Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (4 page)

The binder in which I placed my documents, I must stress, did not contain notes I wrote down from memory long after the events, but rather contemporary, official, and electronically retrievable documents that would either support or not support what I had to say. To make the process work as smoothly as possible for the Kean-Hamilton commission, I decided to pass the entire binder to those commissioners and their staffers so it would be in front of them whenever we spoke.
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It took me three attempts to get it passed to the 9/11 Commission through the clearinghouse that DCI George Tenet established in the CIA for the transfer of such material. I do not know why the first two attempts were unsuccessful, but on the third try I numbered each page by hand and consecutively with a black indelible marker, then telephoned the commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, to confirm that it was in his hands. Mr. Zelikow confirmed that the binder had arrived, but I was never again called on to testify to or brief the commission.

I go into this detail to emphasize that the CIA thoroughly screened the documents in my binder, redacted them appropriately to protect sources and methods, and forwarded them to the 9/11 Commission. The documents therefore have no potential for damaging U.S. national security or for compromising the CIA’s past or ongoing operations. Indeed, they were cleared of sensitive data by the CIA for the express purpose of allowing their use to help Americans understand why the 9/11 attacks occurred. The documents do, however, hold significant potential for embarrassing senior U.S. officials—elected, appointed, and civil service—but CIA regulations state that embarrassment does not constitute grounds for censoring. These documents, others, and the testimony held by the 9/11 Commission identify those who did not act to protect Americans and their interests; shows Americans the truth about foreign enemies, like Saudi Arabia, that U.S. leaders have for decades consistently identified as friends and allies; and shames each 9/11 commissioner for failing to give Americans a complete accounting of the events preceding 9/11.

I contend that if the commission had published at least some of the documents in my binder, Americans would have a far better fix on how very well the CIA performed, as well as a better understanding of the many senior officials in the federal government who had been knowingly negligent in not making sure everything possible was done to protect Americans and U.S. interests. This strikes me as particularly essential in the aftermath of President Clinton’s petulant, over-the-top, and nationally televised insistence in September 2006 that he took advantage of every opportunity he had to eliminate Osama bin Laden—an assertion I know to be untrue. In addition, the importance of publishing these and the other redacted documents and sworn testimonies held by the 9/11 Commission has taken on increased importance because of two factors. First, the inability of the U.S. government to determine with any precision the number or content of the documents stolen from the National Archives by Samuel Berger, President Clinton’s last national security adviser, and subsequently destroyed. Mr. Berger’s self-admitted criminal behavior adds urgency to getting the full documentary record published because his plea agreement with the Department of Justice denied him security clearances for only three years. In other words, if the Democrats win the presidential election in 2008, there is every chance that Mr. Berger will receive a position of trust from the new president; indeed, he is already advising Senator Clinton on foreign policy. From that position, Mr. Berger could not only strike back at the critics of his crime and his incompetent, derelict performance as national security adviser against al-Qaeda, but also ensure the complete destruction of whatever incriminating documents his felonious scissors missed the first time around.
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The second factor is former DCI George Tenet’s recent book,
At the Center of the Storm.
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As I will note below, there are other books about the pre-9/11 period that have been, from my perspective, deliberately misleading, Richard Clarke’s
Against All Enemies
being—until Mr. Tenet’s book—the first among equals in this regard.
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Mr. Tenet’s book, however, is much more dangerous than Mr. Clarke’s and the others in terms of distorting history because Mr. Tenet served as the DCI—a nonpartisan position from which senior U.S. political leaders are told the truth about foreign affairs and threats to America—and yet he has no qualms about misleading Americans about the role Saudi Arabia played in hobbling U.S. efforts against bin Laden and al-Qaeda
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; deceiving Americans about the chances to capture or kill bin Laden before 9/11
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; and urging Americans not once but twice to blindly trust their bipartisan governing elite because they are all good people whose “motives” should not be questioned.
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The documents I and many others provided to the 9/11 Commission would surely tell against the veracity of Mr. Tenet on these points.

