Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (9 page)

These two policy decisions allied us with the theocracies in Israel and Saudi Arabia—surely a vastly ironic situation for the secular American republic and its taxpayers, who are in effect forced to pay to support the regimes of religions to which almost none of them belong. The policies have made us responsible for the survival of two mortal enemies, one of which has developed a large undocumented, unmeasured, and uninspected arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the other of which could bring the U.S. economy and military to a grinding halt in less than a year by closing the oil spigot.
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Both likewise know that they can play havoc with U.S. domestic politics, Israel via its powerful lobby, covert political action, and propaganda machine, and Riyadh via its own potent lobby, ability to hike prices at the pump, and holding of vast amounts of U.S. government securities. Because each holds a whip-hand over all presidential administrations, Israel feels free to do as it pleases vis-à-vis Palestine, and Saudi Arabia makes little effort to disguise the massively expensive and successful campaign it is running to spread a particularly virulent anti-American and anti-Western form of Islam worldwide, nowhere more aggressively than in the United States.

In addition, both of these de facto alliances traduce much of what the Founders intended America to stand for. America has been bound to a self-professed “Jewish state” and equally to self-professed “Islamic states,” neither of which is open to the kind of freedom the Founders envisioned, not even to the Protestant Christianity that so thoroughly informs America’s constitution, and the only faith on which the Founders believed the republic could endure. “Our Constitution,” John Adams wrote in October 1798, in reference to that Protestant Christianity, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
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Washington’s resolute, bipartisan maintenance of these alliances, with countries renowned for political intolerance, religious bigotry, and studied duplicity, has done more than anything else to undercut the Muslim world’s perception of America as a model for fair-minded and tolerant self-government. Our willing, abject, and seemingly permanent surrender to a dependence on foreigners for the energy needed to keep our economy functioning, moreover, would have appalled the Founders, who prized the maintenance of foreign-policy options and complete American independence on the decision of peace or war. On energy, quite simply, Washington has voluntarily ceded control over our economic destiny to barely disguised enemies, and committed the nation to war in their defense if energy supplies are threatened.

The other set of decisions saw the U.S. government steadily develop the habit of pulling its punch whenever it was forced to formulate a military response to an attack on U.S. interests and citizens. These decisions likewise cannot be blamed on the failure to envision the emergence of militant Islam. But our now firmly ingrained reluctance—even fear—to respond with overwhelming force when attacked provided those who later formed al-Qaeda and its allies the loud-and-clear lesson that they had little to fear from U.S. military retaliation. Long before 9/11, the Islamists had pegged the United States as a super-talker rhetorically and as a super-diddler militarily.

Taken together, these two sets of decisions framed the conclusion in the minds of Osama bin Laden and our other Islamist foes that America is in a box of its own making, from which it will be hard put to extricate itself. Bin Laden and other Islamists believe that because of the American public’s unwarranted emotional guilt over the Holocaust, the wealth and resultant political influence of pro-Israeli figures and organizations in U.S. domestic politics, and Israel’s superb covert action inside the United States—which has created a situation where Americans damn other Americans for questioning the U.S.-Israel relationship and try to limit their willingness to speak out by slinging the anti-Semite slur—U.S. foreign policy is all but welded to support Israel without limit. Bin Laden and his like were and are confident that, of all the U.S. policies they could use as foils, America’s ties to Israel was among the most difficult for Washington to change or even to recognize as being in need of change.

Bin Laden also has come to count on the durability of Washington’s path-of-least-resistance willingness to see its economy, and those of its allies, stay dependent on oil produced on the Arabian Peninsula. This, in turn, binds Washington to its longstanding policy of supporting tyrannical governments in Saudi Arabia, elsewhere on the peninsula, and across the Muslim world, thereby discrediting Western calls for democracy for Muslims and creating ever more discontent toward America and the West among Islamic peoples who believe that U.S. support for their governments is an endorsement of the tyranny and repression imposed on them.

