Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (13 page)

Proof of this failure can be found most eloquently in the words of the cochairmen of the 9/11 Commission and the NSC’s counterterrorism chief under President Clinton and George W. Bush, Messrs. Lee Hamilton, Thomas Kean, and Richard Clarke. Each of these gentleman led off his post-9/11 evaluation of what went wrong before al-Qaeda’s attacks by claiming that U.S. policymakers, politicians, generals, and senior intelligence officers had suffered a “failure of imagination” about what al-Qaeda and Islamist militants intended to do to the United States. There was, this troika (and many other graybeards) claimed, not enough out-of-the-box thinking about the Islamist threat to America.
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These assertions irrefutably prove that even after 9/11 these gentlemen all remained firmly rooted in the historically anomalous, outside-the-box, Cold War experience. The years from 1996 to 9/11 were chock-a-block with evidence that history had resumed with great gusto. Granted, the reality of a powerful, transnational entity like al-Qaeda took some getting used to, but its attributes were easy to learn, and the fact that the blessed peace and predictable world of the MAD era was over should have shocked U.S. leaders down to their shoes. Al-Qaeda declared war twice, attacked U.S. targets a half-dozen times, and regularly and publicly described the kind of increasingly lethal wringer it intended to put the United States through until Washington changed its foreign policies toward the Muslim world. The failure of the U.S. governing elite to take heed of these things and unleash U.S. forces to wipe out their authors root and branch is the best possible proof that they collectively failed to imagine that the world could ever leave Pax Atomica behind. Warned repeatedly by working-level military, intelligence, and State Department officials that the al-Qaeda threat was genuine, imminent, and potentially devastating, the governing generation, of which Hamilton, Kean, and Clarke are deservedly distinguished members, continued to think in the anomalous, patient, outside-the-box, nonpreemptive, worry-about-European-opinion manner—and three thousand Americans died on 9/11. They were still seeking to manage rather than eliminate the threats to America, believed that there was always enough time to handle problems at our own pace, and counted the likelihood of unexpected threats and surprise attacks as minimal and acceptable. None seemed to realize that with the demise of the ahistorical Pax Atomica, history had resumed, and with that resumption came those troubling things with which the statesmen of centuries past had had to contend—limited time in which to make life-and-death decisions, the rapid and unexpected emergence of smart, flexible, and adaptable enemies, and the likelihood of surprise attack. What Messrs. Kean, Hamilton, and Clarke and so many others failed to see after 1991 was that U.S. national security required a return to the inside-the-box historical thinking that is pertinent to the unpredictable and often uncontainable threats that have dominated human history on either side of the Cold War.

Exiles, Expatriates, and Ethnic Experts:
For most of its history, the United States has benefited from the advice and assistance of individuals who voluntarily came from abroad to help us wage war or who were themselves exiled from the country or countries at which we were at war. At America’s birth, Casimir Pulaski and Baron von Steuben came from Europe to train and lead Washington’s soldiers in our revolutionary war against Britain; Thomas Paine’s pamphlet
Common Sense
inspired Americans to seek independence and reminds us today how much of our independence we have surrendered to foreigners. In the 1930s Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and many other European scientists came to America and helped develop the atomic bombs that America so effectively used to smash Imperial Japan into final defeat. During the Cold War Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and other external and internal exiles of the Soviet Empire bravely spoke the truth about a monumentally criminal system and helped the West to understand the threat and hold on until Ronald Reagan arrived and brought victory. All of these individuals helped America prevail against its enemies, and they did so in the name of liberty and freedom, in a common effort to defeat tyrannies that threatened the United States.

