Warfare
Command declined to comment. A former CIA official
who has worked in the UAE initially told
BuzzFeed News there
was no way that Americans would be allowed to
participate in such a program. But after
checking, he called back:
“There were guys that were basically doing what you
said.” He was astonished, he said, by what he
learned: “What
vetting procedures are thereto make sure the
guy you just smoked is really a bad guy?”
The mercenaries, he said,
were “almost like a murder squad.”
Whether Spear’s mercenary operation violates US
law is surprisingly unclear. On the one hand,
US law makes it
illegal to “conspire to kill, kidnap, maim”
someone in another country. Companies that
provide military services to
foreign nations are supposed to be regulated by
the StateDepartment, which says it has never
granted any company
the authority to supply combat troops or
mercenaries to another country.
Yet, as BuzzFeed News has previously reported,
the US doesn’t ban mercenaries. And with some
exceptions, it is
perfectly legal to serve in foreign militaries,
whether one is motivated by idealism or money.

With no legal
consequences, Americans have served in the Israel
Defense Forces, the French Foreign Legion,
and even a militia
fighting ISIS in Syria. Spear Operations Group,
according to threesources, arranged for the UAE to
give military
rank to the Americans involved in the mission,
which might provide them legal cover.
Despite operating in a legal and political gray zone,
Golan heralds his brand of targeted
assassinations as a precision
counterterrorism strategy with fewer civilian
casualties. But the Mayo operation shows
that this new form of
warfare carries many of the same old problems.
The commandos’ plans went awry, and the
intelligence proved
flawed. And their strike was far from surgical: The
explosive they attached to the door was designed to
kill not one
person but everyone in the office.
Aside from moral objections, for-profit targeted
assassinations add new dilemmas to modern
warfare. Private
mercenaries operate outside the US military’s chain
of command, so if they make mistakes or
commit war crimes,
thereis no clear system for holding them accountable.
If the mercenaries had killed a civilian in
the street, who
would have even investigated?
The Mayo mission exposes an even more central

problem: the choice of targets. Golan insists
that he killed only
terrorists identified by the government of the UAE,
an ally of the US. But who is a terrorist
and who is a politician?
What is a new form of warfare and what is
just old-fashioned murder for hire?Who has the
right to choose who lives
and who dies — not only in the wars of a
secretive monarchy like the UAE, but also those
of a democracy such as the
US?
BuzzFeed News has pieced together the inside
storyof the company’s attack on Al-Islah’s
headquarters, revealing
what mercenary warfare looks like now — and
what it could become.
“What vetting procedures are thereto make
sure the guy you just
smoked is really a bad guy?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/world/asia/the-secret-
history-of-seal-team-6.html
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2015-
title18/html/USCODE-2015-title18-partI-chap45-sec956.htm
https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/?id=ddtc_kb_article_page&sys_id
=b9a933addb7c930044f9ff621f961932
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/stephen-
toumajan-general-us-uae-yemen-contractor
Left to right: IsaacGilmore, Mohammed Dahlan,
and Abraham Golan.
Provided to BuzzFeed News

The deal that brought American mercenaries to the
streets of Aden was hashed out over a
lunch in Abu Dhabi, at an
Italian restaurant in the officers’ club of a UAE
military base.Golan and a chiseled former
US Navy SEAL named
IsaacGilmore had flown in from the US to make
their pitch. It did not, as Gilmore recalled,
begin well.
Their host was Mohammed Dahlan, the fearsome
former security chieffor the Palestinian
Authority. In a well-
tailored suit, he eyed his mercenary guests coldly
and told Golan that in another context they’d
be trying to kill each
other.
Indeed, they made an unlikely pair. Golan, who
says he was born in Hungary to Jewish parents,
maintains long-
standing connections in Israel for his security
business, according to several sources, and he
says he livedtherefor
several years. Golan once partied in London
with former Mossad chiefDanny Yatom,
according to a 2008 Mother
Jones article, and his specialty was “providing
security for energy clients in Africa.” One of
his contracts, according
to threesources, was to protect shipsdrilling in
Nigeria’s offshore oil fields from sabotage and
terrorism.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/11/kurdistan-k-

