WAR ON TERRORISM
U.S. must learn from other wars, says Dean Stone speaker
Finnegan: "Stamping out terrorism isn't like stamping out germs"

By Ethan Robinson
UM Journalism School

The Bush administration’s war on terror is unfocused and ignores the lessons of past U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts, journalist William Finnegan said in the 43rd annual Dean Stone lecture earlier this month.

Finnegan, a writer for The New Yorker, visited the UM School of Journalism as part of the annual Dean Stone celebration. He gave a public lecture on April 4 and spoke briefly the next night at the Dean Stone awards banquet.

Finnegan said he agreed with the initial decision to bomb Afghanistan, but now believes President Bush’s goal of stamping out terrorists like you stamp out germs is impossible. Instead, the United States must put more effort into rebuilding Afghanistan, he said.

The United States funded Afghani fighters in the 1980s, including Osama bin Laden, said Finnegan, but when the conflict was resolved America turned its sights from Afghanistan, leaving it a destroyed nation controlled by feuding warlords and allowing the Taliban to take control. The country is now in the same situation, he said.

Instead of sending tens of thousands of peacekeepers, as the United States did during the Balkans conflict, it has only a few thousand peacekeepers now in Afghanistan, said Finnegan. Rather than nation-building, he said, Bush is more concerned with starting a war with Iraq, which is a very large nation.

Finnegan has covered civil unrest in Nicaragua and Mozambique, as well as Somalia in 1995, which, like Afghanistan, had been destroyed by war and was without a strong central government.

He was inspired to become a journalist while teaching in South Africa during the era of anti-apartheid demonstrations there. Having many of his students arrested, he said, made him interested in political reporting.

Still, he said he does not consider himself a "news person," and is not interested in wars themselves but more how they begin and their effect.

The war on terror is too popular with Americans, said Finnegan, and politicians are afraid to challenge Bush’s war strategy.

"Democrats in Congress have been amazingly passive," he said.

Noting that the press had easy access to the fighting in the Vietnam War, and virtually none to the current conflict in Afghanistan, he said the media would be allowed more access once the public demands it, adding that the Vietnam War was an unpopular war.

Finnegan is also worried about the countries that the United States is calling its allies.

The government’s attitude seems to be, "If you’re with us on the war on terror, we’ll forget about the human rights part," he said.

Saudi Arabia, he said, is corrupt and was home to 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers. Pakistan is unstable, he said, and President Pervez Musharraf is "hanging by a very thin thread" in cooperating with the United States and not angering the largely anti-American Pakistani people.

Finnegan believes the U.S. government is vastly overstating the success of the war on terror. Even in Afghanistan, he said, where the United States and its allies overthrew the oppressive Taliban, feelings are not largely positive toward America. Afghanis, as in much of the Middle East, are still very oppressed.
Added Finnegan: "Good times aren’t coming (soon) to that part of the world."

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