Believing that America has locked itself into nearly irreversible policies—ones that are simple to compellingly advertise as anti-Islamic—the icing on the cake for the Islamists is America’s repeated failure to annihilate enemies when opportunities arise. In the period between bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war and the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden, his lieutenants, and their allies experienced on a first-hand basis further validation of these conclusions via a series of U.S. actions and nonactions that seemed to prove that Washington’s worldview was still dominated by a Cold War mindset that worked well against nation-state opponents but has yielded almost no positive results against transnational threats such as those posed by the Islamists.

How many times have Americans heard the leaders of political parties, as well as senior bureaucrats, pundits, generals, and academics, mimic Mr. Lincoln by solemnly proclaiming that “the Cold War is over,” that the “long nuclear nightmare has ended,” and that the post–Cold War world requires “new thinking” or (that most detestable, incorrect, and repellent of catch-phrases) “thinking outside the box.” In all likelihood, the endless repetition of these stock cant phrases is about the only thing that has outpaced the long-ignored training camps’ production of professional Islamist insurgents and terrorists. The “Cold War is over” phrases and the mujahedin, however, do have at least one thing in common: they both have the potential to defeat the United States.

I must admit up front that I am neither an expert on the Cold War nor one of those CIA officers who had the honor to spend his career in the ultimately successful, Ronald Reagan–capped effort to destroy the Soviet Union. Indeed, I made a decision early in my career to try to avoid any assignments that primarily focused on either Israel or the Soviet Union, both of which were intertwined in the general ambit of Cold War issues when I joined the Agency in 1982. I avoided Israel because the U.S. relationship with that state was clearly and inexorably drawing America into a religious war—Muslim versus Jew—in which we had no plausible interest and to which there was no imaginable solution. “Unlike most wars,” the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams wrote in summing up this dark reality in 2000, “which are rooted in territorial disputes, the unrest in the Middle East is, at bottom, a religious struggle. For either side—Jewish or Muslim—to compromise would be to commit suicide on those core values that endows each culture with its unique meaning.”
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I also steered clear of the Israeli account because the pro-Israel orientation of every presidential administration under which I worked was so pervasive that there was no call from or tolerance among policymakers and senior IC bureaucrats for intelligence (reports from the field or formal intelligence assessments) that pointed to the massive, obvious, and deadly handicap Washington’s succoring of Israel posed for U.S. interests in the Islamic world. Whenever such information surfaced, which was frequently, the administration of the day deployed the all-purpose, Cold War–era defense: no matter what the cost, America’s vital national interests demand that we must support Israel because it is an island of democracy in a region threatened by Soviet expansionism. This defense survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, with its champions simply deleting “Soviet” and replacing it with the now fashionable and deliberately misleading term “Islamofascist terrorists.” It is no more true to say that U.S. national security depends on the survival of an Israeli democracy—itself an oxymoronic term—than to say America is threatened only by a small number of Muslims, who are terrorists and criminals, who hate our freedoms, who have nothing to do with religion, and who in no way speak for any significant part of the Islamic world. When analyzed, each argument conduces to lethal nonsense. Israel’s survival is not essential to U.S. security, and the threat America faces from Islamist militancy is huge, growing, and motivated by a faith that perceives itself under attack by U.S. foreign policy, part of which is seen as U.S. subservience to Israel.
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I also tried to avoid working on the Soviet Union because after serving as a CIA analyst for a few years it became apparent that the overall attitude of senior Agency managers was (notwithstanding Reagan’s clearly stated goal of defeating the USSR) that the Soviet Union had a lot of life in it and that the Cold War would be perking along long after all current CIA employees had tottered off into retirement. Like many Americans, I have a fairly short attention span, and I had no intention whatsoever of working on an issue that had been in play for thirty-seven years when I joined the Agency and that all my betters believed would be in full swing on the day I was slipped a gold watch. The closest I came to working on the Soviet Union was to do all I could to help the Afghan mujahedin kill as many Soviet military personnel as possible. I accepted this job in late 1985 because I was weary of working in the Directorate of Intelligence on the stultifying issue of the ballet of Cold War politics in Western Europe—my first and last purely analytic assignment—and because I thought the Soviets deserved to die, and because the Afghans were doing America’s work for us by trying to give them their just deserts. It also was a job that provided a strong suggestion that the federal bureaucracy had a tendency to be “protective” regarding the Soviet Union,
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and that at least some officers working on the USSR tended toward a view that attributed a rough moral equivalency to the two superpowers. In addition, I took the job because working on covert-action wars at the CIA is great fun and brought two other possibilities—infamy if the war went badly, promotion if the war progressed or was won. Because the Afghans won, helping them to kill Russians was definitely a career enhancer and I hope in some very small way helped Reagan’s effort to overcome an Intelligence Community bureaucracy that was largely happy and content with the Cold War status quo.

