All the President’s men:
Asleep on
the job
An article by Condoleezza Rice
entitled Promoting the National Interest was published in the
January/February 2000 issue of the US journal Foreign Affairs. She wrote as the foreign policy advisor to
Republican presidential candidate George W Bush, laying down the foreign policy
priorities of a Bush administration.
In those days, Republican criticism of the Clinton
administration was that it was given to military interventions around the world
in circumstances in which no direct US national interest was at stake. Thus, the thrust of the Rice article is that
US foreign policy should be driven strictly by US national interest, and not by
what she dismissively describes as “humanitarian interests” or the interests of
the “international community” (p47)
Humanitarian intervention,
followed by nation-building, was to be avoided like the plague:
“The
president must remember that the military is a special instrument. It is lethal, and it is meant to be. It is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is certainly not designed to build a
civilian society.
“Military force is best used to support clear political goals, whether
limited, such as expelling Saddam from Kuwait, or comprehensive, such as
demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan or Germany during World War II.
“It is one
thing to have a limited political goal and to fight decisively for it; it is
quite another to apply military force incrementally, hoping to find a solution
somewhere along the way. A president
entering these situations must ask whether decisive force is possible and is
likely to be effective and must know when and how to get out. These are difficult criteria to meet, so US
intervention in these “humanitarian” crises should be, at best, exceedingly
rare.” (p53)
How could a presidency with that
outlook become embroiled in Iraq?
Rice was in favour of “regime
change” in Iraq, but that was not extraordinary – it was the declared policy of
the US after Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in October 1998. But she did not view Saddam as a threat to
the US, with or without “weapons of mass destruction”:
“Saddam Hussein’s regime is isolated, his conventional power has been
severely weakened, his people live in poverty and terror, and he has no useful
place in international politics. He is
therefore determined to develop WMD.
Nothing will change until Saddam is gone, so the United States must
mobilize whatever resources, including support from his opposition, to remove
him.” (p60)
Of “rogue regimes” in general (by which she meant Iraq, North Korea
and Iran), she wrote:
“These regimes live on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic
about them. Rather, the first line of
defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence – if they do
acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them
will bring national obliteration.” (p61)
According to her then, Saddam
Hussein could be deterred, even with “weapons of mass destruction”. (She implies that he hadn’t any at the time
of writing – that was true, but did she believe that in early 2000?).
There was therefore a significant
policy difference between her and the neo-conservatives – Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, and others – who became major players in the Bush administration a
year later. In January 1998, they
signed a letter to Clinton asserting that Saddam was a threat to US interests
and advocating that military action be taken to overthrow him.
The most interesting thing about
this article by Rice, which purports to lay down the foreign policy priorities
of a Bush administration, is that there is no mention whatsoever of a threat to
the US from al-Qaeda or other Islamic groups.
This is surprising since it was written after the first attack on the
World Trade Centre in 1993 and after the bombing of US embassies in East Africa
in 1998 (but before the attack on the USS Cole, which took place in October
2000). Nor is there any mention of
al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban.
Rice became Bush’s National
Security Advisor a year later in January 2001.
Having read this article, it isn’t difficult to believe Richard Clarke,
the former Bush counter-terrorism advisor, when he says that he couldn’t get
her (or anybody else in the White House) to take seriously the threat from
al-Qaeda in January 2001, or in the following months up to 9/11. That is the main message of his book Against
All Enemies and of the evidence he has been giving to the 9/11 commission.
Clarke had served three previous US presidents – Reagan,
Bush Sen and Clinton – in the area of counter-terrorism. In
1998, Clinton appointed him to a newly created position of National Coordinator
for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism and to Cabinet
level in the National Security Committee (NSC). He was asked to stay on by Bush in January 2001, but his post was
downgraded so that he no longer sat at Cabinet level in the NSC, which of
itself says something about the emphasis the new administration placed on
countering al-Qaeda.
Clarke had carried over from
the Clinton administration a strategic plan for dealing with al-Qaeda, and on
24 January 2001 he forwarded it to Rice with a request for an urgent
Cabinet-level meeting to discuss it.
