PALO ALTO, CALIF.
A year ago, a group of terrorists from Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked the United States using box cutters as their weapons and citing extremist versions of Islamic fundamentalism as their cause.

Today, the Bush administration and Congress are focused almost solely on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, with almost no reference whatsoever to his ideology.

This narrow focus has only a loose relationship to the grander vision of "securing freedom's triumph" that President Bush has outlined as the mission of American foreign policy in the new millennium.

As currently framed, the debate about Iraq has produced three dangerous distortions. First, the discussion has confused the means-ends relationship between weapons of mass destruction and regime change. Suddenly, both hawkish Republicans and antiwar Democrats now have asserted that the destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is the new paramount objective in the war on terrorism.

For the hawks, regime change is the means to achieving this objective. Those less eager to go to war assert that this same goal can be achieved by other means, such as sending in the weapons inspectors or even by a surgical strike against weapons facilities.

Both sides of this debate are focused on the wrong objective. Regime change – democratic regime change – must be the objective. If over the next years and decades, a democratic regime consolidates in Iraq, then it will not matter to the United States if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not.

Does anyone in the United States know how many weapons of mass destruction the British or French have? Does anyone even lose much sleep over the fact that Russia still has thousands of nuclear weapons and launch vehicles capable of reaching the US in a matter of minutes?

Specialists are rightly worried about the safety and security of Russian weapons, but most Americans no longer make plans for what to do in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. It was not a robust nonproliferation regime, coercive weapons inspections, or a preemptive war against the Soviet Union that produced this shift in our attitudes about Russia's weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it was regime change in the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Someday, the same will be true in Iraq. Israel already destroyed Iraq's nuclear weapons program once in 1981, delaying but not eliminating the threat. The real objective of any strategy toward Iraq, therefore, must be the creation of a democratic, market-oriented, pro-Western regime.

The singular focus on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction – not unlike the misplaced focus on arms control during the cold war – prevents the US from pursuing a grander strategy that could secure the more important objective of democratic regime change. Moreover, many of the means for achieving this objective are nonmilitary by nature, an aspect forgotten in the discussion.

A second distorting consequence of the current debate is that we have become obsessed with one leader, one country, and one category of weapons, none of which were involved directly in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Iraqi dictatorship (and not simply President Hussein) is certainly part of the problem, but Iraq cannot be the only front of the war on terrorism. In fact, victories on other fronts could create momentum for the Iraqi regime's demise. Ronald Reagan's strategy for defeating communism did not begin with a military invasion of the Soviet Union, but rather aimed first to roll back communism in peripheral places like Poland, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Imagine how isolated Hussein would be if democratic regimes took hold in Iran, Palestine, and Afghanistan.

A third distortion of the debate is the near silence about the kind of regime the Bush administration plans to help build in Iraq after the war. The Bush administration is busy making the case against Hussein, but has devoted much less attention to outlining the plan for a new regime in Iraq. Will it be one state or three, a federal or unitary state, governed by the US or the United Nations? How many decades will occupation last?

We need to have the same "frenzied" debate about Iraq's reconstruction that is now being devoted to Iraq's deconstruction. A serious discussion of the postwar regime in Iraq will help inspire support in Congress, the international community, and within Iraq. Now is the time to be concrete about future blueprints.

To be credible, the message of change must also be directed at other dictators in the region. The probabilities of fanatics coming to power in Pakistan and using weapons against American allies are greater than the probabilities of Hussein doing the same.

Without reform, revolution in Saudi Arabia is just as likely as an Iranian attack on American allies. Failure to define a grand strategy of transformation in the region will condemn American soldiers to fighting new dictators like Hussein over and over again.

The anthrax attacks in fall 2001, and the fear and confusion that followed, made it all too clear that the United States lacks a comprehensive strategy for coping with bioterrorism. For too long, thinking about biological weapons has been held hostage to misplaced analogies to nuclear or chemical weapons. An effective strategy must begin by focusing on the special challenges posed by biological threats.

Reprinted in R.D. Howard and R.L. Sawyer, eds., Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Understanding the New Security Environment (Guilford, CT: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2002), pp. 174-184.

The United States is in the midst of its third major debate on nationwide ballistic missile defense-the first culminating in the 1972 ABM Treaty and the second sparked by President Reagan's "Star Wars" speech in 1983. This time the Cold War is over, the objectives for the defense are limited, and technology has advanced to the point where some options may be technically feasible.

However, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are not the primary threat to the United States, as events since September 11 demonstrate. Other homeland defense programs, especially civil defenses against bioterrorism, are more important. Yet emerging missile states may acquire ICBMs some day. To the extent that this is a concern, diplomatic efforts can limit the spread of ballistic missiles, and deterrence can dissuade their use. National missile defense (NMD), then, is insurance against the relatively unlikely event that ICBMs will be launched against the United States.

If the United States decides to deploy a limited NMD, the questions become what type and how much? A midcourse NMD system (one that attempts to intercept missile warheads as they fall through outer space) of the sort proposed for deployment in Alaska is the most technically mature option and would probably work well enough against emerging ICBM threats to justify limited deployment, assuming that the threat materializes. However, such a defense should contain only about 20 interceptors to minimize adverse political reactions from Russia and China. Over the long run, midcourse defenses may be vulnerable to sophisticated countermeasures. Therefore, the United States should place greater emphasis on land, naval, and air-based boostphase intercept options (defenses that attempt to intercept the ballistic missile while its rocket motors are still burning) because they are more robust to countermeasures and they pose relatively little threat to Russia and China. Space-based boost-phase NMD systems have the advantage of global coverage; however, they are technically more challenging, probably more expensive, and more destabilizing.

