Diagnosis for a flawed war strategy

This week Zacarias Moussaoui’s impassive face looms before us in the news.

In recent days we’ve heard him diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

I’m actually glad someone came up with a diagnosis for one of the terrorists. Moussaoui says he plotted to fly a plane into the White House. That doesn’t strike me as the impulse of a sane man. Nor am I convinced of the sanity of the terrorists who died on Sept. 11.

The American Psychiatric Association’s manual of mental disorders lists an ailment for many of us, whether we eat too much or too little, we spend our days gambling away our paychecks at Northern Quest Casino or we sit staring blankly at a wall at Eastern State Hospital.

Surely it must contain diagnoses for men and women who believe in religious martyrdom, who delude themselves with tales of meeting virgins in heaven, who channel their suicidal impulses to further murky political ends.

The testimony regarding Moussaoui’s mental condition was designed to arouse sympathy for him. Mental health professionals described a violent family life, with a father who beat his mother, starvation and alienation.

I’m not going to argue that Moussaoui’s mental state should prevent him from taking responsibility for his actions. I believe justice should be done here.

But this case brings up a point often neglected as we swagger through this decade of the global war on terror.

The terrorists we seek are not just religious and political fanatics. They’re also criminals and sociopaths. They need to be pursued through criminal investigations, with the help of special forces units, and prosecuted through legal channels.

What they aren’t, generally, are the leaders of specific nations.

And yet our bloodiest and most expensive battles in “the war against terror” wind up directed at entire nations rather than the crazed individuals who plot against us.

Last week Vice President Dick Cheney visited Fairchild Air Force Base and described the terrorists in his speech there. “They dwell in the shadows,” Cheney said, “wear no uniform and are determined to kill as many innocent Americans as they can.”

I was struck by that line – they wear no uniform. They’re not associated with any particular country.

And yet, in the same speech, Cheney linked these shadowy figures to the war in Iraq.

Iraqis, and the insurgents this war has created, did not bomb the World Trade Center. They weren’t high on any American’s list of good guys, certainly. But the way we rose up against them with a combination of bravado and deceit has never made much sense.

Most of us in the Inland Northwest recall the insanity that surrounded the Aryan Nations of North Idaho. I remember visiting friends at Hayden Lake for a barbecue one summer afternoon, only to discover hate-filled pamphlets left on their door handle by Richard Butler’s skinhead followers.

Eventually it was the Southern Poverty Law Center that devised a way to bring down these kooks and criminals. Its leaders did not show up with a Rumsfeld-like swagger. Nor did they drive tanks and humvees over to Tacoma to round up an assortment of underworld characters there. They took on the right crazy people, the ones connected to the Hayden Lake compound, and they pursued a lawsuit with deftness and wisdom. In the end, they prevailed.

The Bush administration’s tactics with the terrorists have been to combine firepower with Hollywood-style machismo. Now even former generals criticize its strategy, if not the war itself. Retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste last week described Donald Rumsfeld’s leadership style as “contemptuous, dismissive, arrogant and abusive.”

That approach seems less likely to reduce the insanity than to exacerbate it.