The meeting didn’t take place until 4 September 2001, when, according to
Clarke, with little amendment his plan became a National Security
Directive. In the meantime, there had
been over a hundred meetings of the National Security Committee at
Cabinet-level – on Iraq, Star Wars, China – but none on al-Qaeda.
Clarke commented to Lesley
Stahl on CBS’s 60 Minutes on 21 March 2004:
“I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War
issues when they came back in power in 2001. It was as though they were
preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came
back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not
new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years.”
(see CBS website here)
(A NSC meeting was held on
Clarke’s plan in April, but at a lower level with the deputies in each relevant
department present. As Rumsfeld’s
deputy at the Department of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, was at this. Clarke’s account to 60 Minutes of
Wolfowitz’s opening contribution to this meeting betrays an astonishing fixation
with Iraq.
Clarke
says he began by saying that bin Laden and al-Qaeda had to be dealt with, but
Wolfowitz said, “No, no, no. We don’t have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we
talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the
United States.” It was only with the
help of the deputy director of the CIA that Clarke was able to convince him
that there hadn’t been any Iraqi terrorism directed against the United States
for eight years.)
As for the President’s personal leadership on the issue,
when Clark was asked on NBC’s Meet the Press on 28 March 2004 to “rate
President Bush’s performance on the war on terror prior to September 11th”,
he replied (see MSNBC website here):
“Well,
there wasn’t any personal performance by the president prior to September 11th.
And the only thing that I was ever able to detect that he did on the war on
terrorism was, after Tenet had been briefing him day after day after day after
day after day about an al Qaeda threat, the president said in May, ‘Well, let’s,
you know, let’s get a strategy’. That’s the only thing I ever heard that he got
involved in personally.
“And when he said that, Dr. Rice
called me and said, ‘The president wants a strategy’. And I said, ‘Well, you
know the strategy is what I sent you on January 25th, and it’s been stuck in
these low- level committees’. And she said, ‘Fine. I’ll deal with that’. Well,
she didn’t deal with it until September.
“And interestingly enough, the
president never said after that May conversation, ‘Where’s the strategy?’ And
again, if you go back to what the president himself says to Bob Woodward, he
said, ‘I knew there was a strategy in the works, but I didn’t know how mature
the plan was’. He’s saying this on September 11th, he didn’t know where the
strategy was. The strategy that he’d asked for in May, he’d never come back and
asked where it was.
“You know,
basically it wasn’t an urgent issue for them before September 11th.”
That is an extraordinary
indictment of President of the US. He
was asleep on the job.
Clark does not say that the
adoption of his strategic plan in January 2001 would have prevented the attacks
in New York and Washington the following September. It was a long-term strategy, principally concerned with
eliminating al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.
But Clarke is also highly critical
of the administration’s lack of vigour in reacting to intelligence indications
in the late spring and early summer of 2001 that al-Qaeda was planning
something big. Here is his account on
Meet the Press, where he contrasts the reaction of the Clinton
administration to similar indications in the run up to the millennium in
December 1999 (when an attack on Los Angeles airport was foiled):
“On June 21st, I believe it was,
[CIA director] George Tenet called me and said, ‘I don’t think we’re getting
the message through. These people aren’t acting the way the Clinton people did
under similar circumstances’.
“And I suggested to Tenet that he
come down and personally brief Condi Rice, that he bring his terrorism team
with him. And we sat in the national security adviser’s office. And I’ve used
the phrase in the book to describe George Tenet’s warnings as ‘he had his hair
on fire’. He was about as excited as I had ever seen him. And he said, ‘Something
is going to happen’.
“Now, when he said that in
December 1999 to the national security adviser, at the time Sandy Berger, Sandy
Berger then held daily meetings throughout December 1999, in the White House
situation room, with the FBI director, the Attorney General, the head of the
CIA, the head of the Defense Department. And they shook out of their
bureaucracies every last piece of information to prevent the attacks. And we
did prevent the attacks in December 1999. Dr. Rice chose not to do that.