Following the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies recognized that it was in their vital security interests to promote stable transitions in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the New Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union. For the most part, such transitions would depend on the efforts of the states in transition themselves, including many that had been newly formed. However, one way in which the Western nations could help was by economic assistance -- both financial and technical.

The most abundant and efficacious form of financing will eventually be direct investment by Western private industry combined with indigenous investment in the countries; however, many of the transitioning countries, particularly those of the NIS did not have many attractive investment targets, with the possible exception of the natural resources sector. Recognizing this, the Western countries established a variety of unilateral and multilateral mechanisms to provide interim financing. These mechanisms utilized existing multilateral institutions such as the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund as well as existing unilateral institutions such as the United States' Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Trade and Development Agency. The charters and agendas of several existing institutions were expanded to address the specific issues in CEE/NIS. In addition, they established new multilateral institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and unilateral institutions such as several enterprise funds set up by the United States and TACIS (Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States) set up by the European Union.

In conjunction with these sources of finance the Western countries also initiated an extensive series of programs designed to address specific economic development and security issues in the region. These programs provided their own funding for projects, provided extensive technical assistance, and in some cases were designed to attract and work with Western private industry. One such program is the Nuclear Cities Initiative (NCI), which is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy. NCI's primary objective is to help prevent the flow of critical weapons technology and personnel from Russia to countries aspiring to acquire nuclear weapons. NCI's approach is to assist Russia in downsizing its nuclear weapons complex by creating sustainable, non-military employment for nuclear weapon specialists in Russia's closed nuclear cities. NCI is designed to build infrastructure necessary to attract private investment and to facilitate the efforts of private investors, thereby leveraging NCI's own budget.

Many of the sources of finance cited herein require a Western company as a strategic partner and co-investor. Thus the missions of NCI and these financial sources are highly complementary. Recognizing this, Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, under contract to NCI and under subcontract to the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, undertook a project to assemble information on many sources of finance that were applicable to NCI's mission, particularly those that are at least partially capitalized by the United States Government (USG). The intent was to make this information available to NCI partners to facilitate the establishment of ventures co-financed by NCI, the Russian Federation, private Western industry, and the sources described herein. While this research was performed for the purposes of NCI, much of the data are generally applicable to other projects seeking financing in Russia.

President Bush signed the Patriot Act last week. The new anti-terrorism law has its critics. Some object to the law's intrusions on civil liberties. They cite the provisions for extended detention, new powers to spy on Americans, a lack of controls on use of information, a greater ability to freeze and seize assets and an overly broad definition of domestic terrorism.

Others express concern about the process. The Patriot Act represents the most radical change in police powers in decades, and codifies counterterrorist measures previously rejected by Congress as too intrusive.

Still, there were few hearings and little debate. Many representatives didn't have an opportunity to read the House version before the vote.

In the Senate, the bill bypassed Judiciary Committee markup and went straight behind closed doors. Presented with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down option,

and with little opportunity to amend the bill, few lawmakers were willing to risk being seen as "soft on terrorism."

There is another issue, however, and it has received little attention. It is the issue of effectiveness. Will these new police powers help to stop terrorism? The obvious and intuitive answer would seem to be yes.

If the police have more power to collect information, they should be able to catch more terrorists. That sounds logical, but once you scratch the surface of that argument the problems become obvious.

The Patriot Act's key provisions focus primarily on data collection. The underlying assumption is that the real problem here is a lack of information. The history of intelligence failures suggests, however, that often the problem is not a lack of data, but rather making sense of the data you already have. Sometimes it's the case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand has. After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the FBI discovered that it already had copies of maps and detailed plans of the attack before it happened.

Other times, it reflects the difficulty of weighing conflicting pieces of information or of applying existing information to new contexts. These tasks require human interpretation and judgment. September 11 was not the first suicide attack against the United States. The 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, and the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen all involved suicide bombers. Imagining that suicide bombers might strike the United States did not require new information. It required a more imaginative use of the information already in hand.

So what about the September 11 attacks? Was it a lack of information,faulty data analysis, organizational dysfunction, or some combination of all three? The simple answer is that we don't know. No official investigations have been completed. Congress, not wanting to look like it was pointing fingers at a time of national crisis, decided to hold off on any inquiries. In time, we will know what happened. Once the witnesses are deposed and the records subpoenaed, the American public should have a clearer idea of what went wrong in the weeks and months leading up to September 11.

The irony, of course, is that we will find out what needs fixing after having already passed an anti-terrorism law. In theory, the government could go back and repeal the legislation and replace it with something else. History suggests, however, that passing anti-terrorism laws is much easier than repealing them. What lawmaker will vote for a repeal, and risk that a repeal is followed by a terrorist act? Will police or intelligence bureaucracies want to give up expanded powers? The record is clear. In country after country, temporary measures intended to combat terrorism have became near permanent powers of the state.

Compelled by events, the president and Congress have moved swiftly to redress the failures of September 11 -- perhaps too swiftly. We now have a law that is intended to solve problems we have yet to identify. The Patriot Act may improve our ability to fight terrorism. On the other hand, it may have no effect whatsoever. It could even make things worse. Like the patient who chooses a medicine before knowing his illness, the government has passed a law without knowing what needs a remedy. It is a major gamble, and for the country -- as for the patient -- the effects may be severe and long lasting.

The U.S. government is expert at presenting well-honed Pentagon briefings describing American military action. Decisions are made regularly about how much detail the military believes can be presented without endangering U.S. troops. But only late last week -- after two weeks of anthrax scares in the United States -- did we begin to see similarly professional efforts to inform U.S citizens about the domestic threat they faced.