street-2/
Golan, who sports a full beard and smokes
Marlboro Red cigarettes, radiates enthusiasm. A
good salesman is how
one former CIA official described him. Golan
himself, who is well-read and oftencites philosophers
and novelists,
quotes André Malraux: “Man is not what he
thinks he is but what he hides.”
Golan says he was educated in France, joined
the French Foreign Legion, and has traveled
around the world, often
fighting or carrying out security contracts. In
Belgrade, he says, he got to know the
infamous paramilitary fighter
and gangster Željko Ražnatović, better known as
Arkan, who was assassinated in 2001. “I
have a lot of respect for
Arkan,” he told BuzzFeed News.
BuzzFeed News was unable to verify parts of
Golan’s biography, including his military service,
but Gilmore and
another US special operations veteran who has
been with him in the field said it’s clear he has
soldiering experience.
He is considered competent, ruthless, and
calculating, said the former CIA official. He’s
“prone to exaggeration,” said
another former CIA officer, but “for crazy shit
he’s the kind of guy you hire.”
Dahlan, who did not respond to multiple messages

sent through associates, grew up in a refugee
camp in Gaza, and
during the 1980s intifada he became a major
political player. In the ’90s he was named
the Palestinian Authority’s
head of security in Gaza, overseeing a harsh
crackdown on Hamas in 1995 and 1996.
He later met President George
W. Bush and developed strong ties to the CIA,
meeting the agency’s director, George Tenet,
several times. Dahlan
was once touted as a possible leader of the
Palestinian Authority, but in 2007 he fell
from grace, accused by the
Palestinian Authority of corruption and by Hamas
of cooperating with the CIA and Israel.
A man without a country, he fled to the UAE.
There he reportedlyremade himself as a
key adviser to Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, or MBZ,
known as the true ruler of Abu Dhabi. The
former CIA officer who knows
Dahlan said, “The UAE took him in as their pit bull.”
Now, over lunch in the officers’ club, the pit
bull challenged his visitors to tell him what
was so special about fighters
from America. Why were they any better than Emirati
soldiers?
Golan replied with bravado. Wanting Dahlan to
know that he could shoot, train, run,
and fight better than anyone in
the UAE’s military, Golan said: Give me your best
man and I’ll beat him. Anyone.

The Palestinian gestured to an attentive young
female aide sitting nearby. She’s my best
man, Dahlan said.
The joke released the tension, and the men settled
down. Get the spaghetti, recommended Dahlan.
Mohammed Dahlan on a video conference
last year.
Said Khatib / AFP / Getty Images
"For crazy shit he’s the kind of guy you hire.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/magazine/15HAMAS-
t.html
https://www.ft.com/content/e943240e-a21d-11e4-aba2-
00144feab7de
https://www.jpost.com/Blogs/A-Mid-East-Journal/The-
controversial-Mohammed-Dahlan-463624
Left: Gilmore. Right: Golan.
Taehoon Kim for BuzzFeed News; Courtesy Abraham
Golan
The UAE, with vast wealth but only about 1
million citizens, relies on migrant workers
from all over the world to do
everything from cleaning its toilets to teaching its
university students. Its military is no different,
paying lavish
sums to eager US defense companies and former
generals. The US Department of Defense has
approved at least $27
billion in arms sales and defense services to the

UAE since2009.
Retired US Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal once
signed up to sit on the board of a
UAE military company. Former
Navy SEAL and Vice Admiral Robert Harward
runs the UAE division of Lockheed Martin. The
security executive Erik
Prince, now entangled in special counsel Robert
Mueller’s investigation into Russian election
interference, set up
shop therefor a time,helping the UAE hire Colombian
mercenaries.
And as BuzzFeed News reported earlier this year,
the country embeds foreigners in its military
and gave the rank of
major general to an American lieutenant colonel,
Stephen Toumajan, placing him in command of
a branch of its
armed forces.
The UAE is hardly alone in using defense
contractors; in fact, it is the US that helped
pioneer the worldwide move
toward privatizing the military. The Pentagon pays
companies to carryout many traditional
functions, from feeding
soldiers to maintaining weapons to guarding
convoys.
The US draws the line at combat; it does not
hire mercenaries to carryout attacks or engage
directly in warfare. But
that line can get blurry. Private firms provide
heavily armed security details to protect

