A new united nations report recommending the most sweeping reform in the institution's history offers a global vision of collective security for the 21st century that is as committed to development in poor nations as it is to prevention of nuclear terrorism in rich ones.

The point is, according to the report's research director, Stephen Stedman, a threat to one is a threat to all in today's world. "Globalization means that a major terrorist attack anywhere in the industrial world would have devastating consequences for the well-being of millions around the developing world," the document states. The report's value lies in putting forward a comparative framework of collective security that addresses all the compelling threats of the day, Stedman explained. "The recommendations really are the most important possible makeover of the institution in 60 years," he said. "I think something is going to come out of it." Stedman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at the Stanford Institute for International Studies (SIIS), was recruited a year ago by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to direct research for the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. Stedman is an expert on civil wars, mediation, conflict prevention, and peacekeeping.

Annan created the 16-member blue-ribbon panel, made up mostly of former government leaders and ministers, in the wake of widespread heated criticism of the United Nations following the U.S.-led war in Iraq. In Annan's annual report to the General Assembly in 2003, he said, "Rarely have such dire forecasts been made about the U.N. ... We have reached a fork in the road ... a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the U.N. was founded." The panel was charged with analyzing global security threats and proposing far-reaching reforms to the international system.

On December 2 the panel, chaired by former Thai prime minister Anand Panyarachun, issued its 95-page report: "A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility." The document identifies six major threats to global security:

-War between states;

-Violence within states, including civil wars, large-scale human rights abuses, and genocide;

-Poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation;

-Nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons;

-Terrorism; and

-Transnational organized crime.

Although states do not face these threats equally, a collective security system must take all member states' threats seriously and deal with them equitably, the report noted. It specifically mentioned the world's appallingly slow response to AIDS.

The report makes 101 recommendations for collective prevention and response to the threats, including ways to reform the United Nations. Annan described these in a December 3 editorial in the International Herald Tribune as "the most comprehensive and coherent set of proposals for forging a common response to common threats that I have seen."

The document also reaffirms the right of states to defend themselves-even preemptively-when an attack is imminent, and it offers guidelines to help the Security Council decide when to authorize the use of force. Stedman said other significant proposals involve improving biosecurity, strengthening nuclear nonproliferation, and defining terrorism. Panel members agreed that any politically motivated violence against civilians should be regarded as terrorism and condemned.

The panel was very critical of the Human Rights Commission, a body that has often harmed the United Nations' reputation by permitting the membership of some of the worst human-rights violators, including Cuba, Libya, and Sudan. The report also discussed the need for new institutions, such as a peace-building commission, that would support countries emerging from conflict.

Scott Sagan, co-director of CISAC, described the report as hard-hitting, although he said he would have tried to extend the withdrawal clause of the nonproliferation treaty from three months to a year. "I think it's the beginning of some major changes that will be helpful," he said. "We need to get states to work together to reform the U.N. rather than sniping at it."

CISAC was closely involved in the panel's work and was named in a cover letter accompanying the report from Panyarachun to Annan. Co-director Chris Chyba served on the panel's 30-member resource group, providing expertise on nuclear nonproliferation and bioterrorism. Bruce Jones, a former CISAC Hamburg Fellow, acted as Stedman's deputy, and Tarun Chhabra, a graduate of CISAC's undergraduate honors program and recent Marshall Scholarship recipient, worked as a research officer. Political science Professors David Laitin and James Fearon, and SIIS Senior Fellow David Victor, provided, respectively, expertise on terrorism, civil wars, and the environment, Stedman said. "There is an immense amount of Stanford influence in the report," he added.

CISAC also hosted a nuclear nonproliferation workshop for the panel on campus last March and helped organize a meeting during the summer in Bangkok. SIIS co-hosted a conference on governance and sovereignty on campus in April and a meeting at Oxford University in June. CISAC provided workspace to give the research team a quiet place to focus on writing the report's first draft in August.

The report has attracted intense international media interest in part because it calls for expanding the U.N. Security Council, its top decision-making group, from 15 to 24 members. The panel was unable to agree on one proposal and offers two options that would make the council more representative and democratic. "I believe either formula would strengthen the legitimacy in the eyes of the world, by bringing its membership closer to the realities of the 21st century-as opposed to those of 1945, when the U.N. Charter was drafted," Annan wrote in the International Herald Tribune.

According to Stedman, the media has highlighted the Security Council's proposed expansion because so many nations have a stake in it. "But in the absence of a new consensus on international peace and security, expansion of the council will not be effective," he explained.

In March, Annan will use the report to inform a series of proposals he will present to the 191 U.N. member states. These, in turn, will be submitted to a summit of world leaders before the General Assembly convenes next September in New York. Stedman said he has been asked to stay on for another year as a special advisor to the secretary general to keep the United Nations "on message" during negotiations.

Engagement by the United States, which has openly questioned the institution's relevance, will be critical to implementing the report's recommendations, said Stedman, who added that the superpower can benefit from a revamped United Nations. "Putting threats to the United States into a global framework makes it more secure," he said.

Stedman noted that one of the most disturbing aspects of the panel's consultations was listening to government representatives from civil-society organizations dismiss the seriousness of bio- and nuclear terror threats against the United States. "They were essentially denying this as a real threat to American security," he said. "I said it's as real a threat to the U.S. as other threats are to you."

When Stedman accepted the job, he thought he would spend 80 percent of his time on research and writing and 20 percent on consultations and negotiating. In fact, he said, it was the other way around. "It's unlike anything I've ever done," he said. "It's been a blast." In contrast to academia, where a researcher presents his or her best findings and defends them, Stedman was faced with 16 people who would push back, reject, or accept his work. "I had to work to change language to include their concerns," he said. "My biggest concern at the beginning was that the report would be based on the lowest common denominator. It's not."

