Against All Enemies (2 page)

A
FTER THE SHOCK OF
S
EPTEMBER
11, Americans rallied around the flag in support of their country and their government. Unfortunately, that commendable sentiment brought a blind loyalty, an unquestioning willingness to accept whatever the leadership said was necessary to fight terrorism. By suppressing our natural skepticism, turning off our analytical filters, we participated in
a major national mistake,
the invasion of Iraq.

Although I believed that to my core, I was in a distinct minority in America at the time I was writing this book. The U.S. military had brilliantly swept up the Tigris and Euphrates valley in twenty days, easily overthrowing the rotted, fetid house of Saddam. There were few U.S. casualties. Some Iraqis seemed pleased. As the statue of Saddam toppled, the Bush administration gloated. In October 2003 the invasion of Iraq seemed to most Americans to have been the right thing to have done. Al Qaeda also seemed on the ropes, its sanctuary in Afghanistan having been removed by the U.S. military. How could one criticize such success? However, as we now know, that success was more perceived than real.

We now know several things that were not public when this book first appeared. We know, for example, that George Tenet's daily briefings for the President mentioned al Qaeda on forty occasions, often with great urgency, prior to 9/11. The administration has made much of the fact that on one of those forty occasions, the President suggested we stop “swatting flies.” Yet, as I outline in the book, and as the 9/11 Commission Report makes painfully clear, the President did little else about terrorism prior to September 11 despite the alarm bells from George Tenet.

Unfortunately, the jihadist terrorist threat continues and the work of the national security community is more urgent than ever. The Bush administration was slow to place U.S. ground forces into the areas of Afghanistan where the al Qaeda leadership was present, allowing them to escape. Almost three years later, the leader of al Qaeda and his deputy are both still at large, as is the leader of the Taliban group that ruled Afghanistan in partnership with al Qaeda. Afghanistan itself is still unstable, in large measure because the Bush administration withheld forces and other resources while preparing for its preemptive war on Iraq.

Incredibly, al Qaeda has grown since 9/11, conducting more terrorist attacks in the thirty months since 9/11 than it had in the thirty months prior to that date. The State Department tried in June 2004 to say that attacks were diminishing, but when challenged by the facts, the State Department had to withdraw its annual report on terrorism and reissue it to admit that terrorist attacks had actually increased. While the U.S. has been preoccupied with invading Iraq, al Qaeda has morphed into a hydra, with autonomous regional organizations such as Asbat al Ansr in the Middle East, Abu Sayyaf and Jemmah Islamiya in Southeast Asia, the Salafist Jihadia in North Africa and Western Europe, and a dozen other such groups. As recently reported by the International Institute of Strategic Studies, recruitment into al Qaeda is up, spurred by anger at the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

At home, major vulnerabilities to terrorism remain. We have not done what could have been done in the last three years to raise America's defense against terrorism. We do not need to wait for another attack to say that. What happened on the trains of Madrid could happen in Philadelphia, San Francisco, or Chicago. As Steve Kroft of
60 Minutes
personally demonstrated by walking around unmolested, a terrorist could walk into a chemical plant in the U.S. carrying a large satchel. The Bush administration, far from improving coordination among federal agencies, has only created more agencies. Recently the American people were given the unreassuring image of the Homeland Security Secretary saying publicly that there was no specific intelligence about an impending threat, followed within hours by the Attorney General contradicting him. Shortly thereafter, congressmen and senators were forced to run from the Capitol because an “unidentified” aircraft was approaching Washington. In reality, the aircraft was known by the Federal Aviation Administration, but in a scene reminiscent of 9/11, they had not coordinated with the Air Force or Homeland Security. The aircraft carried the Governor of Kentucky.

State and local officials and private sector infrastructure owners have repeatedly told me horror stories about the lack of information and cooperation they receive from Washington. The disappointment in the Bush administration's failure to take the necessary steps to defend America is hardly limited to the opposition party. I sat with one state's Homeland Security Director as he was told by a succession of federal officials on his cell phone that his major city was still on Orange alert, no it wasn't, yes it was, we don't know and we will get back to you. My Republican friend shook his head in frustration and disgust. One Republican chairman of a Senate committee took me aside two months after my public appearance before the 9/11 Commission to say, “Thank you for what you did. These guys in the White House have really messed things up.” Other Republican members of Congress have confided in me their outrage at the failure of the Administration to make the Homeland Security Department effective. Yet, there is no sign that three years after 9/11, the Bush administration can make the new Department of Homeland Security work, achieve coordination among federal security agencies, or significantly reduce domestic vulnerabilities.

Far from uniting Americans in efforts to defend our country, the Bush administration has divided the nation by contorted legal doctrines that seek to allow searches without prior judicial review (in the Patriot Act II), that deny American citizens their constitutional rights (in the Jose Padilla case), that hold prisoners in Guantánamo without affording them any means of proving their innocence, and that contend that torture occurs only when there is pain equivalent to organ failure.

And then there is Iraq.

