Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (12 page)

Nation-State Fixation:
Of all the aspects of the U.S. governing elite’s post–Cold War hangover, its fixation on threats from nation-states is the most understandable: America’s half-century face-off against the USSR was preeminently a state-vs.-state confrontation. The durability of the fixation was obvious in both Bush administrations’ wars against Iraq: the elder Mr. Bush echoed World War II rhetoric about thwarting aggression against Kuwait, while the younger Mr. Bush and his advisers looked for a nation-state to assign culpability for 9/11. It can also be seen in the war drums that both Republicans and Democrats beat more or less regularly vis-à-vis the supposed threats from Iran and North Korea. And this focus is not misplaced, only myopia-inducing. The just-mentioned states, plus Russia and China, do to a greater or lesser degree threaten America. The nation-state threat has not disappeared, but for the moment it is eminently containable.

But the nation-state threat invariably remains at the head of the line in Washington’s formulation of foreign and defense policies. While the last three administrations have talked the talk of transnational threats, the walk they have walked—from weapons systems and NATO expansion, to wars, air strikes, and economic sanctions on Iraq—is nation-state centric. This reality is very marked in regard to al-Qaeda and its threat to use weapons of mass destruction inside the United States. As noted, bin Laden made this threat before 9/11, and the U.S. Intelligence Community has consistently told the Executive Branch that in 1992 al-Qaeda formed a special unit—staffed by engineers, technicians, and hard scientists—to try to build, steal, or purchase such weapons. Indeed, the U.S. government held first-hand reporting from an individual who had participated in a failed al-Qaeda attempt to purchase uranium. Then after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan U.S. personnel recovered documents showing that al-Qaeda’s deputy chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been running two programs to develop chemical weapons, each of which was compartmented from the other and proceeding on different paths. Finally in May 2003 al-Qaeda secured a treatise from an important Saudi Islamic scholar that sanctioned the use of nuclear weapons in the United States and set the upper limit of religiously permissible American casualties at ten million.
²⁴
Americans can take minor comfort, I suppose, in the fact that bin Laden must go back to the clerics and win their approval if he plans to kill more than ten million Americans. They should take no comfort, however, from the fact that the Saudi authorities “persuaded” the cleric to recant the approval expressed in his treatise. Such recantations are produced by Riyadh and other Arab regimes simply to deceive Western governments and publics. Few Muslims, radical or otherwise, put stock in such reversals because their prevailing and probably accurate assumption is that the individual’s reversal of view was prompted by threats or physical punishment directed at him or his family.

One can agree or disagree about whether al-Qaeda has a nuclear device, as well as about whether it would know how to detonate one, but it is impossible to argue that bin Laden is not pursuing such a weapon or that al-Qaeda would not use it if acquired. And yet that is exactly how the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have behaved. They have not been bashful about warning Americans about this possibility, but twelve years after bin Laden declared war, and six-plus years after 9/11, U.S. borders remain porous to the point of being wide open. Instead of seeing border control as perhaps the single most vital element of homeland security, our governing elite have turned it into a political issue with which to court Hispanic voters, a tactic that can only be seen as meaning our leaders value their offices more than the lives of Americans. More disastrously, sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the three post-1988 U.S. presidential administrations have failed to push to conclusion the U.S.-Russian program to secure the 22,000 nuclear devices that form the former USSR’s nuclear arsenal. The Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, in fact, have cut funding and manpower for the program.
²⁵
Open borders and unaccounted-for nuclear devices are a dangerous combination, especially because al-Qaeda and America’s other enemies have been on the trail of the latter since 1992.

How to explain such criminal negligence? One possible answer is that our leaders are still of a mind that genuine national-security threats come only from nation-states. But that seems unlikely given that post–Cold War Democratic and Republican administrations have specialized in undermining U.S. national security by ludicrous actions or inactions toward nation-states: not pushing Russia to secure its nuclear weapons; allowing Saudi Arabia to continue to hold the energy hammer over the head of the U.S. economy; and encouraging China to hold a percentage of U.S. debt that could be used as a kind of WMD in its own right. Unable or unwilling to recognize the threat posed by al-Qaeda and other transnational threats, and actively disinvesting in U.S. security by surrendering strategic advantages to ill-disposed nation-states, perhaps the best explanation is simple incompetence and a dearth of common sense.

Just-War Theorists:
Like antinationalist organizations and soft-power advocates, the just-war theorists flourished under the umbrella of U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces and have grown livelier and more dangerous to U.S. national security since the end of the Cold War. Tracing their roots back to Saint Augustine, the just-war theorists have become ever more strident in their rhetoric and ever more influential with their doctrines, especially that of proportional and discriminate response—a theory that usually leaves America in an ineffective, tit-for-tat military response mode against its enemies.
²⁶

Like other antinationalist groups, the just-war theorists were abetted by U.S. and Western political leaders during the Cold War and have become even more popular with those political leaders since 1991. Indeed, the influence of the just-war theorists has increased in direct proportion to the downturn in the quality of political leadership that the West has experienced since the end of the Reagan-Thatcher era. The moral cowardice that is rife among today’s Western leaders makes them eager to use just-war doctrine and its totem of proportional response to avoid the popular opprobrium inherent in the effective use of military power. Today weak and ineffective military responses to attacks on or threats to the United States are not mistakes; they are rather evidence that elected leaders and too many U.S. strategists and generals have listened to the just-war theorists and are conducting war in a “civilized” manner.