In our war against Islamist militancy, however, more exiles, expatriates, and ethnic experts than ever before are helping less than any of their predecessors. Why? The most important reason for this reversal, I think, is that the exiles we deal with today are unrepresentative of the great mass of Muslims across the Islamic world. They have been displaced by revolutions or hounded by security services, were ineffectual in insurgencies, or were philosophically so far out of touch with their countrymen that they chose to emigrate. These men and women talk the talk of freedom but at bottom want the United States to do something that they themselves cannot do. And that phrasing is important because from Ahmed Chalabi to Fareed Zakaria to Zalmay Khalilzad to the late Shah of Iran’s son to Walid Phares, the current roster of these types of experts have argued that America should act to install secular democracies in Muslim lands—without a shred of evidence that such an action would be welcomed by anyone except the experts and their Westernized friends. Indeed, the distinguishing characteristic of the current crew of such advisers is that they have been dead wrong in almost all of the recommendations for policy that they have made to the U.S. governing elite. They seem, moreover, ashamed and embarrassed by the reality that the great bulk of their brethern want no truck with secularism, and they project their own ambitions for their homelands as achievable foreign policy goals for the United States. As Abdel Bari Atwan, editor in chief of
Al-Quds Al-Arabi,
has written, the George W. Bush administration “listened to Arabs or so-called Arab ‘experts’ who gave it advice and studies to fit its anti-Arab and anti-Muslim strategy and not the advice or studies that reflected reality.”
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Complexity:
The Cold War’s edge-of-Armageddon nuclear standoff created an environment in which U.S. leaders of all kinds—political, military, academic, and media—were able to create in their minds a world of stunning complexity, one that was far more complex than the reality that existed. Because Mutually Assured Destruction protected Americans against everything save the ultimate catastrophe (the chance of which the same doctrine likewise reduced to near zero), U.S. leaders lost track of the only organizing principle that is essential for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy: protect Americans, their liberties, and independence; maintain a domestic environment that cultivates liberty and equality of opportunity; and let no domestic interests or foreign countries stand as an obstacle to those objectives. This view of what the U.S. government should be about is singular, not simplistic; it simply follows George Washington’s sage advice, “We ought not to convert trifling difficulties into insuperable obstacles.”
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It would encourage our governing elite to always use a clear and inflexible priority when formulating national-security policy by simply asking and answering the question: “Where do America’s interests lie in this or that issue?” This query automatically would put a brake on the enduring Cold War propensity to make the setting of national-security policy unnecessarily difficult and complex. When this Cold War leftover predominates, the American people see—and some unreflectively come to share—a number of odd and self-defeating ideas. For example, U.S. leaders, even in wartime, equate the life of an American with that of a foreigner, even an enemy and his supporters; the U.S. response to attacks on American citizens and interests becomes proportionate, leaving the enemy intact and ready to kill again; and the U.S. government goes to war not against peoples, groups, or countries but against individuals like Milosevic, Saddam, bin Laden, and Qaddafi. This is the nuanced, international-ballet-of-politics approach to U.S. foreign policy. Since 1991 the men and women who practice this sort of diplomacy have produced policies that have consistently yielded dead Americans, undefeated U.S. enemies, and new crops of foes for the United States. These individuals are the enemies of common sense and the security of Americans that David Brooks identified as “bourgeoisophobes.”

In the period between 1996 and 2001, the Clinton administration’s nuanced-ballet-of-politics crowd was an example par excellence of Brooks’s “bourgeoisophobes” in their approach to foreign policy: they used the idea of the horrendously complex international political arena as a shield behind which to hide their moral cowardice. On the snowy Sunday before Christmas in 1998, for example, I accompanied Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence General John Gordon (USAF) to the White House operations center where Mr. Tenet was to present to the NSC’s Counterterrorism Steering Group (NSC/CSG) a chance to kill Osama bin Laden in Khandahar, Afghanistan. The method of attack would be military, using the cruise missiles on U.S. submarines then on station in the Indian Ocean. CIA officers and their assets on the ground had located the building and the room in which bin Laden was to spend the night, and Tenet was to describe this information, detail the manner in which it was acquired, and (as he told us before we left CIA headquarters) remind his listeners, once again, that the intelligence was not likely to become any better or more reliable than that which we had at the moment. Tenet went into the meeting alone, leaving General Gordon and myself to wait and watch the football game unfolding on the operations center’s television sets.