Stedman said the panel members remained open-minded throughout the year. "They showed flexibility, listened to arguments, and changed their minds," he said. "Our job was to be as persuasive, rigorous, and comprehensive in our analysis as we were able to achieve."

In the end, Stedman said, the report belongs to the panel. "Parts of what the exercise shows is that access to those making policy is really important," he said. "If you do really good work and you have access, you have a chance of being heard. Kofi Annan gave me that opportunity."

We hardly needed the 30th anniversary of the Vietnam War's end to remind us of that war. Iraq provides daily reminders, prompting frequent comparisons to Vietnam. While many of the analogies are misplaced, looking back at America's intervention in Vietnam can be valuable.

The major challenge now facing the United States in Iraq is to establish a stable and powerful indigenous military to provide a secure environment for nation-building.

The U.S. Army's initial unwillingness to integrate South Vietnamese soldiers into its military plans--and its later inability to motivate the indigenous troops to take over the fighting--tells us what to avoid in Iraq.

The old Iraqi army fell apart in April 2003 as American soldiers marched on Baghdad. As the insurgency grew and American casualties mounted, the coalition forces started putting Iraq's army together again. Many of the same soldiers came back to sign up--it was only at the higher levels that Baathist officers were purged. Both Iraq and the United States have an interest in strengthening a purely Iraqi force.

Still some lessons

President Bush calls the comparison of Iraq with Vietnam a "false analogy" and accuses those who use it of sending the wrong message to the enemy and to the troops. Likewise, Rep. Richard Baker, R-La., calls the analogy "wrong, disturbing and dangerous."

In fact, Vietnam does not make for a good comparison with Iraq--but the differences are informative. The most striking difference between the two situations is in the sequence of war and nation-building. In Vietnam, the United States attempted nation-building under South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem's administration for nearly a decade before intervening directly with ground troops; in Iraq, a short and overwhelming display of force preceded nation-building. Moreover, the Americans were facing a much stronger adversary--including an organized army--in Vietnam.

Beginning in 1969, the Nixon administration implemented its policy of "Vietnamization," withdrawing U.S. troops while simultaneously turning over to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam the fighting and the pacification efforts. By 1973, the South Vietnamese army was the strongest in Southeast Asia, boasting more than 1 million soldiers and toting the most advanced weaponry, thanks to U.S. Army programs such as Enhance and Enhance Plus. However, unimpressive performances during a joint incursion into Cambodia and the 1972 spring offensive testified otherwise. Finally, on April 30, 1975, Saigon fell to the communists. Where did Vietnamization go wrong?

From the entry of American ground forces in 1965, South Vietnamese forces were made to feel marginalized in defending South Vietnam. This was mainly due to the U.S. Army's belief in 1965-69 that the South Vietnamese troops were essentially irrelevant to victory or defeat. Not only were the soldiers equipped with inferior weapons, underpaid and given poor housing compared to their American counterparts, but they also were relegated to so-called pacification missions.

U.S. soldiers had more respect for their enemies from the North than for their allies in the South. Training and communication were beset with linguistic, social and cultural barriers. By the time South Vietnamese soldiers started replacing U.S. soldiers in 1969, it was too late to induce them to adopt what had come to be regarded as U.S. strategic goals, rather than South Vietnamese ones.

It's not too late

Now, in Iraq, a window of opportunity is still open for Americans. According to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the United States wasted the whole first year after the invasion in halfhearted attempts to create effective Iraqi military and police forces. The bulk of the army is made up of soldiers who were fighting Americans a few months ago. Ethnic and religious divisions among the men, and their legacy of service under an autocrat, make it difficult for them to attain modern professional military standards. However, the Iraqi people are much less distrustful of the Iraqi army than they are of occupying U.S. forces.

The Multinational Security Transition Command, set up late last year, must focus on the Iraqi army's esprit de corps. It is not too late to incorporate and integrate Iraqi forces in strategic planning and operations so that they have a stake in securing a stable Iraq. Otherwise, the Iraqi army will soon be overwhelmed by the size and hostility of a growing insurgency.

The Vietnam analogy has too often been deployed in times of political conflict in the United States. But the comparison can be useful. If we learn the right lessons from the mistakes in Vietnam, we need not be condemned to repeat them in Iraq.

Of the Pentagon's $419.3 billion budget request for next year, only about $10.5 billion - 2 percent - will go toward basic research, applied research and advanced technology development. This represents a 20 percent reduction from last year, a drastic cutback that threatens the long-term security of the nation. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should reconsider this request, and if he does not, Congress should restore the cut.

These research and development activities, known as the "technology base" program, are a vital part of the United States defense program. For good reason: the tech base is America's investment in the future. Over the years, tech base activities have yielded advances in scientific and engineering knowledge that have given United States forces the technological superiority that is responsible in large measure for their current dominance in conventional military power.

Research into basic understanding of methods for reducing radar signatures in the 1970's, for example, gave rise to "stealth" technology. Advances in electronic sensor technology enable the vast collection of information from satellites, and past work on computer systems permits distribution of this information in near real-time to military commanders. The combination of near-real-time intelligence and precision munitions are the heart of the so-called "revolution in military affairs" that avoids large and costly systems and approaches.

These advances require years of sustained effort by university, industry and government researchers. If the Pentagon does not make the required investments today, America will not have dominant military technology tomorrow.

The technology base program has also had a major effect on American industry. Indeed, it is the primary reason that the United States leads the world today in information technology. American companies not only draw heavily on the Pentagon's work, but they have also come to depend on it. The research and development programs of many of America's major information technology companies are almost exclusively devoted to product development.

