Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (8 page)

One of the senior U.S. government officials who seemed to intuitively grasp this reality was Richard A. Clarke, then the National Security Council’s chief for transnational issues. In the spring of 1995, I headed the unit at CIA headquarters that was responsible for managing worldwide operations against Sunni militants, and the pursuit and capture of Yusuf and his associates fell under that unit’s mandate. After Yusuf’s arrest in Peshawar by U.S. and Pakistani officials, I briefed Mr. Clarke several times on the operation and on the hard-copy and electronic materials that were confiscated from Yusuf and his subordinates in Manila, Bangkok, and Peshawar. One of the most troubling discoveries made during the examination of a computer seized from Yusuf’s apartment in Manila was a file that contained a detailed plan (Yusuf had code-named the plan “Bojinka”) to down a dozen or so U.S. commercial airliners in midflight over the Pacific Ocean. The planes were to be brought down by the detonation of liquid-explosive bombs brought onto them at their points of origin by Yusuf’s operatives. The explosives and the necessary electrical components would be concealed in carry-on luggage as innocuous-looking items—contact-lens-solution bottles, compact disk players, wristwatches, etc. During the first leg of the flight, the attacker would assemble the bomb, position it in the cabin, set the timer to detonate on the aircraft’s second leg over the Pacific, and then deplane. The Bojinka attacks were not to be suicide operations.

U.S. government forensics specialists examined the formula for the liquid explosive, as well as the schematic for the electric-detonating system, and concluded that the bomb would have worked. Then, after interrogations of Yusuf and his colleagues, we learned that the bomb had already been used once. Yusuf himself had boarded a Japanese airliner in Manila that was flying to Sebu, in the Philippines, and then on to Tokyo. He successfully smuggled the components on board in Manila, assembled and set the bomb on the flight’s first leg, and deplaned in Sebu. The bomb detonated over the Pacific, killing one Japanese national. Yusuf later said that he used only a small amount of explosives on this trial run because there were not enough Americans on board to justify destroying the aircraft.
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When briefing Mr. Clarke on this information, it was clear that he “got it” immediately. Men like Yusuf, he said, could not be deterred. As important, Mr. Clarke ruminated that if Yusuf been successful in bringing down the World Trade Center towers and/or a dozen U.S. airliners flying Pacific routes, the United States—by that time the world’s only superpower—would have suffered a massive, costly, and humiliating defeat. Worse, Washington would have had absolutely nothing against which to militarily respond. The superpower and its massive military machine would have been seen looking at the ruins, quivering with rage, pressed by a population eager for revenge, and yet impotent to respond in any meaningful way. Mr. Clarke clearly saw what many CIA counterterrorism officers saw: Yusuf had irrevocably ended the comfortable era of Cold War deterrence by proving it irrelevant to at least the transnational threat posed by Islamist militants. Mr. Clarke’s effectiveness in conveying to the Oval Office this vital, Yusuf-taught lesson about a new kind of national-security threat demanding preemption is unclear. I do know though that from the spring of 1995 until I temporarily left the CIA’s bin Laden operations, Mr. Clarke and his superiors turned down every opportunity provided by the U.S. clandestine service to conduct a preemptive covert-action or military attack against bin Laden. But while the Clinton administration was fatally slow on the pickup, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda learned Professor Yusuf’s lesson by heart.

The other event that would have lasting impact on the perceptions of America’s Islamist foes involved the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s (IIS) reliably clumsy and ham-fisted attempt to kill former president George H.W. Bush during his visit to Kuwait in February 1993. The attack was preempted by Kuwaiti security officials, who initially tried to hide their success for fear that its publication would cause the visit’s cancellation. In this judgment, the Kuwaitis clearly were ignorant of the enormous personal courage of that fine gentleman.

