Evaluating the War on Terror

For example, Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has described U.S. support for democracy in foreign countries as "inconsistent". He has stated that countries receiving the more support from the U.S. tend on average to be less democratic than countries that receive less help from the U.S.[citation needed] Noam Chomsky insists that this "inconsistency" is consistent in that the U.S. has favored its international business interests over supporting democracy in nearly all cases.[citation needed]

This "consistent inconsistency" can be traced to 1791, when President Washington sent U.S. tax money to plantations owners in Haiti trying to suppress a slave rebellion during the French Revolution.^[1] The only exceptions to this "consistent inconsistency" were allegedly when public interest and knowledge in the U.S. of a specific country was sufficient to prevent substantive U.S. government action, overt or covert, in opposition to democracy.

Freedom / democracy scores could be merged with data on US financial aid, transfers of U.S. military equipment and security training.[citation needed] The published figures would exclude any funds hidden in the Congressional Black Budget^[2] and funded in other ways like portions of the Iran-Contra affair and use of drug trafficking to fund CIA assets.^[3] Any anti-democratic actions funded by secret money would likely reduce the level of democracy without a comparable increase in the published U.S. assistance. This in turn would likely make it harder to detect any correlation between official U.S. support for the country and democracy. However, if Carothers' claim is correct, the effect could still be large enough to find using data from published sources.

The justification for the War on Terrorism should explicitly balance the risks of international terrorism with the costs. These cost should include both increased risks of blowback^[4] and the opportunity costs incurred because the money spent on the War on Terror was not available for other, more productive uses such as public health and education (considered with "Domestic policy" below).

Perhaps the clearest evidence of blowback appears in the data on suicide terrorism compiled by Robert Pape. His Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST)^[5] combed news in many languages for reports of suicide terrorism. The earliest instances they found since the Kamikaze of World War II were part of a campaign by initiated in 1982 Hezbollah against Israel, the U.S., France and the Lebanese militaries that convinced the U.S. and France to leave Lebanon in 1984.^[6]

The abrupt withdrawal of U.S. and French forces after that attack inspired dissident groups all over the world to organize similar suicide attacks. CPOST researchers found 2022 suicide attacks between 1980 and 2009.^[7] Roughly 98% of them were attributed to a foreign occupation supporting a government that lacks domestic legitimacy. Suicide terrorism spiked in Iraq and Afghanistan when local control seemed threatened and fell when the occupiers made greater efforts to involve local governmental authorities in defending their own interests.^[8]

On September 12, 2001, Al-Qaeda was all but dead. Millions of individuals all over the world participated in vigils, declaring, "We are all Americans." This included official condemnations from traditional enemies like Iran, Cuba and Afghanistan. If the U.S. had pursued this as a law enforcement issue, people all over the world would have reported suspicious activities, Al-Qaeda would have received few new recruits, and its surviving activists would have had much greater difficulties finding supplies and safe houses for further terrorist attacks. If the Taliban in power in Afghanistan had refused to cooperate with a criminal investigation, they would likely have lost more of the limited support they had.

The mainstream commercial media in the U.S. has often ridiculed international law,[citation needed] and the U.S. government has resisted many efforts to strengthen the rule of law internationally.[citation needed] The reasons are simple: All politics is local and virtually the only constituency for international relations anywhere are people with family and financial dealings outside the country.^[11] In a large country like the U.S., this is a very small portion of the population. Those with major financial interests outside the country have a disproportionate influence over foreign policy and related media editorial policies, because they typically control major advertising budgets and political campaign contribution budgets.

Before the November 2000 election, leading members of the Bush team including Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other members of the Project for a New American Century had called for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity", but complained that without a "New Pearl Harbor", the U.S. public might not eagerly support that. The September 11 attacks became the justification for an increase in U.S. support for authoritarian regimes[citation needed] and greater government secrecy.[citation needed]

Also evaluate the major international security treaties that are still pending in terms of whether each has been approved by the U.S. and the possible reasons for delay in ratification. One set of reasons is the current gridlock in Washington as analyzed by Lawrence Lessig in Republic, Lost.

Also, research is needed to evaluate how the War on Terror has impacted the level of democratic participation, especially among the Muslim community in the U.S.

Similarly, more people die on average every 3 days in the U.S. from tobacco smoking-related disorders.