It was the investment of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in a network known as ARPA-net in the 1960's and 70's, for example, that gave rise to the Internet. The JPEG file format for digital images is based on software and standards developed by the Pentagon. The global positioning satellite system, first developed for precision-guided munitions, is now used in many cellphones and has the potential to revolutionize our air traffic control system. America's ability to translate the Pentagon's technology base into commercial achievement is the envy of the world.

Of course, the administration and Congress need to make tough budget choices. But to shift money away from the technology base to pay for Iraq, other current military operations or research on large, expensive initiatives, is to give priority to the near term at the expense of the future. This is doubtful judgment, especially at a time when the nature of the threat confronting America is changing. New threats, like catastrophic terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, urgently call for new technology.

There should be no doubt that basic research will continue to make a contribution. Robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, brain and cognitive sciences, nanotechnology, large-scale modeling and simulation: all these fields can have a huge impact. If properly supported, basic technology work is likely to lead to unprecedented results.

Mr. Rumsfeld has long championed the need to transform the military and exploit new technology. He has supported the technology base in the past and has urged the adoption of a more long-term view of security needs. He should, then, be willing to review and reverse the Pentagon's request for reducing its technology base. He should understand that short-term budget requirements for the armed services always tend to push out the technology base program - unless the Pentagon leadership supports it.

Perhaps the reason for this year's reduction is the mistaken belief that a one-year gap in financing does not matter, because innovation takes so long. But tech base advances occur because of stable financing. Fluctuating budgets cause wasted effort.

It is possible that Congress will restore the cuts in technology base programs and correspondingly reduce some other part of the defense budget. But Mr. Rumsfeld should not depend on Congress. It would be vastly better if the Pentagon understood the importance of the tech base effort, and acted on that understanding.

The Department of Defense's technology base programs have been an important factor in giving America the dominant military force in the world. They have also helped many American information technology companies become successful. The Pentagon should maintain its dedication to these programs, and that will require leadership from the secretary of defense - as well as support from Congress.

John Deutch, a professor of chemistry at M.I.T., was deputy secretary of defense from 1994 to 1995. William J. Perry was secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997.

By Dawn Levy

Responding to a terrorist attack employing biological or chemical agents requires knowledge spanning many disciplines. Three Stanford researchers were among nearly 135 leading scientists and technical experts from industry, academia and government invited to participate in the Gordon Research Conference on Chemical and Biological Terrorism Jan. 30-Feb. 4 in Buellton, Calif. The conference brought together public and private sectors to discuss what has worked, where problems are now and may appear in the future, and what needs more attention in responding to and preventing terrorism. The goal was to move toward a better "systems approach" to defense.

The Stanford participants were Margaret E. Kosal, a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) with a doctorate in chemistry; Steven M. Block, a professor of applied physics and of biological sciences and senior fellow, by courtesy, at the Stanford Institute for International Studies; and Mark A. Musen, a professor of medicine (medical informatics) and, by courtesy, of computer science.

The conference included discussions of public health surveillance and response, food supply vulnerabilities and agricultural security, forensics of biological and chemical evidence, and the changing nature of the threat environment.

Both biological and chemical terrorist attacks have the potential to cause a large number of causalities and overwhelm medical capabilities, or "surge capacity." The nation's terrorism defense plans focus on mass-effect bioterrorism--events with the potential to infect tens of thousands and kill more than a thousand. But those plans may not effectively counter small-scale biological or chemical attacks, much less nuclear or radiological attacks, Kosal asserted.

Musen spoke about the computational problems of automating surveillance for possible bioterrorism using "prediagnostic" indicators that become available even before health-care workers can identify a specific epidemic.

"There is enormous enthusiasm--and enormous spending--for combining databases of over-the-counter drug sales, absenteeism records, 911 calls and admitting diagnoses to emergency rooms and clinics," he said. "There has been virtually no empirical evaluation of any of these efforts, despite all the excitement."

Musen discussed difficulties computers have making sense of high-volume, low-signal data streams, including basic problems with the way that the data typically are represented, difficulties of integrating disparate data sources and uncertainty in how to present the results of computational analyses to public-health officials in an optimal way.

"Although there is enormous political pressure to be 'doing something' to monitor for bioterrorism, it's also important to take a step back and to engage in the research needed to determine what we really should be doing," Musen said.

Chemical threats are underestimated

The focus on bioterror threats may miss a more frequent occurrence--chemical attacks. In a presentation titled "The Shifting Face of Chemical Terrorism: Assessing an Emerging Threat," Kosal examined the growing trend of non-state actors to use improvised chemical devices (ICDs) that may include choking and blistering agents.

"The path from the 'street chemistry' of improvised explosive devices [IEDs] to ICDs incorporating commercial chemicals is very short, whereas the path from IEDs to transgenic biological agents effectively weaponized is a substantial leap for states and even more so for terrorists," Kosal said. "While U.S. policy is focused on defending against a mass-effect bioterrorism attack, we may be missing a lower-tech threat of much higher probability."

Half of the U.S. fatalities in Iraq have been due to IEDs, typically roadside bombs, Kosal said. "This strongly suggests there is a substantial tacit knowledge base and readily available materials for constructing these types of weapons--one guy has not been making them all in a Mosul garage." While incorporating chemicals into roadside bombs would not dramatically increase military casualties, incorporating them in devices employed in enclosed spaces could, Kosal said.

An analysis of terrorism between 1910 and 2003 from open-source information shows the lion's share of 265 terrorist attacks--76 percent--were chemical. Only 17 percent were biological, 0 percent nuclear (involving fissile material, such as that powering an atomic bomb) and 7 percent radiological (involving radioactive elements that cannot be used for fission or that contain less than a critical mass of fissionable material, such as those employed in "dirty bombs").