Most disturbing, however, is Mr. Tenet’s seemingly deliberate attempt to lay the groundwork for blaming President George W. Bush’s administration, rather than Mr. Clinton’s, if al-Qaeda detonates a nuclear device inside the United States. Mr. Tenet claims that such an attack is his biggest worry and argues, “Our nation ought to be moving heaven and earth to get a handle on all the deadly fissile material currently unaccounted for.”
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Now, no one can disagree with the former DCI on this point, but it is worth noting that Mr. Tenet claims that it was not until President Bush’s watch in February 2001 that “al-Qaeda’s pursuit of WMD became clear…[when] Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl, described how, as far back as 1993, he helped bin Laden try to obtain uranium in Sudan to be used in some type of nuclear device.”
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Thereafter, Mr. Tenet asserts, “the only responsible course of action [for the U.S. government] was to do whatever was necessary to rule out any possibility that the terrorists could get their hands on fissile material.”
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Again, no one can disgree with Mr. Tenet on this point, but Americans might like to know that the documents provided to the 9/11 Commission irrefutably show that Mr. al-Fadl’s very specific and worrying information was not new in 2001 but rather had been first acquired by the U.S. from Mr. al-Fadl after he “walked in” to a U.S. embassy in Africa in the fall of 1996 and that it was available to Mr. Clinton and his National Security Council from that point until the end of the Democratic administration. Mr. Tenet’s valid assertion that Mr. al-Fadl’s information required the U.S. government “to do whatever was necessary” to eliminate the nuclear threat raises the question of why President Clinton and his national security advisers never acted to capture or kill the sponsor and manager of the nuclear threat, Osama bin Laden, when they had ten chances to do so between May 1998 and May 1999. Notwithstanding Mr. Tenet’s attempt to make sure that Mr. Bush and the Republicans take the blame if a mushroom cloud one day appears over an American city, the documents in the 9/11 Commision’s archive clearly show that all the political fallout, as well as direct responsibility for the accompanying deaths and economic catastrophe, will fall on Mr. Clinton, his national security team, and needless to say, the duplicitous Mr. Tenet.

Finally, I would like to remind readers that when I refer to the documents in my binder, I am doing so from memory. I studied those documents so closely and for so long, however, that I am confident that I am paraphrasing them correctly. For those interested in pursuing further study on these issues, I believe that I have described the binder (a black, four-or-five-inch, three-ring, government-issue binder) well enough to permit a fairly accurate Freedom of Information Act request for the material, which again has already been redacted by the CIA to eliminate all the concerns the CIA had in regard to the possible compromise of sources and methods. This is one case where the paucity of documents by government officials lamented by Jefferson is not a problem. Indeed, I think that many of these documents could be described as what Jefferson called on another occasion “morsel[s] of history” which are things “so rare always to be valuable.”
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And their publication, along with other documents and testimony held by the 9/11 Commission, might begin to negate the effort of the George W. Bush administration and our overall governing elite to “dissuade Americans from peering too deeply at the events of 9/11. Were they to do so, they might just pose discomfiting questions about the competence of our leaders, the organization and purposes of government, and the rationale of U.S. foreign policy.”
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On September 11, 2001, history began exacting revenge from America’s bipartisan governing elite for thirty years of ill-considered, path-of-least-resistance decisions and policies that had disinvested in U.S. security, as well as for its inability to alter the worldview that forms the basis for U.S. national-security policy—even as they chanted that the Cold War was over and fresh foreign-policy thinking was required. The 9/11 attacks found U.S. leaders ignorant both of America’s lack of options that had been created by a quarter-century of decisions taken “for the sake of present ease,” and of the dimensions and power of the Islamist foe their policies had nurtured. They also were boundlessly confident that the approaches that brought victory in the Cold War would ensure the quick and utter destruction of the forces led, inspired, and instigated by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Between 1973 and 9/11, U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world committed Americans to the untenable position of supporting and protecting the viability of an endless religious war-to-the-death between Israelis and Arabs. In economic policy, moreover, Washington ignored the warning shot fired by the Saudi Arabia–led 1973 oil embargo and decided to let the U.S. economy remain dependent on energy supplies from a group of foreign nations that had used oil as an anti-U.S. weapon. This steady and deliberate disinvestment in U.S. national security also encouraged the growth of Islamist militancy by allowing Islamist leaders to demonstrate to their audiences that America was an extraordinary and malignant hypocrite, rhetorically championing democracy and liberty for all peoples, while specializing in the killing and brutal oppression of Muslims, supporting Israel in the former and Muslim police states like Saudi Arabia in the latter.

Between 1996 and 9/11, Washington compounded the damage caused by its prolonged security disinvestment with an equally debilitating failure to shuck off Cold War thinking and accept that history had resumed with a vengeance. For the U.S. governing elite, the Islamists were not a threat to U.S. national security but a lethal nuisance that could be defeated at the pace and moment and with means decided by the United States. Washington was about to learn that security disinvestment and a Cold War hangover left it to confront Islamism with few good options, and so, to paraphrase what Mr. Lincoln once said in another losing situation: If there is a place worse than hell in 2008, Americans are now in it.
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America and the Muslim World, 1973–1996

It has become a commonplace to argue that the world changed forever on September 11, 2001. Only rarely in history, however, can a specific date be pointed to with accuracy as such a landmark. Generally, important events that happen on specific days—July 4, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s 1914 assassination, and Fort Sumter’s surrender—are points of culmination, the end-points of lengthy series of events that occurred over years prior to the date that came to be seen as a historical breaking point. Independence Day was the culmination of a quarter-century of increasing alienation between Great Britain and her American colonies; the archduke’s murder triggered a war between two rival military alliances that had been rapidly arming and bumping against each other for a decade or more; and the cannonading of Fort Sumter capped two decades of political jockeying, acrimonious sectional partisanship, and finally a crisis over the westward extension of slavery.