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney persist in saying that there were “ties” between al Qaeda and Iraq and that those ties prove that Iraq posed a threat to the United States. Cheney also insists that significant weapons of mass destruction may still be found. They believe that if they just keep saying it, most Americans will believe it, even though the facts have now been demonstrably proven otherwise. In that belief, Bush and Cheney are again wrong. Since the original release of this book and because of other related events, opinion polls have shown a shift in Americans' understanding. Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission Report states quite simply, “We have seen no evidence that [any Iraq–al Qaeda] contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

Fortunately, as time has passed, the spirit of debate that is a healthy sign of democratic life has returned. Americans have come to question not just the Iraq war, but the success of the larger war on terrorism. For this, in part, we owe thanks to the 9/11 Commission. We also owe thanks to the family members of the victims of 9/11. The Commission was created over the strenuous objections of the White House because of the unity and tireless lobbying efforts of those family members. As the Commission conducted its private and public hearings, they continued their pressure, asking for more open hearings and for the release of White House documents. Without the efforts of those families, so much of the events leading up to and on 9/11 would not have become public knowledge. In their grief, they have done the government and nation that failed them an enormous service. We shall forever owe them a debt of gratitude, for they more than anyone have pressured the government to take steps to ensure that the failures of 9/11 are not repeated.

Now most Americans accept seven damning facts: (1) President Bush did little or nothing about terrorism before 9/11, (2) there was no Iraqi threat to the United States, (3) the Bush administration began plotting to invade Iraq early in their term, well before 9/11, (4) there is no evidence of an Iraqi hand in 9/11, or of any significant support to al Qaeda, (5) there were no weapons of mass destruction and the White House and Pentagon justified their claims about WMD by citing phony evidence from Iraqi exiles to whom they paid millions of dollars, (6) the Bush administration had no real plan to administer Iraq after the invasion, and (7) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ignored professional military advice and sent too few troops to Iraq to protect our forces.

When the war crimes at Abu Ghraib prison were publicly revealed, many called upon Secretary Rumsfeld to resign. He refused, flew to Iraq, told the suffering U.S. troops there how much fun it was to be in Iraq, and alluding to the calls for resignation, boasted, “I'm a survivor!” How very different from Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, who resigned after seventeen American soldiers were killed in Mogadishu, allegedly because Aspin had not authorized sufficient armored vehicles. Forty times that number have died in Iraq because there were not enough troops to guard the lines of communication, insufficient armored HUMVEEs, a lack of body armor, and no overall plan for postwar Iraq. Little wonder that Marine four-star general Anthony Zinni, former commander of all U.S. troops in the Middle East, accused the Pentagon civilian leadership of “dereliction of duty.” Yet Rumsfeld stays on, commended by President Bush as the best secretary of defense in memory. When asked if he could admit to any errors of his own, President Bush responded that he could not, especially under the “pressure” of a prime-time news conference. No apologies, no admissions of error—only a persistence in erroneous claims.

There is at least one momentous error that is inescapable: President Bush has sowed the seeds of current and future terrorism against the United States by his needless, counterproductive, deceitful invasion of Iraq.

George Bush had said of the potential of terrorists in Iraq, “Bring 'em on.”

They came. Some foreign terrorists did go there and kill Americans. Many more Iraqis became terrorists only because we had invaded their country. The death toll of American troops is now four times what it was when I wrote this book. Over six thousand U.S. military have been killed or wounded. Many of the wounded have lost arms, legs, or eyes and will never be the same. For most of the casualties there are mothers, husbands, and children whose lives will also never be the same. And there are many more Iraqi casualties, many Iraqis whose homes have been violated, and some who have been tortured. They too have aggrieved family.

When I showed the movie
The Battle of Algiers
(about the resistance to the French occupation of Algeria) to my mid-career class at Harvard, a Bangladeshi came up after the discussion and told me of how Pakistani troops had isolated his home, beat his father, and dragged his mother from her house many years ago when he was just a young boy. He said, “I am generally a very nonviolent man, but if I saw a Pakistani soldier today, I would kill him. You Americans should think about this, about the long-term effect you are having on your own security by what you have done to Iraqis.” I did think about that as I saw the U.S. Marines assault Fallujah and then reverse course and arm and pay the very fighters they had been assaulting.

George Bush was right, however, when he said that “Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.” He made it so. He turned it from a nation that was not threatening us into a breeding ground for anti-American hatred. For a generation or more, we will be the victims of Iraqi revenge. And the Iraqis are not alone. The scenes of the U.S. occupation have inflamed Islamic opinion from Morocco and Western Europe, through the Middle East and South Asia, to Thailand and Indonesia. Radical Islamicists will not easily or soon be dissuaded of their hatred of America. Egypt's President had said, “Before you invade Iraq there is one Usama bin Laden, after you invade there will be hundreds.” Hosni Mubarak was right.

I suggested in this book that while we fixate on Iraq, we risk a situation in which our security is threatened by adverse trends in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Since I wrote that, Iran continues to sponsor terrorism and—if the International Atomic Energy Agency is to be believed—build a nuclear weapon. Saudi Arabian domestic security continues to deteriorate, with attacks on oil facilities, police, and Americans. Pakistan continues its instability, with the ruling general narrowly missing assassination by al Qaeda.

It pains me that so much of what I wrote in this book is coming to pass. I would rather have been wrong, but the truth is that by the blindly ideological, arrogant, irresponsible way in which the Bush administration responded to 9/11, by enraging the vast majority of the Islamic world and failing to reduce our vulnerabilities to al Qaeda, they have actually managed, incredibly enough, to make us less safe than we were before the attacks.

What should happen in Washington, to protect us rather than further endanger us? One lesson is that even though we are the world's only remaining superpower—as we were before September 11, 2001—we are seriously threatened by an ideological war within Islam. It is a civil war in which a radical Islamist faction is striking out at the West and at moderate Muslims. Once we recognize that the struggle within Islam—not a “clash of civilizations” between East and West—is the phenomenon with which we must grapple, we can begin to develop a strategy and tactics for doing so. It is a battle not only of bombs and bullets, but chiefly of ideas. It is a war that we are losing, as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.