It used to be that the major threat of chemical weapons came from state-based programs. Chlorine and mustard gases were used extensively in World War I, for example. The United States and the former Soviet Union amassed stockpiles exceeding 40,000 tons, which are still being destroyed. International efforts to control the exchange of certain chemicals, such as precursors for nerve and blister agents, have been effective. Kosal cited the refusal in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war of the world community to sell Iraq the key precursor to mustard gas.

Nowadays, terrorists both foreign and domestic may disperse traditional chemical warfare agents using improvised methods. In 1995, for example, the Aum Shinrikyo group crudely dispersed a nerve agent in a Tokyo subway--killing 12 and panicking thousands--using umbrellas to puncture 11 garbage bags, each filled with a common solvent and about a pound of sarin. Today's chemical weapons may just as likely come from common commercial sources, such as agrochemicals. Radical Islamists have even attempted to weaponize a research chemical, osmium tetroxide, used to prepare biological specimens for electron microscopy.

In contrast with nuclear or mass-effect biological weapons, chemical weapons may not require sophisticated knowledge to produce. In 2003 at a rented storage space in Tyler, Texas, government agents seized half a million rounds of ammunition, more than 60 pipe bombs, remote-controlled bombs disguised as briefcases, pamphlets on how to make chemical weapons and improvised hydrogen cyanide dispersal devices hypothetically capable of killing thousands in a minute. The stockpiler, William J. Krar, described as a white supremacist and anti-government extremist, was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. His specific objectives remain unknown to authorities.

Kosal said terrorists do not appear to be concocting new chemicals; they're co-opting existing ones. "Chemical terrorism is likely to be a crime of opportunity and familiarity with chemicals and chemistry," Kosal said. "Perhaps the basic knowledge and materials--commercial dual-use chemicals in this instance--are too globally widespread to justify efforts to control the capability of terrorists to co-opt them for malfeasant uses. . . . The best threat-reduction policy may be to reduce the motivation.

"Much of the academic and policy dialogue segregates the folks discussing motivation from the folks discussing capacity and vulnerability. The former tend to be historians and social scientists and the latter, biologists, chemists and physicists. It may prove that decreasing terrorist motivation is unfeasible in the near term, but here is an example where those with the technical knowledge and those with the social science knowledge need to be working cooperatively, the type of interaction that the CISAC Science Fellows program fosters," Kosal said.

Ten thousand fingers on the bioterror "button"

Block's talk focused on the growing threat of bioterror. While chemicals have killed more people to date than have biological weapons, future biological attacks using infectious, untreatable pathogens have the potential to kill more people than chemicals. Block wryly called such biological attacks "the gift that keeps on giving."

Block said post-9/11 restrictions aimed at keeping pathogens out of the wrong hands have backfired. One is the Department of Health and Human Services' "Select Agent Rule," which establishes requirements regarding possession and use in the United States, receipt from outside the United States and transfer within the United States of a particular list of agents and toxins.

"We're shooting ourselves in the foot," Block said. "We've made it so hard to work on these pathogens that even our so-called 'A-Team' can't do research with them." World-renowned plague researcher Stanley Falkow of Stanford and famed anthrax expert John Collier of Harvard have stopped working on live pathogens because of restrictive effects of recent legislation, according to Block. They now confine their research to a handful of cloned genes. "It's almost impossible to hire grad students or postdocs to work on Select Agents. Such research has been driven underground or into our national labs, which historically have not had the biological expertise found in the top academic labs and biotech companies."

Much of our response to bioterror threats is based on how we've historically responded to nuclear terror threats, Block said. "With nuclear weapons, only two things can be made to go 'boom'--plutonium and highly enriched uranium," he said. That made it comparatively easy to track and control materials, and to get a handle on the problem. "We tried to keep nuclear secrets secret. Not everyone knows how to make an atomic bomb."

In contrast, the genie has long been out of the bottle when it comes to biological agents. Virtually all research is reported in the open literature. "Even if we were to stop publishing everything now, there'd be enough public information to keep bioterrorists busy for at least another 50 years," he said.

"Back in the nuclear age, only a few countries were nuclear powers, and only a few people were authorized to have their 'fingers on the button,'" Block said. "Like them or not, they were responsible people. Contrast that with a world where genetically engineered weapons can be produced by, say, 10,000 people. Someone is guaranteed to press that button. We can't stop [bioterror acts] at the source any more than we can stop a computer virus at the source."

Rather than futilely attempting to thwart biological threats at their sources, which are ubiquitous, Block advocated shoring up the public health system so it can respond nimbly once threat turns to reality. A new generation of antitoxin, antiviral and antibacterial agents may mitigate ill effects, and improved vaccines may prevent damage altogether. "We need to work the problem from the other direction," he said. "To confine our attention to Select Agents alone is essentially putting on blinders. The future threats we may face may bear little relation to the organisms on the current list."

While the improving U.S. economy remains the engine of growth for the world economy, an underlying trend involving "huge imbalances and risks" should be cause for serious alarm, Paul Volcker warned Feb. 11 during a speech on campus. Americans have virtually no savings, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve said, and the nation is consuming more than it is producing. Furthermore, Social Security and Medicare are threatened by the retirement of millions of baby boomers and skyrocketing health care costs. More broadly, he continued, the world economy is lopsided.

"Altogether, the circumstances seem as dangerous and intractable as I can remember," Volcker said during a keynote address at the second annual summit of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. "But no one is willing to understand [this] and do anything about it."

