Sorting Through the Accusations

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 21:02:30 -0600 (CST)
From: alert () stratfor com
Subject: STRATFOR WEEKLY: Sorting Through the Accusations

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THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
26 March 2004

Sorting Through the Accusations

Summary

The United States is in the process of picking apart the
intelligence and political failures that led up to the attacks on
New York City and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001. This is an
unprecedented process. Normally such reviews occur after the war
has ended. In this case, the review was made necessary by the
president's failure to clean house after Sept. 11. That said, the
truth of the matter would appear to be more complex than the
simplistic charges being traded. The fact is, in our view, the
Bush and Clinton policies were far more similar than they were
different. We are not quite certain who we have insulted with
that claim.

Analysis

Conducting a highly public inquiry and debate over the origins of
a war while that war is being conducted would appear to be one of
the most self-destructive exercises imaginable. No reasonable
person could argue that mistakes were not made prior to Sept. 11,
2001, any more than it could be argued that mistakes were not
made before Dec. 7, 1941. There is no question but that the
intelligence system failed to predict the event and that it was
supposed to.

But just as the Pearl Harbor inquiry was carried out after the
war, so as not to interfere with the war effort, it would seem
reasonable that the Sept. 11 inquiries should take place after
the war is over. Officials and former officials hurling charges
against each other in a public display of disunity does not seem
to serve the national interest. There were secret investigations
and discussions before World War II ended, but the public report
by Congress was not released until July 1946 and not really
undertaken in earnest until after the war ended.

It has been argued that the unlimited nature of this war makes
waiting for the end impossible. But this war is not unique in
appearing to be potentially endless. Only with the benefit of
hindsight can one make the argument that previous wars would be
temporally contained. As British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward
Grey so poignantly stated in 1914 -- at the start of World War I,
the shortest of the 20th century's major conflicts -- "The lights
are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in
our lifetime." The review could have waited.

However, in all fairness, it should be pointed out that George W.
Bush set himself up for this, although not in the way his critics
charge. One of the things that President Franklin D. Roosevelt
did was to clean house after the Pearl Harbor attack. This
housecleaning was not necessarily fair. Adm. Husband Kimmel,
Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), for example, was fired
even though a strong case could be made that he was less
responsible than others for Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, Pearl
Harbor happened on his watch and he was gone.

It went deeper than that. Roosevelt wanted to signal that
something had gone terribly wrong not only with one person but
also with a generation of leaders. Relatively junior commanders
Chester Nimitz and Dwight Eisenhower were catapulted into senior
command positions. Not all of the old leaders were replaced --
consider Douglas MacArthur or George Marshall -- but there was a
broad enough housecleaning that no one could escape the fact that
the war had changed everything. You could argue that Roosevelt
did this to protect himself, but if so, he was doing his job.

President Bush did not clean house after Sept. 11. He kept the
same team in place with some very minor second-tier shifts. There
was no whirlwind of activity designed to bring in a fresh,
wartime team using streamlined procedures. He went with the team
he had. There was a defensible case to be made for this. The
country was in a state of shock, and an upheaval in the
intelligence and defense communities was perceived to be an
unnecessary follow-on shock to public morale. Moreover, the
battle was joined, and changing commanders in the middle of the
battle was dangerous.

Finally, there was a political aspect. The man who was
institutionally responsible for detecting Sept. 11 was CIA
Director George Tenet. He was 2001's Kimmel. Whether it was his
fault or not, Sept. 11 was an intelligence failure. Tenet was in
charge of intelligence, and it happened on his watch. Kimmel was
sacked -- but Tenet was not a Bush appointee. He had been
appointed by Bill Clinton. Bush began with a crippled presidency
due to the Florida fiasco. He did not have the national authority
of Roosevelt, and he badly needed bipartisan support. Bush
obviously respected Tenet since he kept him on after his
election. He might have decided to keep him on after Sept. 11 in
order to help bulletproof his administration. Tenet was, after
all, a Clinton appointee.

The problem with this strategy was that, rather than deflect
inquiries, it made them unavoidable. After Dec. 7, those directly
and visibly responsible for Pearl Harbor -- excepting the
president and his key political appointees -- were removed from
the chain of command. After Sept. 11, those most directly and
visibly responsible remained in the chain of command. If there
were mistakes made, then the people who made those mistakes were
still in control of huge parts of the war effort. The question of
whether these people were competent could not be avoided.