After the CIA acquired the information from the Kuwaitis about the disrupted attack, an intense multiweek and multiagency effort ensued to prove what was obvious before the investigation began: Saddam had ordered his security service to murder Mr. Bush. By reason of my position at the time, I and several other CIA officers—analysts, lawyers, and operations officers—worked with FBI and Department of Justice (DoJ) officials to prepare a paper for the National Security Council and President Clinton assessing whether Iraq was culpable for the attempted assassination. This was a testy and at times acrimonious process. The CIA knew who conducted the attack: the human intelligence and physical evidence were complete and the forensic evaluation was conclusive. The FBI and DoJ officials, however, were looking for court-quality evidence and were decidedly gun-shy about vouching for the validity of information acquired by the clandestine service and the Kuwaitis. At one point, I recall, a very senior FBI official threw his pen across the conference table at the CIA team out of frustration over the fact that CIA reporting contained so much detail, some of which might be exculpatory if used in a courtroom situation. As he launched the pen, he barked something like “if one of my officers ever wrote down that much of what a source told him, he would find himself packed off to the FBI office in Juneau.” Refraining from firing a return volley of Paper Mates, we simply told our FBI counterpart that CIA officers are trained to write down exactly what their assets tell them, whether or not U.S. judges, law enforcement officials, or policymakers want to hear it.
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We eventually put together a paper that brought us all the way back to where we began—Saddam had ordered the assassination attempt. The NSC and President Clinton accepted the paper’s conclusion and ordered the U.S. military to prepare a retaliatory cruise-missile attack on IIS headquarters in Baghdad. While preparations for the raid were ongoing, I was assigned the task of traveling to New York to brief the then-U.S. ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright on the paper’s conclusions, as well as to explain the nature and quality of the evidence that supported them. The goal was to prepare Ambassador Albright to present UN members with an explanation and justification for the cruise-missile strike we were about to launch on Iraq. The briefing did not begin until almost midnight on a Saturday evening in the ambassador’s residence, but Ms. Albright proved to be a very quick study and asked pointed questions; indeed, she struck me as the sharpest, toughest, and most aggressive individual I had so far encountered in the Executive Branch while dealing with this issue. This was, of course, before Ms. Albright’s champagne-glass-clinking days with Kim Jong Il. In any event, the next day Ambassador Albright delivered an excellent briefing to the assembled UN grandees and received virtually no pushback from anyone.

When I returned to CIA headquarters the next morning, I learned that the White House had launched the cruise-missile strike against Saddam’s intelligence headquarters in the middle of the night so as to limit casualties.
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Thus the hard and contentious work of the U.S. Intelligence Community was completely wasted. Saddam’s regime had tried to murder a former American president, and the mightiest military power the earth had ever seen responded by breaking some cheap Iraqi concrete and cinder-block and killing a few members of the janitorial staff and a very unlucky female Iraqi poet who lived nearby. What was the point? Well, here was another instance where the nuancers and “ballet of international politics” sermonizers—this lot from the Democratic Party’s ranks—easily persuaded themselves that protecting Americans and U.S. interests was not really their top priority. President Clinton and his advisers pulled their punch because they did not want to upset Moscow, which still had a strong relationship with Iraq; they did not want to be seen to deliver a militarily disproportionate response to what, after all, had been an unsuccessful attempt on Mr. Bush’s life, if we did so, they fretted, the Europeans and Muslims would be angry with them; and they reliably dragged out that traditional bipartisan Executive Branch excuse for moral cowardice and not protecting Americans—they wanted to limit collateral damage. In this case, of course, the last justification was absurd because the timing of the attack ensured that only innocent Iraqis sweeping floors, cleaning toilets, and composing verse would be killed.

