The Foreign Service Journal, October 2005

INTERPOL. All of these agencies, along with those mentioned earlier, such as NATO and the Financial Action Task Force, have a role to play — diplomatically, militarily, control- ling smuggling or money laundering, sharing intelligence, carrying out investigations, or even facilitating extradition. Even if the time has not yet come for one international agency to be given the mandate to fight terrorism in all its manifestations, let us launch a serious international dialogue on the issue. The fact that U.N. Secre- tary General Kofi Annan, in his March 2005 report, “In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All,” endorsed the working definition of terrorism as proposed by his “High- Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change,” leads me to believe that we are approaching a critical point. For if the world community can agree on a working definition of terrorism, we could be — if we wish to make the journey — on the path to developing a working strategy. And on that basis, perhaps we can design an organizational framework that can be used once and for all to link together the interests of most of the world’s nation states in fighting the scourge of international terror- ism. n Leon Weintraub retired from the Foreign Service in 2004 after an almost 30-year career. Among many other assignments, he worked on U.N. Security Council affairs during a Washington tour and spent four years at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva. He is currently an adjunct professor of political science at The George Washington University. 20 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 Iraq represents the most blatant instance of the Bush administration’s preference for unilateralism.