Volcker spoke at the end of a daylong conference that attracted about 450 corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, policymakers and academics. The event included discussions on the stability of the global economy, the U.S. economic outlook and the role of the Internet in helping to level the competitive playing field worldwide. The conference also featured sessions on outsourcing, Medicaid and Medicare, technology policy and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was implemented in 2002 to restore investor confidence in corporate America following a series of bankruptcies and far-reaching accounting scandals.

During a morning session, William J. Perry, a former secretary of defense and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, gave a chillingly stark assessment of the crisis of terrorism that was reinforced by George Shultz, a former secretary of state.

"I fear that we're headed toward an unprecedented catastrophe where a nuclear bomb is detonated in an American city," Perry said. "The bomb will not come in a missile at the hands of a hostile nation. It will come in a truck or a freighter at the hands of a terror group."

Perry, who holds the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professorship, said the "awesome military capability" of the United States has had unintended consequences in that it has increased the incentive for a hostile power, unable to compete in conventional warfare, to acquire weapons of mass destruction and launch terror attacks against America. U.S. military superiority is not particularly effective against such tactics, he said. "There exist terror groups, of which al Qaeda is the most prominent, that have the mission, the intent to kill Americans," Perry said. "They have the capability to do so; they have the resources to do so." A truly nightmare scenario would involve a terror group using nuclear weapons acquired clandestinely, he said: "After 9/11 that threat seems all too real."

Such a catastrophe is preventable, but the United States is not taking the necessary measures to avert it, Perry warned. Important steps should include a major expansion of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program with the support the G-8 group of industrialized nations. The program was created in 1991 to reduce the threat posed by the legacy of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and succeeded in dismantling and destroying weapons in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus. Furthermore, Perry said, a clear strategy of "coercive diplomacy" should be used against North Korea and Iran, followed by a major diplomatic initiative to convince other nuclear powers that the threats posed by terrorists are real and not just directed at Americans. "While America must show real leadership in dealing with this problem, [it] cannot deal with it alone," he said.

Shultz, the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, said the United States faces a huge problem in combating Islamic radicals intent on using terror to achieve their goals. "Eventually, what they want is to change the way the world works by creating a unified Islamic theocratic state," he said. "It's a worldwide agenda."

Shultz argued that the United States must help supporters of mainstream Islam understand the fundamental nature of the problem so they will take action against the radicals themselves.

"That's why Iraq is of such overwhelming importance," he said. "Here we have a country in the heart of the Middle East where there is a chance. If Iraq can emerge as a sensibly governed country--that's a gigantic event in the Middle East and in this war on terror. Our enemies recognize that just as well as we do, and that's why we're having so many problems."

Other measures that Shultz said should receive greater support include efforts to set up independent media in countries such as Iraq, as well as a revival and expansion of the U.S. diplomatic service, which he said was allowed to atrophy after the end of the Cold War. "We have developed an awesome military capability," he said. "We need a diplomatic capability that is as every bit as good." Shultz also stressed the need to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. "We are out of our cotton-picking minds not to be doing much, much more to figure out how to use much, much less oil," he said to applause from the audience.

In the afternoon, Thomas Friedman, a columnist at the New York Times, also called for greater efforts to develop alternative energy supplies. This should be the "moon shot of our generation," he said.

Friedman discussed how the convergence of personal computers, cheap telecommunication and workflow software has changed the way the world works. In his upcoming book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, Friedman explained that the world has shrunk to the point where individuals, not countries or companies, are increasingly able to think and act globally. "And it's not just a bunch of white Westerners," he said. "It's going to be driven by individuals of every color of the rainbow."

Friedman told the audience that these technological advances quietly unfolded just as the 9/11 terror attacks, the Enron collapse and the dot-com bust grabbed America's attention. "People thought globalization was over but actually it turbo-charged globalization; it drove it overseas," he said. "9/11 completely distracted our administration, and then there was Enron. We have hit a fundamentally transformative moment and no one is talking."

In this new scenario, people anywhere in the world will be able to "innovate and not emigrate" if they have the required skills, Friedman said. This means that engineers in India and China will be able to compete on a level playing field with people in this country. "When the world goes flat, everything changes," he said.

To address this challenge, Friedman said the United States must radically improve science, mathematics and engineering education and encourage young people to enter these fields. "We're not doing that," he said. "In the next two years, five years, it won't matter. In 15 years, which is the time it takes to build an engineer, it will matter. We will not be able to sustain our standard of living."

From the September/October 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs.

As the war on terrorism continues, statistics on terrorist attacks are becoming as important as the unemployment rate or the GDP. Yet the terrorism reports produced by the U.S. government do not have nearly as much credibility as its economic statistics, because there are no safeguards to ensure that the data are as accurate as possible and free from political manipulation. The flap over the error-ridden 2003 Patterns of Global Terrorism report, which Secretary of State Colin Powell called "a big mistake" and which had to be corrected and re-released, recently brought these issues to the fore. But they still have not been adequately addressed.

Now-common practices used to collect and disseminate vital economic statistics could offer the State Department valuable guidance. Not long ago, economic statistics were also subject to manipulation. In 1971, President Richard Nixon attempted to spin unemployment data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and transferred officials who defied him. This meddling prompted the establishment of a series of safeguards for collecting and disseminating economic statistics. Since 1971, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress has held regular hearings at which the commissioner of the BLS discusses the unemployment report. More important, in the 1980s, the Office of Management and Budget issued a directive that permits a statistical agency's staff to "provide technical explanations of the data" in the first hour after principal economic indicators are released and forbids "employees of the Executive Branch" from commenting publicly on the data during that time.

