In new fight, shades of cold war

Three weeks on, it is becoming increasingly clear that the United States' struggle against terrorism will likely be less a hot fight than a multidimensional strategy of perseverance.

Retaliation for the Sept. 11 strikes against New York and Washington might yet come at any moment. Osama bin Laden remains a key target for US military forces.

But to this point, the US response to the attacks has belied the Bush administration's initial warlike rhetoric. Official actions have emphasized domestic security, freezing of suspects' financial assets, and the construction of an international antiterror coalition.

The analogy seems less with the Gulf War than with the cold war - America's long, twilight struggle against communism. As in the cold war, virtually all the nation's priorities and commitments are being rethought, with the containment, and eventual rollback, of an overarching threat in mind.

"The one place you can most clearly make the comparison to the cold war is how this is going to be the central focus of US foreign policy," says Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

From the first, President Bush has talked about the terrorism fight as a long and difficult one that will test the national will as much as it does the Marines.

But the bellicose nature of some of his early remarks, such as his desire to catch Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," implied that military moves might be imminent. Combined with reports of troop movements, the authorization of a call-up of the reserves, and the administration's very use of the word "war," many Americans received the impression that the 82nd Airborne might shortly be arriving on the outskirts of Kabul.

In reality, the emerging US strategy has two obvious layers, say officials and experts outside government. The first is the hunt for the immediate perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. Rather than a quick US military strike, this is likely to involve special-operations missions. It involves brainpower - via intelligence and international police work - as much as bullets.

The second is the reorganization of national life, insofar as possible, in an effort to render Americans safe from fear of sudden attack. However difficult the bin Laden manhunt must be, it is this secondary layer that would require the most profound changes - in everything from the US budget to America's relationship with Russia, or China, or Iran.

As the cold war was a fight against communism, the terrorist war will be a struggle against a new "ism": radical Islamic extremism.

That makes it a war of ideas as much as a war of force, notes Michael McFaul, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And a war of ideas is necessarily a multifaceted one. It will involve an effort to win the hearts and minds of at least some in the Middle East who might otherwise be sympathetic to radical Islamists' anti-Western message.

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