“Now, in retrospect, we now know
that there was information in the FBI that hadn’t bubbled to the top, that two
of the hijackers were in the United States. If we had had that kind of process
in the summer of 2001 that we had in December 1999, where the national security
adviser was every day in the White House asking the FBI director and the
Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, ‘Go back to your building, find
out all that you can’, if we had done that in the summer of 2001, maybe the
information that was in the FBI would have shaken loose.”
It is
unknowable whether action of this kind would have prevented 9/11. But had the information that was within the
FBI got to the top level, it is certainly possible.
Condoleeza
Rice has said on many occasions that no one could have predicted the use of an
airline hijacking for the kind of attacks that took place on 9/11. On this, Clarke was scathing, telling Meet
the Press:
“Well, actually we did, beginning
in 1996. As I describe in the book, at the Atlanta Olympics, the
counter-terrorism team from Washington, which I chaired, came down three months
before the Atlanta Olympics and checked out the security. And we asked, ‘What
happens if someone hijacks a jet and flies it into the stadium?’ And no one had
a plan for that. And so we quickly cobbled together a plan for that, using
helicopters, no-fly zones, snipers, air-defense radars.
“We did that again for five or six
events over the course of the next five years. And I tried to get the
authority, and I tried to get the money, to make it a permanent capability to
protect the Congress and the White House, but I wasn’t able to do that.”
And to
think that the fourth hijacked aircraft was on its way to the White House, when
its passengers brought it down.
Reaction
to 9/11
Clarke
also gives an extraordinary insight into the Bush administration’s reaction to
9/11. He told 60 Minutes that he expected the administration to focus its military
response on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but instead the talk quickly turned to
Iraq. It is difficult to credit this
but apparently Rumsfeld said Iraq should be bombed and, when people objected on
the grounds that al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan, he said there weren’t any good
targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq. Clarke says:
“I think
they wanted to believe that there was a connection [between al-Qaeda and Iraq],
but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there
saying we’ve looked at this issue for years. For years we’ve looked and there’s
just no connection.”
Bush too seemed to want a connection to exist and he ordered Clarke personally
to see if there was one. Clarke wrote a
report, in co-operation with the CIA and the FBI, which concluded there was no
connection, but it was sent back to him with the message that he had got the
wrong answer and he should redo it. He
did, and returned the same answer.
War on
Iraq
Asked on Meet
the Press if he had spoken out against the war on Iraq, Clarke replied:
“I had spoken out against the
notion of bombing Iraq immediately after September 11th. And the Defense
Department, the deputy secretary [Wolfowitz] and the secretary [Rumsfeld],
talked to my bosses in the White House and indicated how unhappy they were with
my attitude on Iraq.
“But when I had spoken out, when I
said, ‘Invading Iraq after 9/11 is like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor’,
that didn’t go over well. And I was very quickly sidelined as someone whose
opinions were going to be taken into account.”
Asked why
he thought the Iraq war had undermined the war on terrorism, he replied:
“Who are we fighting in the war on
terrorism? We’re fighting Islamic radicals, and they are drawing people from
the youth of the Islamic world into hating us.
“Now, after September 11th, people
in the Islamic world said, ‘Wait a minute, maybe we’ve gone too far here. Maybe
this Islamic movement, this radical movement has to be suppressed’. And we had
a moment, we had a window of opportunity, where we could change the ideology in
the Islamic world. Instead, we’ve enflamed the ideology, we’ve played right
into their hands, of al Qaeda and others. We’ve done what Osama bin Laden said
we would do.
“Ninety percent of the Islamic
people in Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt – allied countries to the United
States – 90 percent in polls taken last month hate the United States. It’s very
hard when that’s the game, where 90 percent of the Arab people hate us, it’s
very hard for us to win the battle of ideas.
“We can arrest them. We can kill
them. But as Don Rumsfeld said in the memo that leaked from the Pentagon, I’m
afraid that they’re generating more ideological radicals against us than we are
arresting them and killing them. They’re producing more faster than we are.”
Who could
argue with that?
Labour
& Trade Union Review
April 2004