diplomats in war zones or
intelligence officers in the field. Such contractors
can engage in firefights, as they did in
Benghazi, Libya, when two
contractors died in 2012 defending a CIA post. But,
officially, the mission was protection, not
warfare.
Outside the US, hiring mercenaries to conduct
combat missions is rare, though it has
happened. In Nigeria, a strike
forcereportedlyled by longtime South African
mercenary Eeben Barlow moved successfully
against the Islamist
militant group Boko Haram in 2015. A
company Barlow founded, Executive Outcomes,
was credited with crushing
the bloody RUF rebelforcein war-torn Sierra Leone
in the 1990s.
The US draws the line at combat; it does not
hire mercenaries to carry
out attacks. But that line can get blurry.
https://www.ciponline.org/images/uploads/actions/Bill_Hartung
_UAE_Arms_Report_92117.docx.pdf
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/stephen-
toumajan-general-us-uae-yemen-contractor
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=cor
e&id=6247a35a5d9816a4b5e4f067b8758ecc&_cview=0
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianoc
ean/nigeria/11596210/South-African-mercenaries-secret-war-
on-Boko-Haram.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/04/opinion/saving-sierra-
leone-at-a-price.html

But over spaghetti with Dahlan, Golan and Gilmore
were offering an extraordinary form of mercenary
service. This
was not providing security details, nor was it even
traditional military fighting or
counterinsurgency warfare. It was,
both Golan and Gilmore say, targeted killing.
Gilmore said he doesn’t remember anyone using
the word “assassinations” specifically. But it
was clear from that
first meeting, he said, that this was not about
capturing or detaining Al-Islah’s leadership. “It
was very specific that
we were targeting,” said Gilmore. Golan said he
was explicitly told to help “disrupt and destruct”
Al-Islah, which he
calls a “political branch of a terrorist
organization.”
He and Gilmore promised they could pull together a
team with the right skillset, and quickly.
In the weeks after that lunch, they settled on
terms. The team would receive $1.5 million a
month, Golan and
Gilmore told BuzzFeed News. They’d earn bonuses
for successfulkills — Golan and Gilmore
declined to say how
much — but they would carryout their first
operation at half priceto prove what they could
do. Later, Spear would
also train UAE soldiers in commando tactics.
Golan and Gilmore had another condition: They wanted

to be incorporated into the UAE Armed Forces.
And they
wanted their weapons — and their target list — to
come from uniformedmilitary officers. That was
“for juridical
reasons,” Golan said. “Because if the shit hits the
fan,” he explained, the UAE uniform and dog
tags would mark “the
difference between a mercenary and a military
man.”
Dahlan and the UAE government signed off on
the deal, Golan and Gilmore said, and Spear
Operations Group got to
work.
BuzzFeed News
Standing in front of a UAE military plane are
Gilmore (middle left), Golan (middle right),
and two soldiers on their mercenary team.
Courtesy Abraham Golan
Back in the US, Golan and Gilmore started
rounding up ex-soldiers for the first, proof-of-
concept job. Spear
Operations Group is a small company —
nothing like the security behemoths such as
Garda World Security or
Constellis — but it had a huge supply of talent
to choose from.
A little-known consequence of the war on terror,
and in particular the 17 combined years of