All these justifications amounted to just one thing—pure hooey. The sum of this useless raid on IIS headquarters totaled one probable and one definite loss for U.S. security and the safety of Americans. The probable loss: Saddam’s grip on power might have been undermined. It depended in large measure on the strength and loyalty of his intelligence service, a brutal, murderous, and effective internal-security service if there ever was one. Had the U.S. military been ordered to strike the intelligence headquarters in Baghdad in the late morning of a workday, there is every chance that many hundreds of Iraq’s intelligence officers, including some of the service’s senior leaders, would have been killed. In thereby tearing a large human chunk out of the Iraqi service (and breaking up some concrete to boot), we would have denigrated the capabilities and manpower of one of the main instruments Saddam relied on to maintain power. Such an eminently positive and valuable slaughter would have merited Machiavelli’s praise for well-used cruelty
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and might have had the added benefit of causing Iraqi intelligence officers to begin thinking about whether Saddam was worth keeping around if his personal desire for revenge against former president Bush earned such a retaliatory massacre. While a coup probably was too much to expect, CIA operators surely would have found a few candidates for recruitment as penetrations of Saddam’s regime among IIS officers worried about the possibility of another surprise visit by a cruise missile on their headquarters.
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In wartime, as a general rule, the steady application of intense violence produces increased opportunities for the collection of high-quality intelligence.
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In the definite-loss category, our Islamist enemies went to school on this feckless, noncasualty-causing U.S. military raid. Al-Qaeda and its allies live in a police state–dominated culture whose lingua franca is the sturdy and remorseless application of power. While we in the West detest that reality because it does not mesh with our fantasy that all cultures and societies have equal value, the routine, arbitrary, and excessive use of force is a fact of everyday life for Muslims who live under the tyrannies that America supports and that govern much of the Islamic world. Thus what our foes saw was that Saddam Hussein had tried to kill the former U.S. president, in a manner that made little or no effort to hide Iraq’s hand. Indeed, Saddam expected the attack to succeed and wanted the world to know that he was responsible for exacting revenge against his persecutor. In response, the Clinton administration loudly rattled the American saber and reduced a mass of cinder-blocks and concrete to gravel. The lesson drawn by al-Qaeda was that the U.S. response to an attack was liable to be wordy but weak. The nuancers had again triumphed, and Richard Clarke later wrote that the cruise missile sent a message to Saddam that brought cessation of Iraqi terrorist attacks on U.S. interests. The reality is that there was no sustained Iraqi terrorist campaign against the United States before the cruise-missile strike, and Mr. Clarke’s claim is just part of his book-length apologia for the ineffective Clinton national-security team of which he was a key member.
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When ineffective U.S. military attacks are used to “send messages” to our Muslim and Islamist enemies, a message is indeed delivered. Unfortunately, the message delivered causes mirth, not trepidation. The message read by the Islamists is: “The Americans are stupid, they have the strongest military in history and are afraid or embarrassed to use it; we can, with prudence, do what we want.” That is the message delivered by Washington’s military half-measures, and it is heard by all but those in the White House who are too busy congratulating themselves for successfully modulating the use of violence so as not to disrupt the sophisticated ballet of international politics.

Summing Up, 1973–96: Gulliver Recklessly Binds Himself

In the years between 1973 and 1996, then, U.S. leaders—the elected and unelected of both parties and their senior civil servants—made a number of decisions that severely limited America’s foreign policy options and military credibility by the time the 9/11 attacks occurred. The pattern of these decisions also encouraged al-Qaeda and other Islamists to strongly suspect that Washington would not respond with all the power at its command no matter what sort of attack was launched against the United States.

It would be foolish of course to argue that U.S. policymakers should have made none of the decisions discussed above in anticipation of the emergence of a foe like Osama bin Laden. Many things can and should be demanded of policymakers, but 20/20 foresight is not one of them. There was no way to anticipate the rise of a unique and history-altering figure like bin Laden, although the path he trod to that emergence was clear long before U.S. policymakers accepted the seriousness of the developments they were watching. Two remarkable points about the decisions, however, must cause one to wonder whether the foregoing decisions made any kind of common sense for the national-security interests of the United States and its citizens.

The decisions that bound America to very public, bipartisan, and unquestioning support for anti-Arab Israel, to a less public but just as firm support for the anti-Israeli Arab police states, and to our enduring acquiescence in allowing the latter to hold the life-and-death energy lever over the U.S. economy surely must be open to question solely on the basis of common sense, without any reference whatsoever to bin Laden and the Islamist threat. By unstintingly supporting both sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict U.S. policymakers consciously gave a set of potentially lethal hostages to fortune that were and are almost entirely beyond U.S. control. One-sided support for Israel in the conflict not only increasingly alienated the Muslim world but especially alienated Saudi Arabia, whose king’s status as the Protector of the Two Holy Mosques gives the kingdom at least symbolic leadership in the Arab war against Israel. Saudi Arabia, in turn, was and is the world’s key oil producer and as such constantly keeps at least a theoretical pistol trained on the head of the U.S. economy.