The Foreign Service Journal, October 2005

other national initiatives, but to supple- ment and thereby strengthen them. Regrettably, the interest in such an approach shown by the 9/11 Commission in its well-known report, issued last year, is scarcely better. In its chapter on recommendations (“What to Do: A Global Strategy”), it lists a “firm tripod of policies” that include attacking terrorists and their organizations, preventing the contin- ued growth of Islamist terrorism, and protecting against and preparing for terrorist attacks. True, the text of the chapter includes some peripheral mention of the value of international organizations, such as how Western states meet with each other in NATO or the G-8, or how the international community works through the International Civil Aviation Organi- zation to arrive at agreed standards for passport design. But there is not one recommendation in this otherwise comprehensive report calling for a concerted effort to place greater responsibility on international organi- zations. When President Bush spoke to FBI and DEA agents at the FBI Academy this past July, he recited the litany of international locations of ter- rorist incidents, with “9/11” and London being followed by the men- tion of Bali, Casablanca, Riyadh, Jakarta, Istanbul and Madrid. The president then cited a “comprehen- sive strategy in place” for protecting the homeland, improving our intelli- gence, staying on the offensive and “fighting the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the world so we do not have to face them here at home.” In his call to work with our allies, he appropriately praised the FBI, which has “deployed its personnel across the world,” for questioning captured terrorists and uncovering valuable information. But our FBI assets, wherever they may be, will get much better and more reliable infor- mation if countries around the world believe we are working together with them in a mutually agreed framework to protect each other from the scourge of terrorism — rather than looking out only for ourselves. International organizations might not be a panacea, but they offer hope for global inclusiveness that ad hoc arrangements with key allies cannot match. After all, most of the prob- lems don’t originate with our key allies, but within countries where our relations are often strained, if not quarrelsome. The Case for Collective Action Don’t get me wrong. We should have no illusions that an international organization made up of sovereign nation-states, each with its own agen- da and with varied approaches toward working with us and other nations and collective entities, is going to solve the problem of terrorism. The often- Byzantine nature of the politics of international organizations and deci- sion-making within them frequently fails to show positive results — either by selecting a country like Libya to head a human rights body or in dithering away on fruitless debate while 800,000 Rwandans were massa- cred or acts of genocide continue relentlessly in Darfur. What international organizations can do, however, is forge a global con- sensus on an issue and then incre- mentally push their members to take steps to address problems that have been identified. Consider the issue of international trafficking in drugs, per- sons or materials. The State Depart- ment’s Bureau for International Nar- cotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, the European Union, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime and the Inter- national Organization for Migra- tion (to name just a few) all adminis- ter programs dealing with this. Some of these efforts are mutually reinforcing, while others are devel- oped separately for distinct rationales and are likely duplicative. Wouldn’t it make better sense for one lead agency to have a clear mandate, with the sup- port of the international community, to develop a strategy, gather the appropriate intelligence, and then design and implement the operational activities to carry out that strategy? There would always, of course, be a need for specific components of these programs to be “outsourced” to spe- cific national agencies (especially in the intelligence field). But a mutually reinforcing and layered series of activ- ities pursuing a coordinated strategy would surely be better than the sepa- rately designed, funded and imple- mented programs that we have now (some of which actually compete with each other). There is a precedent for this approach. When we were confronted with the first OPEC oil embargo in 1973, the insightful leadership and diplomacy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and others eventually led to the creation of the International Energy Agency. The IEA was no 18 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 5 S P E A K I N G O U T u International organizations might not be a panacea, but they offer hope for global inclusiveness that ad hoc arrangements with key allies cannot match.