If the world did change fundamentally for America on and after 9/11—and I tend to think that it did, and greatly for the worse—the change was caused not by the attack but by the foreign-policy decisions taken and implemented over the preceding three-plus decades. During that period, I will argue, the federal government, under both parties, steadily disinvested in U.S. national security vis-à-vis the Muslim world, both by the things it did and by those that it did not do. While Washington had invested heavily, and by the end of 1991 successfully, in defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, its ability to protect the country against other threats had simultaneously withered. Washington’s mindset seemed to be that the United States was vulnerable only to the USSR and that none of the other wars, problems, and threats in the international system would ever reach the status of endangering national security. The term
national-security threat,
for purposes of this book, is defined in the narrow (and I suppose old-fashioned) sense of a life-and-death threat to the nation’s survival. In turn, the term
national interest
is used herein to denote an issue of utmost importance because it involves the survival of the United States. Dependence on anti-U.S. energy-supplying states is a national security threat to the United States, for example, and therefore ending that debilitating dependence is a national interest of the United States. Establishing U.S.-like women’s rights regimes abroad, on the other hand, is an admirable ambition, but the lack thereof is not a national security threat to the United States, and by definition, the creation of such regimes overseas cannot be deemed a national interest.

As noted above, the discussion that follows will strike some as eclectic and even eccentric in its choice of the 1973–96 foreign-policy issues on which it focuses. In response I can only say that the topics covered in this chapter are those that, at least in my estimate, contributed substantially and directly to the unwitting but almost systematic elimination of U.S. foreign-policy options in regard to the transnational Islamist groups that began finding their legs in the years after Israel defeated its multiple Arab-state attackers in 1973. Some of the issues discussed below did not immediately sound alarms about the nascent Islamist threat, but over time they have proven to be nearly immovable obstacles in the path of America’s ability to plot a course that will deliver victory over that threat. No better examples of the ever-tightening shackles on America’s ability to maneuver and defend itself against the Islamist threat can be found, for example, than the policies Washington set in 1973 toward Israel, Saudi Arabia, and energy policy. In addition, several of the topics in this chapter have not received much public discussion, such as the enduring negative impact for America of the Clinton administration’s military response to Saddam Hussein’s 1993 attempt to kill former president George H.W. Bush. I have included lesser-known topics because I believe they contributed to the mess in which we now find ourselves mired in the Muslim world, and because I had first-hand exposure to how U.S. leaders perceived and handled the problems.

For Americans, I believe, their country’s current quandary is founded on the failure of its governing elite to study U.S. and world history and perhaps, even more, to recognize that their faith in American exceptionalism does not equate to America being exempt from the lessons, warnings, and wisdom acquired by studying history. How much less dangerous would America’s current confrontation with the Islamists be, for example, had its leaders simply followed the most important advice for foreign-policy makers available in the canon of Western political science and philosophy? “I am not ignorant that many have been and are of the opinion that human affairs are so governed by Fortune and by God, that man cannot alter them by any prudence of theirs, and indeed have no remedy against them,” Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in 1513, “and for this reason have come to think that it is not worthwhile to labor much about anything, but that they must leave everything to be determined by chance.

From 1973 to this day I would argue that U.S. policymakers have done little to prepare for changes of what Machiavelli called “Fortune” in the Muslim world. As will be seen, U.S. policies were based on the assumption of an unchanging status quo and were designed to follow the path of least resistance. When war with the Islamists came, therefore, the United States had no policy options other than the status quo and had built no “weirs or moles” with which to deflect or channel the Islamists’ violence back toward its primary targets, Muslim regimes and Israel. This lack of prudent common sense left the United States adrift and in a state where reacting to the actions of others was the order of the day. “And so when occasion requires the cautious man to act impetuously,” Machiavelli wrote in words that exactly mirror the optionless reality faced by U.S. policymakers on 9/11, “he cannot do so and is undone; whereas, had he changed his nature with time and circumstances, his fortune would have been unchanged.”
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1973: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Oil—America’s Shackles

In 1973, America confronted two major challenges in the Middle East, and while it did not suffer an immediate outright defeat in dealing with either, both would prove to be paralyzing burdens on the United States when it moved to respond to the 9/11 attacks.