To put it a little differently: Unlike Roosevelt, Bush failed to
armor himself against his political enemies. While Roosevelt, who
had a lot more political weight in 1941-1942, successfully
deflected political attacks by combining a sense of national
emergency with a sense that he was taking steps to deal with the
problem, Bush kept his team intact. That meant it was essential
to examine their performance -- and their culpability, if any --
prior to Sept. 11.

Bush argued that the United States was in a war, but he never
shifted his administration into a wartime mode. Failure -- real
or perceived -- was never punished. Bush's one administrative
innovation, Homeland Security, moves at a snail's pace. The armed
forces did not undergo massive expansion, and the intelligence
community was not torn apart and rebuilt in an emergency measure.

The war began with a massive surprise attack. Bush said there was
a war going on, but somehow Bush never appeared to be
reconfiguring his team for war. It undermined his ability to
demand a pass until after the war was over because he sometimes
did not act as if a war were going on. This has been noticed.
Many Americans do not consider the Bush administration's "war on
terror" to be a war at all.

What is most ironic is that an administration regarded as being
so highly politicized has been, in fact, so politically
incompetent. It is as if the administration never understood that
this moment was coming and never prepared for it. It is
particularly amazing because the charges against Bush
administration -- at least in the way they have been framed --
are so weak. The administration is essentially being charged with
two things: first, that it came into office obsessed with Iraq,
to the extent that it was considering invading Iraq from the very
first meetings it had on national security. Second, it is charged
with failing to heed intelligence warnings about al Qaeda,
downplaying the threat and therefore not taking actions that
might have prevented the attack. Implicit in both these charges
is the notion that Bush policies were fundamentally different
from Clinton policies -- and that the Clinton policies were
superior.

There is no question but that the Bush administration had a focus
on Iraq and considered invading Iraq. The explanation that has
been given is that this was the desire to complete Bush Senior's
job. The actual answer does not require strained readings of
Sigmund Freud. The fact is that the Bush administration was
simply continuing the Clinton administration's policies on Iraq,
virtually without change.

The very first briefings Bush was given when he took office had
to have been about Iraq. That is because U.S. and British
aircraft were carrying out constant combat operations over Iraq,
patrolling the no-fly zones. These missions had been carried out
from the end of Desert Storm -- during the administration of
President George H. W. Bush -- throughout the Clinton years,
under U.N. mandate. The Clinton administration at times
intensified these attacks. In December 1998, for example, it
carried out Operation Desert Fox in response to Saddam Hussein's
refusal to allow U.N. weapons inspectors into the country. The
Clinton administration also attempted on various occasions to
overthrow Hussein through covert operations; Clinton also
continued sanctions on Iraq.

None of these efforts were effective in bringing about change,
but Clinton did not discontinue the combat operations, sanctions
or desultory covert operations. Although it was generally felt
that these were unsuccessful, Clinton was trapped by a lack of
alternatives. He did not want to mount a full invasion. At the
same time, he did not want to halt the ineffective actions
against Hussein and signal American weakness, undermine the
regional alliance and embolden Hussein. The patrols continued, as
did occasional bombings of Iraq.

Given that the United States had been involved in combat
operations in Iraq for more than a decade, one would hope that
the first topic on President Bush's foreign policy agenda would
have been Iraq. What else would it have been? Bush shared the
view of the previous two presidents that halting operations was
not possible and bringing Hussein's government down was a major
U.S. foreign policy goal. The new administration obviously
conducted an early review of how to bring closure to the U.S.
Iraq policy.

In this review, it would have been noted that the Clinton policy
had failed to achieve the stated goals. Continuing the policy of
ineffective combat and covert operations coupled with sanctions
was soaking up U.S. military and intelligence resources without
achieving any goal. Bush accepted Clinton's premise that simply
walking away was not an option. That left only intensified
military options, the most certain of which would be an invasion.

Anyone thinking about Iraq in the spring of 2001 knew that the
Clinton policy could not continue indefinitely. Obviously one
faction was going to argue that since the United States could not
walk away, the only solution was an invasion. That appears to be
what several people thought, including Donald Rumsfeld. What is
most noteworthy is that they were -- for the time being at least
-- overruled. There was no invasion, nor any buildup in the
region for an invasion. Bush decided, essentially by default, to
continue Clinton's Iraq policy.

Now that may have been a defensible position, all things
considered, or one could charge that Bush was continuing a failed
foreign policy begun by his father. But charging that the Bush
administration was unreasonably obsessed with overthrowing
Hussein -- given the context which the Clinton and Bush Sr.
administrations had created for them -- is truly stretching
things.