I say all this in prelude to a discussion of what seems to me to be Cold War leftovers (ways of thinking about and perceiving the world) that continue to this day to plague the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Unless, as Mr. Lincoln said, U.S. leaders disenthrall themselves from this Cold War hangover, they will never formulate a precisely accurate estimate of the threat posed by the Islamist forces led and inspired by bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Again, I claim no Kissinger-or Richard Pipes-like experience or expertise on either Cold War history or the USSR as a political entity, but I can at least claim to be an informed observer of both, and a bit-better-than-average student of America’s steadily worsening confrontation with the Islamic world.

Sense of Time:
After the Soviet Union acquired a nuclear capability and the means of delivering it to the continental United States, the Cold War settled in and, certainly by the mid-1950s, took on the appearance of permanence. Decade after decade the Cold War continued and, aside from an occasional harrowing blip that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war (the Berlin blockade, the Cuban missile crisis, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the tense 1983–84 period), U.S. elected officials and their senior foreign-policy bureaucrats planned policy based on a vision that saw no end to the Cold War. And once the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) kicked in, the Cold War’s nuclear-standoff scenario seemed to be mankind’s earthly destiny.

This reality came to be accepted as the definition of normality, and time moved for politicians and policymakers at a steady and relatively undisturbed pace. To say that the Cold War world was a nine-to-five affair with weekends off for the U.S. politicians, civil servants, and military personnel managing the U.S.-Soviet relationship would be an exaggeration, but it would not be much of one. If, for example, U.S. intelligence found that the Soviets had begun designing a new military aircraft, such information would cause a flurry of activity, debate, staff work, and decision-making. That activity would yield a U.S. program to design a better aircraft that could be fielded in the same time frame as the Soviet plane. The decision was an important one for U.S. security, but the time line for accomplishing its goal was quite a few years in the future. So while the discovery of Soviet intentions was essential, and immediate remedial action was required, most Cold War “emergencies” allowed response times numbered in years and not in months, weeks, days, or hours.

Cold War–era military conflicts also tended to last for years: Vietnam, 1963–75; Afghanistan, 1979–92; and Korea, 1950–today, the last outliving the Cold War itself. Once begun, these conflicts of course needed to be managed and decisions had to be made, but the decisions were intended to calibrate the pace of the ongoing conflict, not to make a final decision where victory or defeat hung in the balance. And decisions about these wars were never taken in the context of having to prevent an imminent attack on U.S. territory. Superpower arms-control negotiations also went on for multiple decades in Geneva, during U.S.-Soviet summits, and at the United Nations, as did the talks pertaining to the Arab-Israeli conflict, each side of which had a superpower supporter. These gab-athons seldom yielded surprises or results, and decisions could be made when the time was right—or not made at all—at these forums; indeed, success was often defined as the continuation of discussions without much eagerness or even hope for a culmination.

Also allowing a steady, close-to-relaxed pace of events was the variety of sophisticated detection systems that American industry and the U.S. military and intelligence services designed and implemented to reduce the chance that U.S. political and bureaucratic leaders would be surprised by an entirely unforeseen threat from the Soviet Union or any other nation-state. From human intelligence to satellite imagery to X-15s to instruments for detecting electronic and chemical emissions, U.S. leaders could be confident that they would know if any sudden change in the Soviet threat required their immediate attention. Thus there was a large element of predictability in the Cold War world that allowed time for thought, study, and measured response, not to mention tennis after work, golf on the weekends, and plans for long summer vacations that rarely if ever had to be scrapped at the last moment. Though always fraught with a slim chance of nuclear catastrophe, and punctuated sporadically by periods of high stress, the Cold War environment for U.S. leaders was mostly calm, civil, and unhurried. Very few and far between were the occasions when life-and-death decisions had to be made on issues laid on the table only hours earlier.