The State Department should adopt similar protections in the preparation and dissemination of its reports. In addition to the global terrorism report, the State Department is required by Congress to report annually on international bribery, human rights practices, narcotics control, and religious freedom. Gathering and reporting data for congressional oversight is presently a low-level function at the State Department. The department rarely relies on high-quality, objective data or on modern diagnostic tests to distinguish meaningful trends from chance associations. Adopting safeguards against bias, both statistical and political, would enable Congress to better perform its constitutional role as the White House's overseer and allow the American public to assess the government's foreign policy achievements.

A PATTERN OF ERRORS

Congress requires that the State Department provide each year "a full and complete report" that includes "detailed assessments with respect to each foreign country ... in which acts of international terrorism occurred which were, in the opinion of the Secretary, of major significance." The global terrorism reports are intended to satisfy this requirement, but, over time, they have become glossy advertisements of Washington's achievements in combating terrorism, aimed as much at the public and the press as at congressional overseers.

The 2003 global terrorism report was launched at a celebratory news conference in April. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Ambassador J. Cofer Black, the State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, outlined some remaining challenges, but principally they announced the Bush administration's success in turning the terrorist tide. Black called the report "good news," and Armitage introduced it by saying, "You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight." The document's first paragraph claimed that worldwide terrorism dropped by 45 percent between 2001 and 2003 and that the number of acts committed last year "represents the lowest annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969." The report was transmitted to Congress with a cover letter that interpreted the data as "an indication of the great progress that has been made in fighting terrorism" after the horrific events of September 11.

But we immediately spotted errors in the report and evidence contradicting the administration's claims. For example, the chronology in Appendix A, which lists each significant terrorist incident occurring in the year, stopped on November 11-an unusual end to the calendar year. Clearly, this was a mistake, as four terrorist attacks occurred in Turkey between November 12 and the end of 2003. Yet it was impossible to tell whether the post- November 11 incidents were inadvertently dropped off the chronology and included in figures in the body of the report or completely overlooked.

More important, even with the incomplete data, the number of significant incidents listed in the chronology was very high. It tallied a total of 169 significant events for 2003 alone, the highest annual count in 20 years; the annual average over the previous five years was 131. How could the number of significant attacks be at a record high, when the State Department was claiming the lowest total number of attacks since 1969? The answer is that the implied number of "nonsignificant" attacks has declined sharply in recent years. But because nonsignificant events were not listed in the chronology, the drop could not be verified. And if, by definition, they were not significant, it is unclear why their decrease should merit attention.

On June 10, after a critical op-ed we wrote in The Washington Post, a follow-up letter to Powell from Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and a call for review from the Congressional Research Service, the State Department acknowledged errors in the report. "We did not check and verify the data sufficiently," spokesman Richard Boucher said. "... [T]he figures for the number of attacks and casualties will be up sharply from what was published."

At first, Waxman accused the administration of manipulating the data to "serve the Administration's political interests." Powell denied the allegation, insisting that "there's nothing political about it. It was a data collection and reporting error." Although there is no reason to doubt Powell's explanation, if the errors had gone in the opposite direction-making the rise in terrorism on President George W. Bush's watch look even greater than it has been-it is a safe bet that the administration would have caught them before releasing the report. And such asymmetric vetting is a form of political manipulation.

Critical deficiencies in the way the report was prepared and presented compromised its accuracy and credibility. Chief among these were the opaque procedures used to assemble the report, the inconsistent application of definitions, insufficient review, and the partisan release of the report. These deficiencies resulted in a misleading and unverifiable report that appeared to be tainted by political manipulation.

It is unclear exactly how the report was assembled. The report notes that the U.S. government's Incident Review Panel (IRP) is responsible for determining which terrorist events are significant. It says little, however, about the panel's members: how many there are, whether they are career employees or political appointees, or what affiliations they have. Nor does it describe how they decide whether an event is significant. Do they work by consensus or majority rule? What universe of events do they consider?

The State Department announced a decline in total terrorist attacks, which resulted from a decline in nonsignificant events. But without information about the nonsignificant events, readers were essentially asked to blindly trust the nameless experts who prepared it.

The report's broad definitions, moreover, are sometimes too blunt to help classification. Terrorism is defined as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience." The report specifies that an international terrorist attack is an act committed by substate actors from one nation against citizens or property of another. An incident "is judged significant if it results in loss of life or serious injury to persons, major property damage, and/or is an act or attempted act that could reasonably be expected to create the conditions noted."

But hardly any explanation was provided about how the IRP distinguishes significant from nonsignificant events. When is property damage too minor for an event to be significant? How are nonsignificant events identified? Is the IRP responsible for making these determinations too? Has the source and scope of their information changed over time? The corrected 2003 report, the first to list individual nonsignificant acts, defines as "major" property damage that exceeds $10,000. It does not indicate, however, whether that criterion applied to previous reports.

Admittedly, measuring international terrorism is no easy task. Even scholarly reckonings are not free from subjective judgment, and there are inevitably close calls to be made. The most one can hope for in many cases is consistent application of ambiguous definitions.

Unfortunately, in the global terrorism reports the rules have been applied inconsistently. Many cross-border attacks on civilians in Africa have not been included in the reports, for example, even though similar attacks in other regions have been. The report for 2002, moreover, counts as significant a suicide attack by Chechen shaheeds (Islamist martyrs) against a government building in Moscow that killed 72 people. Yet none of the numerous suicide attacks by the Chechen "black widows" that terrorized Russia and killed scores in 2003 was tallied as an international terrorist attack in the latest report. After one such attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, "Today, after a series of recent terrorist attacks, we can say that the bandits active in Chechnya are not just linked with international terrorism, they are an integral part of it." If the State Department considers such attacks domestic, rather than international, it should do so consistently from one year to the next.