If the Bush administration was obsessed with anything, it was
China. When Donald Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense, he said
that the new focus of U.S. defense policy would be Asia, and
plans were rapidly drawn for redeploying forces there. The
dominant event between Bush's inauguration and Sept. 11 was the
crisis with China over the downing of the EP-3 aircraft over
Hainan Island. Asia was reinforced. Iraq was not.

So too with the charge that Bush had failed to take al Qaeda
seriously. To be more precise, there had been a persistent
failure -- in both the Clinton and Bush administrations -- to
take al Qaeda and radical Islamists seriously. Part of the fault
lay directly with the CIA and the manner in which it collected
intelligence and analyzed it -- but Bush's CIA director was the
same as Clinton's. Blaming Bush for unique neglect of al Qaeda
for eight months, after Clinton's eight years, is hard to fathom.
Indeed, part of the fault lies with some of the terrorism experts
now critical of Bush. When their record is examined, many did
warn about al Qaeda, but over the course of their careers they
had issued similar warnings about so many groups that it was hard
to distinguish the real from the fantastic. It was a profession
that had cried wolf too many times.

The Bush failure was the same as the Clinton failure. Both
administrations looked at al Qaeda as the heir of the Palestinian
terrorist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. They would set off a
few bombs, kill no more than a few dozen people, hijack planes
and represent an irritant and a nuisance far more than a
strategic threat. Their rhetoric was extreme, but no more extreme
than that of other groups that never were able to match rhetoric
with action.

The misevaluation of al Qaeda was a systemic failure that ran
from the CIA to the American public. We recall no public outcry
for increased expenditures on intelligence and counterterrorism
in the 1990s. Nor was there massive public unrest when -- after
attacks against Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the East African
embassies or the USS Cole in Yemen, all of which claimed American
lives -- a major effort to destroy al Qaeda was not undertaken.
As a nation, the United States calmly accepted the danger. For
the Clinton administration to claim that it had devoted major
resources and made a great effort to hunt down and destroy al
Qaeda is simply not true. To their credit, both former Defense
Secretary William Cohen and Secretary of State Madeline Albright
testified this week that their efforts against al Qaeda were both
thin and constrained by public disinterest. In its policy of
inaction, the Clinton team was simply tracking the American
public's mood.

There are two charges that can be legitimately leveled against
George W. Bush. The first is that, in spite of knowing that the
Clinton policy on Iraq was ineffective, he neither ended the
containment of Hussein nor moved to destroy him. Bush carried on
Clinton's policies unchanged. The second charge is that Bush did
not increase the level of effort taken to destroy al Qaeda, but
essentially followed the Clinton administration's policy of
watching and hoping for a low-risk, low-cost moment to act -- a
moment that Osama bin Laden was too smart to give them.

In our view, the most serious charge that can be made against
Bush is not that he continued -- unchanged -- key Clinton
policies before Sept. 11, but that he did not drastically reshape
his administration for war after Sept. 11. He left in place the
man who was responsible for the failure to understand, locate and
destroy al Qaeda under President Bill Clinton and inexplicably
left him and others in place, even after his failures became
manifest on -- and after -- Sept. 11.

This was, in our view, a serious error in judgment. It may be an
unforgivable one. But to hold Bush's eight months in office as
having been more responsible for al Qaeda's emergence than
Clinton's eight years in office -- not to mention the Carter and
Reagan administrations' responsibility for encouraging militant
Islam -- strikes us as strange reasoning. Sept. 11 was planned,
and it was being implemented while Clinton was president. Bush
simply adopted wholesale -- and extended -- Clinton's errors.

This is not an argument for Clinton or Bush. Given the mood of
the country, it is unlikely that any president would have done
much differently. Had either man proposed invading Afghanistan
prior to Sept. 11, both would have been labeled as certifiably
insane. The problem was rooted in the mind-set that had enamored
the American people after the end of the Cold War: a belief that
the world had become a safe place to live and that those who said
otherwise were alarmist cranks.

Sept. 11 was a systemic failure of the nation, for which both
Democrats and Republicans are equally guilty. Bush's errors in
judgment did not occur before the war, but after the war began.
The current attempt to prove some spectacular failure by Bush
before the war makes political sense, but it is intellectually
incoherent and misses the places where Bush made genuine errors.
Bush did fail. He failed to hold the intelligence community
responsible for its failures, tear it apart and rebuild it. He
failed to find a Nimitz to run the CIA. We regard this as an
enormously serious charge against him. For the rest, he shares
responsibility with his predecessor -- and with the rest of us.

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