US warfare in Iraq and
Afghanistan, is that the number of special
operations forces has more than doubled since
9/11,from 33,000 to
70,000. That’s a vast pool of crack soldiers
selected, trained, and combat-tested by the most
elite units of the US
military, such as the Navy SEALs and Army
Rangers. Some special operations reservists
are known to engage in for-
profit soldiering, said a high-level SEAL officer
who asked not to be named. “I know a
number of them who do this
sort of thing,” he said. If the soldiers are not on
active duty,he added, they are not obligated to
report what they’re
doing.
But the options for special operations veterans
and reservists aren’t what they were in the early
years of the Iraq
War. Private security work, mostly protecting US
government officials in hostile environments,
lacksthe excitement
of actual combat and is more “like driving Miss
Daisy with an M4” rifle, as one former
contractor put it. It also
doesn’t pay what it used to. While starting rates
for elite veterans on high-end security jobs used to
be $700 or $800
a day, contractors said, now those rates have
dropped to about $500 a day. Golan and
Gilmore said they were
offering their American fighters $25,000 a month —
about $830 a day — plus bonuses, a
generous sum in almost any

market.
Still, the Yemen gig crossed into uncharted territory,
and someof the best soldiers declined. “It was
still gray
enough,” Gilmore said, “that a lot of guys were like,
‘Ah, I’m good.’ ”
Gilmore himself said he has an imperfect record.
During a live-fire training mission he led,
back in his Navy days, he
says he accidentally shot another SEAL. Gilmore
said that’s what prompted him to leave the
Navy, in 2011. His last
major job before joining Spear was as an
executive at an artisanal Tequila company.
That stain on his military career, he said, is also
what prompted him to take the risk with Spear:
He was an outsider,
he wasn’t in the reserves, and he didn’t have a
pension to worry about.
By the end of 2015, Golan, who led the
operation, and Gilmore had cobbled together a
team of a dozen men. Three
were American special ops veterans, and most of the
rest were former French Foreign Legionnaires,
who were
cheaper: only about $10,000 per month, as
Gilmore remembers it, less than half of what he
and Golan said they
budgeted for their American counterparts.

They gathered at a hotelnear Teterboro Airport in
New Jersey. Theywere dressed in an assortment
of military
fatigues, somein camouflage, somein black. Some
were bearded and muscled, others tattooed and
wiry.
When it was time to go, they convinced the hotel
staff to give them the US flag flying outside,
Gilmore said. In a
makeshift ceremony,they folded it up into a small
triangle and took it with them.
They also packed a few weeks’ worth of
military “meals ready to eat,” body armor,
communications gear, and
medical equipment. Gilmore said he brought a
utility knifewith a special crimping tool to
prepare the blasting caps
on explosives. The team was sure to stock up on
whiskey, too — threecases of BasilHayden’s
sinceit would be
impossible to get any alcohol in Yemen, let
alone the good stuff.
On December 15, they boarded a chartered Gulfstream
G550. Onceairborne, Gilmore walked to the
cockpit and told
the pilots that therewas a slight change to
their flight plan. After refueling in Scotland,
they wouldn’t be flying to
Abu Dhabi’s main commercial airport but to a
UAE military base in the desert.
Left: Business cards for Spear Operations Group;
Right: Gilmore's dog tags

From that base,the mercenaries took a UAE Air
Force transport plane to another base in
Assab, Eritrea. During that
flight, Gilmore recalled, a uniformedEmirati officer
briefed them and handed them a hit list — 23
cards with 23
names and 23 faces. Each card featured rudimentary
intelligence: the person’s role in Yemeni
politics, for example,
or grid coordinates for a residence or two.
Gilmore said somewere members of Al-Islah, somewere
clerics, and somewere out-and-out terrorists —
but he
conceded he couldn’t be sure.
http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/montalvo-spirits-
appoints-isaac-gilmore-as-chief-business-development-officer-
otcqb-tqla-1917210.htm
BuzzFeed News has obtained one of the target
cards. On it is a man’s name,
photograph, telephone number, and
otherinformation. At the top right is the insignia of
the UAE Presidential Guard.
Conspicuously absent is why anyone wanted him
dead, or even what group he was associated
with.The man could
not be reached for comment, and it is not known
if he is alive or dead.
Assassinations have historically played a limited