Another problem is that the staff that prepared the 2003 global terrorism report did not participate in releasing it; in fact, they have yet to be identified. High-level Bush administration officials presented the report to the media, using it to support White House policies and take credit for the alleged decline in terrorism. Even after the report's flaws were recognized, they continued to spin the figures. When the corrected version was released, Black repeated that "we have made significant progress," despite being pressed to acknowledge that last year the number of significant attacks reached a 20-year high. Given the war on terrorism's central role in the upcoming presidential election, such presentation gives the appearance that the report is being manipulated for political gain.

The State Department has tried to explain the report's flaws using language eerily reminiscent of the Bush administration's justification of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Spokesman Boucher told reporters that previous claims that the war on terrorism was succeeding had been based "on the facts as we had them at the time [and] the facts that we had were wrong." Even Powell partook in the spinning. On the one hand, he announced that "the [original] narrative is sound and we're not changing any of the narrative." On the other hand, he acknowledged, "We will change the narrative wherever the narrative relates to the data."

To his credit, Powell instructed those responsible for preparing the report to brief Waxman's staff on the procedures they had used and the origins of their mistakes. Based on a summary of the briefing by Waxman's staff, much has come to light. Authority for compiling the list of attacks was shifted from the CIA to the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), an organization created in May 2003 to "merge and analyze all threat information in a single location." The TTIC provided information to the IRP, which, it was disclosed, consists of representatives from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. A TTIC representative chaired the meetings and could cast a vote to break ties on the classification of an event as significant or nonsignificant.

At least this year, chaos prevailed. The IRP's members changed from meeting to meeting-when they attended the meetings at all. The CIA employee responsible for the database left but was never replaced; in mid-process, an outside contractor who entered data was replaced by another contractor. Because of technical incompetence, the report relied on the wrong cutoff date.

Arithmetic errors were rampant. Larry Johnson, a retired CIA and State Department professional, discovered that the total number of fatalities in the chronology exceeded the number listed in the statistical review in Appendix G. According to Black, the errors resulted from "a combination of things: inattention, personnel shortages and database that is awkward and is antiquated and needs to have very proficient input be made in order for to be sure that the numbers will spill then to the different categories that are being captured [sic]." The debacle is more like an episode of the Keystone Kops than a chapter from Machiavelli, but even that analogy is not very comforting.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

Despite the data's limitations, the chronology of significant events in the 2003 global terrorism report yields important information about terrorism's trends, its geographical characteristics, and its magnitude.

Time-series analysis, which seeks to discern trends in given phenomena over time, requires a consistent approach to collecting data. The State Department's terrorism report presents time-series analysis, but by focusing on the total number of attacks it misleadingly combines verifiable data on significant events with nonverifiable data on insignificant ones. And because, as TTIC director John Brennan admitted, "many nonsignificant events occur throughout the world that are not counted in the report," one must also be concerned about consistency in the measurement of the total number of terrorist events. Even if the nonsignificant events were listed (and thus could be verified), trends in significant events are more relevant because they track events that, by definition, are more important. Accurately measuring these trends is a prerequisite for understanding the factors that underlie them and the policies that shape them. In fact, an analysis of the revised report reveals that the number of significant attacks increased from 124 to 175, or by 41 percent, from 2001 to 2003-a significant fact indeed.

The detailed chronology also allows analysts to cumulate terrorist events for each country and cross-classify them according to the country where they occurred and the perpetrators' country of origin. These figures can then be related to the countries' characteristics, yielding information that can help policymakers devise strategies to address terrorism's root causes. Using the global terrorism reports for the years 1997-2002, the authors of this article have previously found that terrorists tend to come from nondemocratic countries, both rich and poor, and generally target nationals from rich, democratic countries.

The State Department has rightly emphasized that the threat of terrorism remains serious, but a close examination of its data helps put the magnitude of the threat in perspective. In 2003, a total of 625 people--including 35 Americans--were killed in international terrorist incidents worldwide. Meanwhile, 43,220 died in automobile accidents in the United States alone, and three million died from AIDS around the world. Comparative figures, particularly when combined with forecasts of future terrorism trends, can help focus debate on the real costs people are willing to bear--in foregone civil liberties and treasure--to reduce the risk posed by terrorism.

CHANGING TRACKS

The State Department currently uses, and Congress accepts, nineteenth-century methods to analyze a twenty-first-century problem. To prevent errors of the type that riddled the 2003 global terrorism report, Congress has two alternatives. It could reassign the State Department's reporting responsibilities to a neutral research agency, such as the GAO (the General Accounting Office, recently renamed the Government Accountability Office) which routinely uses appropriate statistical practices. The problem is that the GAO has little foreign policy expertise and does not necessarily have access to the (sometimes classified) information that goes into the reports. Alternatively, Congress could keep the reports within the State Department's purview but demand that its practices for data collection and analysis be improved and that the reports be insulated from partisan manipulation.

If responsibility remains within the State Department, Congress should establish a statistical bureau in the department to ensure that scientific standards are respected in all reports, thereby elevating the status of data-gathering and statistics there. The bureau would promote consistency, statistical rigor, and transparency. When appropriate, it could seek input from the scientific community. And, while respecting classified sources, it could also insist that sufficient information be released to independent analysts for verification.

To overcome conflicts of interest facing political appointees who issue government reports, the State Department should adopt rules similar to those that govern the production and dissemination of key economic indicators. Career staff who prepare the reports should be given an hour to brief the media on technical aspects of the data, during which time political appointees would be precluded from making public comments. (After the hour elapses, it is expected that political appointees would offer their interpretations.) Career staff should be protected so they can prepare mandated reports without interference from political appointees and then present them for review by the statistics bureau. Once the reports are finalized, but before they are publicly released, they should be circulated to designated political appointees who need to prepare for their release. Disclosure dates should be announced long in advance to prevent opportunistic timing by political appointees.