Hogwash. The antinational and antihumanity triumph of the just-war theorists can be seen in the dozen half-fought, waiting-to-be-resumed wars that litter the world. Proportional and discriminate responses are the recipe for only one sure thing: wars that are never finished and enemies who always have the time and calm in which to regroup, reequip, and fight another day. From Haiti to the Balkans, and from Somalia to Afghanistan, proportional response has left America’s enemies intact and biding their time for another round. Half a millennium ago the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli reminded his readers that a nation cannot use patience and goodness to subdue enemies; it must exact vengeance through punitive actions that annihilate present enemies and make their successors think twice before pursuing attacks that risk the same response.
²⁷
Perhaps more pertinent words for Americans, though harsher sounding, are those of the Civil War era’s General Philip H. Sheridan. “The main thing in true strategy is simply this,” Sheridan wrote in his memoirs. “First deal as hard blows at the enemy’s soldiers as possible, and then cause so much suffering to the inhabitants of a country that they will long for peace and press their government to make it. Nothing should be left to the people but eyes to lament the war.” Al-Qaeda and its allies, of course, do not govern or possess countries, so the populations among which they live and hide will have to be punished until they will no longer allow the Islamists to base among them.
²⁸

The period between 1996 and 2001 demonstrated in detail how damaging the doctrine of proportional response was to U.S. interests, and how it simultaneously allowed our Islamist enemies to not only survive but also to proliferate, to train, and to believe as an article of faith that America would never use its military power effectively. We already have seen how both President George H. W. Bush and President Clinton fretted about what the world would think if they used the military power that Americans have paid for to protect their country. That thought process again carried the day in the summer of 1998. On August 7, 1998, al-Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in attacks that occurred less than ten minutes apart. Several hundred people were killed, and more than five thousand were wounded.

In response, President Clinton ordered the U.S. military to prepare cruise-missile attacks on al-Qaeda-related training facilities near Khowst, in southeastern Afghanistan, and against a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan. Intelligence reporting showed that the latter was handling precursor materials for chemical weapons, and the plant appeared to be part of the Sudanese government’s effort to develop weapons of mass destruction. On August 20, 1998, the U.S. military launched about one hundred cruise missiles at the two targets. Both attacks occurred after dark when few people would be in the vicinity. The end result was (as in the 1993 attack on Iraq’s intelligence headquarters) few enemy casualties and a lot of broken bricks and concrete. The U.S. military had begun using million-dollar-a-copy missiles to do the work of day laborers armed with thirty-dollar sledgehammers.

The bigger of the two raids was focused on the Khowst training facilities because several intelligence sources reported that bin Laden was going to meet other senior mujahedin leaders there on August 20, 1998. As it turned out, according to Abu Jandal, the al-Qaeda chief’s former bodyguard, bin Laden decided at the last minute to skip the trip to Khowst and go to Kabul instead.
²⁹
Interestingly, even if bin Laden had been there, it would have taken a good deal of luck to kill him. The camp facilities at Khowst are fairly extensive and cover a substantial piece of ground. So the best chance we had of killing bin Laden was to pinpoint the main mosque that would be used for the evening prayers; wherever he and the other mujhaedin chiefs were in the Khowst complex, they were (given what we knew about their behavior) very likely to gather at the mosque to pray. The White House, however, did not order the missile strike to occur at evening prayer time but rather several hours afterward.
³⁰
Why? Because even if it meant severely degrading the chances of killing the man who a fortnight earlier had caused nearly six thousand casualties in east Africa, U.S. leaders thought it was more important to avoid offending the Muslim world (and, of course, Europe’s elites) than to use the disproportionate force that might have ensured the death of bin Laden, even at the cost of hundreds of other Islamist fighters at prayer, many of whom surely had not been involved in the embassy bombings. The application of the just-war theorists’ concept of “proportionate response,” in short, almost certainly would have spared bin Laden’s life had he been at Khowst that night, leaving him alive to plan—as he did—the attacks on the USS
Cole,
New York, and Washington.

Ahistorical Thinking:
The Cold War, I think, was a historical anomaly; in many ways, it was a fifty-year, out-of-the-box experience that absolutely required out-of-the-box thinking. For the first time in human history, national leaders had the ability to kill many tens of millions of people over the course of twenty-four hours, while simultaneously making large swaths of the world uninhabitable for generations if not centuries. Indeed, these leaders theoretically held in their hands the potential for ending human life on earth. The task of managing this just-around-the-corner Armageddon had no precedent; U.S. leaders learned as they went, and all praise and honor is due to them for their success. But in many ways these leaders enjoyed a luxury that their predecessors and successors did not and do not enjoy. The leaders of the Cold War era worked in an environment where the balance of contending forces, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, and the development and deployment of multiple technologies to provide early warning more or less deleted unexpected threats, surprise attacks, and the need to stage preemptive attacks from their list of things to lose sleep over in regard to other nation-states.

What should have struck the Cold War’s elected leaders, policymakers, bureaucrats, and generals was that they were living through an ahistorical era. In few periods of modern history were the chances lower of surprise attack and total war between great powers. These individuals should have reveled in the great good luck they enjoyed in serving America during Pax Atomica, but they should have likewise been consistently reminding themselves that their luck might someday run out. More important, they should have been mentoring their successors, to the point of hectoring, that history suggested that such good fortune could not last forever and that the much more unpredictable pre–Pax Atomica world would someday return and with it the requisite resumption of thinking inside the historical box. Our leaders did not perform this reality check on themselves; nor apparently did they press it upon their subordinates. The result in the 1996–9/11 period was that history resumed while the U.S. governing elite continued to think about and perceive the world as if the out-of-the-box Cold War era were still moving along in full swing. “The problem…that unpleasantly confronts us here at the beginning of the 21
^st
century,” Georgetown University scholar Joshua Mitchell has argued, is that the Cold War’s end removed “the temporary masking of those darker aspirations in the human heart: order, honor, and tribal affiliation…The people of the Middle East know nothing of the victory of freedom and the end of history. That myth is ours, not theirs.”
³¹