America’s first major 1973 challenge flowed from the Arab-Israeli war of that year. Under President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the U.S. government went to Israel’s rescue during the Yom Kippur War by providing unlimited financial support and military equipment, as well as by standing toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union—risking nuclear war—to prevent Moscow’s all-out support for Israel’s Arab foes. After the superb and U.S.-resupplied Israeli military rallied to defeat the Arab armies, U.S. aid proved to be, not a stopgap, wartime measure, but the opening of a spigot through which would flow unlimited, no-strings-attached financial, military, and diplomatic support for Israel. As the level of this support grew, so too did efforts by pro-Israel Americans in both parties and large parts of academia, the media, and Hollywood—complemented by what can only be described as superbly effective covert political action by Israel’s intelligence services
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—to entwine U.S. support for Israel ever more deeply and inextricably into U.S. domestic politics. Indeed by the morning of the 9/11 attacks, unquestioning U.S. support for Israel was as much a domestic political issue—exactly the same kind of politically sacrosanct “third rail” as Social Security—as it was a foreign-affairs matter. Of all the foreign policy issues that have come before the American people in their history, support for Israel was and is perhaps the only one that is certainly immune to challenge or change and very nearly exempt from comment, criticism, or debate. And Israel, of course, is not the real problem here. Reasonable people can disagree over what the nature of U.S. support for Israel—if any—should be. The problem lies, rather, in the reality that such disagreement and the debate it would naturally engender are not possible in America because critics of the relationship are shouted down as anti-Semites by the bipartisan governing elite and Israel’s U.S.-citizen acolytes and agents.

The inauguration and domestication of the U.S.-Israel relationship surely ranks as one of the least debated and most undemocratic watershed events in American history, one that is now costing us both blood and treasure and will cost us much more of each in the future. The U.S. federal government, without any initial authorization save the president’s decision, tied America’s future relations with the Islamic world to an ever-tightening, one-way relationship with the state of Israel, a country devoid of any natural, political, or geographic resources needed by the United States; virtually undefendable against a united foe; and then as now absolutely irrelevant and manifestly counterproductive to the national-security interests of the United States. All of President Nixon’s successors and all successive Congresses have tied the United States more closely and expensively to Israel, to the extent that an attack of any sort on Israel is responded to by Washington as if an enemy had reached out and smashed Delaware or some other state of the Union.

While Nixon risked nuclear war with Moscow for Israel’s sake, today America, as the unquestioning superpower supporter of anything and everything that Israel does, confronts more than a billion Muslims. One cannot help but wonder what the Founders would have thought of such an absurd situation, one in which Americans and their future are put increasingly at risk to further the interests of a state that contributes nothing to America’s economic welfare or strategic security but rather is a drain on both. Reflect for a moment on George Washington’s advice to his countrymen on the occasion of his retirement from the presidency, then decide for yourself if America’s current relationship with Israel is in the national interest. In foreign policy, Washington wrote,

Is there a better description of the dangers America faces because of its governing elite’s “passionate attachment” to Israel? Is not our adversarial relationship with the Palestinians and Muslims generally an example of the “infusing” into America of the “enmities” of Israel? And what better definition of the double standard that our Islamist foes cite is there than the “concessions to the favorite Nation of privileges denied to others” in the form of the constant U.S. veto of any UN resolution condemning Israeli actions?

It is fashionable in these days to regard Washington—and America’s other Founders, who will be cited periodically throughout this book—as irrelevant, as dead white men, as antiquated, and as morally abhorrent because some of them owned black slaves. This attitude is a mistake for any American to take. The Founders remain vitally relevant to the conduct of American domestic politics and foreign policy, not because they could see the impact of such future developments as transcontinental railroads, the cell phone, ballistic missiles, Social Security, and nuclear weapons. They clearly could not, and so have little value to us as soothsayers. The Founders’ eternal relevance for Americans is based on their study and knowledge of human beings, of how human beings act and interact, and of the manifest imperfectibility of human beings. When the Founders met in 1787 in Philadelphia to write the American constitution, as the brilliant professor Daniel Robinson has said, they drew on the totality of the “political life of early America [which itself] is an extended treatise on the nature of human nature, informed by scripture, informed by Christian apologists, informed by philosophers.”
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The Founders’ wisdom must remain in the forefront of American thinking not because they were demigods but because they were, by their own admission, flawed human beings who used that knowledge about themselves and others to shape a nation capable of an ongoing effort to build an equitable society, preventing the growth of tyrannical power at home, and savvy enough to survive in a world of competitive nation-states and frequent wars.