Mr. Tenet came out of the room after about an hour and, saying little, signaled it was time to return to CIA headquarters. Riding back through the snow on the George Washington Parkway, Tenet said that the administration had decided not to attempt to kill bin Laden. The reason? The house in which bin Laden was staying the night was located in the proximity of a mosque, and the White House did not want to take the chance of “offending opinion in the Muslim world” by shooting and having some shrapnel from the attack hit, mar, or destroy the mosque and thereby cause a violent response in the Muslim world that would endanger Americans overseas. No, the NSC was not worried about wounding or killing innocent worshippers at the mosque; the attack, after all, would have occurred in the middle of the night. What they had worried themselves into paralysis over was the potential that some stone in the mosque might get scraped or broken up, thereby making more Muslims hate us and perhaps kill U.S. tourists.
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Well, truth to tell, by December 1998 Muslims could not have hated U.S. actions much more than they already did, and the impact of an ephemeral event like damaging a mosque’s structure with shrapnel would have been negligible. Polls by Gallup, Zogby, the Pew Trust, and the BBC were then showing eighty-plus percent majorities in many Muslim countries hating the same U.S. foreign policies that bin Laden had identified and condemned as attacks on Islam. In addition, the administration’s decision again demonstrated its papable ignorance of the Islamic world; with a few major exceptions—the mosques in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, for example—Sunnis do not put nearly as much value on structures as do Christians and Shias. Indeed for many Sunnis treating mosques as shrines smacks of the idol worship of polytheism.
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Thus Washington’s reason for not killing bin Laden on that snowy Sabbath does not hold water and was at base stupid—and the NSC/CSG members certainly knew that. They simply were grasping at straws to find a justification not to shoot to protect Americans and—if one was cynical—so as not to disturb their plans for the coming Christmas season.

Even more questionable was their other reason for not shooting: that enraged Muslims might take to the streets and kill Americans or other Westerners. Now, here we had a Democratic administration—those paragons of antiracism and champions of multiculturalism—assigning to Muslims a kind of genetic madness that would cause them to rise up en masse and mindlessly slaughter non-Muslims left, right, and center if a mosque in Khandahar was damaged by shrapnel. Could the CSG members really see headlines in their minds that read “Thousands of Westerners Slain by Muslims Enraged by Scratched Stone!” If they could, they were racists of the worst sort.

No, neither stupidity nor racism is the likeliest answer to why Washington did not try to kill bin Laden on that Sunday. Part of the answer lies simply in our elites’ eagerness to make things vastly more complicated than they are. Yes, Muslims might be upset about an attack on bin Laden in a Muslim country. Yes, Pakistan might yelp if U.S. missiles flew over its territory with little or no notice. Yes, we might not kill bin Laden and some innocents might be killed in the raid. And yes, the Pavlovian European political-and-media elites would go into a knee-jerk, well-lathered anger over the irresponsible gun-slinging American cowboys. All of these issues surely weighed on the minds of the CSG members that Sunday and led to their paralysis, but only because they did not put U.S. interests first, work through the problem from that starting point, and then recognizing the likely downsides, ask the right question—“So what?” What were all those angry folks going to do in response to a U.S. military action meant to protect Americans? Well, they surely would intensify the scurrilous epithets they routinely throw at the United States, but they were not going to invade Alabama, blockade our ports, or reject the military protection and economic aid that U.S. taxpayers provide. All of them together could do nothing more than shout and pout. So who cared? The fillip to U.S. national security provided by a dead bin Laden far outweighed any offense the whiners could have imposed on our ears. And silently and smugly, government leaders from Paris to Riyadh and from Islamabad to Kuala Lumpur would have rejoiced over the elimination of Osama bin Laden and the fact that the Americans took the heat and they did not have to take action themselves.