part in US warfare and foreign policy. In
1945, “Wild Bill” Donovan,
the director of the CIA’s predecessor agency,
the OSS,was handed a finalized plan to deploy
kill teams across Europe
to attack Nazi leaders such as Hitler, Himmler,
and Goering, as well as SS officers with a
rank of major or above,
according to a biography of Donovan by Douglas
Waller. But the OSS chiefgot queasy about
the “wholesale
assassination” project and canceled it.
During the Cold War, the CIA played a role in
plots to assassinate foreign leaders, such as
Patrice Lumumba of the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Rafael Trujillo of
the Dominican Republic, and Ngo Dinh Diem of
South Vietnam.
Later in the Vietnam War, the US launched the
Phoenix program, in which the CIA oftenteamed
up with US military
units to “neutralize” — or, critics say, assassinate
— Viet Cong leaders. Even so, targeted killings
were not a central
pillar of US military strategy in Vietnam. And
after Congress exposed CIA activities in the 1970s,
the US banned
assassinations of foreign leaders.
Then camethe war on terror.
Under President George W. Bush, the CIA and
the military used drones to kill terrorists, and
the CIA developed
covert assassination capabilities. President Barack

Obama halted the agency’s secret
assassination program but
drastically ramped up the use of drone strikes
in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
Soonthe CIA and the
https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Bill-Donovan-Spymaster-
Espionage/dp/1416567445/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=
UTF8&qid=1539032910&sr=1-1
military were using the aircraft — piloted
remotely using video monitors — to kill
people whose names the US didn’t
even know, through “signaturestrikes” based solely
on a target’s associations and activities.
President Donald
Trump has further loosened the rules for drone
strikes.
But while private contractors oftenmaintain the
drones and sometimes even pilot them, thereis
one action they
reportedlycannot take: Only a uniformedofficer can
push the button that fires the drone’s missile
and kills the
target.
With organized assassinations having become a routine
part of war in the region, the UAE developed its
own
appetite. The country had begun to flex more
military muscle, and by 2015 it had become a
major player in the war

in Yemen. It quickly targeted Al-Islah, an
Islamist political partythat won more than 20% of
the vote in Yemen’s
most recent parliamentary election, held in 2003.
Elisabeth Kendall, an expert on Yemen at the
University of Oxford, points out that unlike
al-Qaeda or otherterrorist
groups, which try to seizepower through
violence, Al-Islah participates in the political
process. But, she said, the US
rationale for drone strikes has legitimized other
countries’ pursuit of their own assassinations: “The
whole very
watery, vague notion of a war on terror
has left the door wide open to any regime saying,
‘This is all a war on terror.’
”
At the top of the deck of targets they got from
the UAE, Gilmore and Golan said, was Mayo,
Al-Islah’s leader in Aden.
Mayo had close-cropped hair, wire-rimmed glasses,
and a wisp of goatee to go with his
mustache. He had spoken out
against US drone strikes in Yemen, telling
the Washington Post in 2012 that rather than
stopping al-Qaeda they had
instead fueled its growth.
Asked about the ethics and legality of killing
unarmed Al-Islah political leaders, as opposed to
armed terrorists,
Golan responded, “I thinkthis dichotomy is a
purely intellectual dichotomy.”

Golan said he models his assassination business on
Israel’s targeted killing program, which has
been underway since
the country was founded, and which, despite some
high-profile errors and embarrassments, he
claims is done
properly. He argues thereare someterrorist enemies so
dangerous and implacable — and so difficult to
arrest — that
assassination is the best solution.
He insists his team is not a murder squad. As
evidence, Golan recounted how, as their mission
continued, the UAE
provided names with no affiliation to Al-Islah or
any group, terrorist or otherwise. Golan
said he declined to pursue
those individuals, a claim that could not be
verified.
The people Spear did target, he and Gilmore
said, were legitimate because they were selected by
the government of
the UAE, an ally of the United States that
was engaged in a military action supported by
the US. Gilmore said that he
and Golan told the UAE they would never act
against US interests. And Golan claimed that,
based on his military
experience, he could tell if a target was a
terrorist after just a weekor two of surveillance.
Still, Gilmore acknowledged that someof the targets
may have been people who merely fell out of
favor with the
ruling family. Referring to the country’s Crown

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