Last October, in a candid memorandum to top aides that was leaked to the press, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted, "Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas [Islamic schools] and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?" The statement was a stinging acknowledgment that the government lacks both classified and unclassified data to make critical policy decisions. It is also a reminder that only accurate information, presented without political spin, can help the public and decision-makers know where the United States stands in the war on terrorism and how best to fight it.

We've been down this road before: A crisis threatens global security, and the international community is not coming together to deal with it. Hawks in the U.S. administration see the Europeans as too timid to use force and reliant on diplomacy to a fault, while many Europeans see the United States as trigger-happy and too impatient with negotiated settlements. This lack of cohesion damaged the legitimacy of the American-led war in Iraq and left U.S.-European relations in tatters. A similar disunity jeopardizes current attempts to manage Iran's nuclear aspirations, even though both sides agree that the threat posed by a nuclear Iran is grave and real.

Departing Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage positively spun the divergent U.S. and European approaches to Iran: "The [diplomatic] incentives of the Europeans," he said, "only work against the backdrop of the United States being strong and firm on this issue. In the vernacular, it's kind of a good cop/bad cop arrangement. If it works, we'll all have been successful." The problem with Armitage's hopeful outlook is that the good cop/bad cop strategy works only if pursued consciously and in coordination, and the U.S. and European approaches do not reflect that yet. In fact, they seem headed in opposite directions.

The good cops--Britain, France and Germany--recently persuaded Iran to suspend all uranium enrichment-related activities until they reach a final accord. If the mullahs cooperate, they will receive numerous economic carrots, including possible membership in the World Trade Organization (the U.S. would have to agree) and improved trade relations.

In October 2003, when the International Atomic Energy Agency was prepared to take its negative report on Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council, the mullahs cut a similar deal with the Europeans, promising to suspend all enrichment-related activities. But Iran soon grew impatient with the agreement and resumed efforts to produce the gas that feeds uranium enrichment. It similarly rushed to make as much of that gas as possible before the latest accord's deadline, undercutting confidence in the deal on both sides of the Atlantic. In another bad-faith move, Iran announced last week that it wanted to keep operating uranium-enrichment equipment for research purposes, backing off its pledge to freeze all such activities.

Enter the bad cop--the United States. It has pushed to refer the question of Iran's nuclear aspirations to the Security Council. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell steps down, the hawkish voices in his department will probably intensify and gain influence, especially if the mullahs break the newest deal.

Armitage might be right that the discordant U.S.-European approaches will push the mullahs to hold to the deal. But the U.S. will be uncomfortable with an agreement that does not insist on any means of enforcement or verification, as is the case with the latest accord.

Iran knows that the war in Iraq colors U.S. conduct toward it. The worse Iraq gets, the less Iran worries--and the mullahs don't seem too worried at the moment. But if they break the accord with the Europeans and the Europeans respond timidly and U.S. resources are freed up as a result of an improving situation in Iraq, the U.S. could take on Iran alone--to everyone's detriment. To avoid this risk, the U.S. and Europe need to harmonize their approaches and develop a coordinated strategy for Iran. The best way to accomplish this is to agree in advance on the consequences Iran will face if it violates its commitments. For example, if the mullahs renege on the latest deal, frustrate the monitoring and verification efforts of IAEA inspectors or fail to ratify an addition to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that allows for more invasive inspections, the U.S. and Europe should go to the Security Council, impose economic sanctions or, in the worst case, take military action.

Fortunately, diplomatic disunity over Iran does not run as deep as it did over Iraq, where even the nature of the threat was a bone of contention. Both the U.S. and Europe are worried about a nuclear Iran, and they feel strongly about enforcing the rules of nonproliferation. In June 2003, European foreign ministers required only 45 minutes to approve a document that endorsed U.N.-sanctioned use of force as a last resort against proliferators, as well as "political and diplomatic preventative measures."

If the Europeans agree to leave all responses on the table and to act decisively at the first sign of Iranian mischief, the United States would be foolish not to form a partnership with them. (It's also important that the U.S. set a better example as a member of the nonproliferation community by abandoning plans to build new mini-nuclear weapons and ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.)

The role the U.S. forges for itself in dealing with Iran will have significance beyond reinvesting in international order or responding to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions. Iran's despotic regime will collapse some day, and there will be a "morning after" similar to that in Iraq, where reconstruction efforts have floundered because U.S. planners underestimated the challenge of nation-building and the need for international support to make it work. When Iran makes its move toward a better government, the U.S. should be in a position to lead a coherent, collective international effort to help it get off the ground.

Yet since the severing of U.S.-Iranian ties in 1980, the U.S. has been slack in developing a viable Iran policy. Iran's nuclear ambition should be motive enough to reverse this inattention. U.S. policy toward Iran must cease to be reactive, as it is now.

In addition to working with the Europeans to curb the mullahs' nuclear efforts, the U.S. should begin crafting a strategy to work toward--and then with--a democratic Iran. Supporting a government that complies with its international obligations is certainly preferable to containing one that thwarts them. By getting involved now, the U.S. can do much to show Iranians that it will be a friend to a free Iran. A democratic Iran may still want a nuclear bomb as a matter of national pride. But a less threatening, pro-diplomacy U.S. would be in a stronger position to argue the benefits of membership in the nonproliferation community rather than life as a rogue power.

Participating in a multilateral approach to Iran's nuclear program is a great place to start. In doing so, the U.S. will signal to Iranians that its aggressive position does not reflect a desire to remake Iran in its own image but rather a desire to achieve, alongside Europe, a substantial victory for nonproliferation and international security.