The times and their tenor changed with the 1991 collapse of the USSR and the simultaneous ascendance of the United States to the rank of the world’s greatest power. The military capabilities of other nation-states remained of concern to U.S. policymakers and generals, but none posed a threat even faintly resembling that posed by Moscow in its prime. In some ways, the first few years of unchallenged American dominance resembled what the Harvard historian Charles S. Maier described as the “few blissful years” between the annihilation of Imperial Japan and Hitler’s Germany and Russia’s acquisition of nuclear weaponry.
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The latter obviously ended America’s era of bliss and invulnerability, and Washington took notice, responded accordingly, and the Cold War was on.

In retrospect, it is hard to detect a point at which Washington similarly woke up during the period between the end of the Soviet threat and the attacks of 9/11, though such wake-up calls were loud and frequent. The gradual emergence of a set of transnational threats to U.S. security—terrorism, narcotics trafficking, organized crime, and nuclear proliferation—had been recognized even before the Cold War’s end, but in that era they were the cats and dogs of America’s international concerns, regarded as lethal nuisances not national-security threats. While presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton waxed eloquent between 1991 and 9/11 about the New World Order, the positive benefits accruing to all from the progress of globalization, and the irreversible narrowing of differences between peoples of all creeds, cultures, ethnicities, and colors, the United States military was embarrassed by and then driven from Somalia, the World Trade Center was nearly destroyed, two U.S. military facilities were attacked in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden declared war on America in Islam’s name, two U.S. embassies were simultaneously destroyed in East Africa, bin Laden declared war on the United States for the second time, U.S. interests and citizens at home and abroad were barely saved when al-Qaeda’s millennium-eve plot was foiled, and a billion-dollar U.S. Navy destroyer was nearly sunk in Aden, Yemen. The gap between the glories-of-globalization rhetoric and reality was never bridged in this period: Washington spoke as if the Cold War had been won and no serious threat were on the horizon, and all the while increasing portions of the world’s largest religion were mobilizing to wage or support war against America.

From my perspective, there is no clearer evidence that U.S. policymakers were still operating on Cold War time between 1991 and 2001 than the manner in which they addressed the need to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and destroy his organization. After bin Laden’s summer of 1996 declaration of war on the United States, and even after the clandestine service had definitively established by that year’s end that al-Qaeda had in 1992 established a specific unit to seek weapons of mass destruction,
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the U.S. government’s approach was still characterized by an attitude something akin to: “There is always time to take care of things, and so we can wait until we have better intelligence about the threat.” It was as if Washington were competing with the Soviets in producing a more sophisticated and potent fighter plane, a competition whose outcome could be confidently predicted and whose pace was leisurely. The deadly shortcoming in maintaining this approach after 1991 was that there was no balance of nuclear power vis-à-vis al-Qaeda, no mutually assured destruction if bin Laden’s team acquired and then used a purchased, fabricated, or stolen nuclear device inside the United States.
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Our failure to shake this patient approach can also be seen in the Clinton administration’s refusal to try to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Between May 1998 and May 1999 the CIA presented President Clinton with two chances to capture bin Laden and eight chances to kill him using U.S. military air power. Mr. Clinton and his team decided against action on each occasion.
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This was of course Mr. Clinton’s rightful decision as commander in chief, but it is interesting to note that Mr. Clinton and his colleagues told the Hamilton-Kean 9/11 Commission that the intelligence available on each of these opportunities was not “good enough” to take action.
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Implicit in these decisions was the Cold War notion that there was time to sit and wait for better intelligence and then act with more confidence of accuracy and success, and in any event our massive military will protect us from any unpleasant surprises. Wrong. America had—and has—no dependable deterrent against al-Qaeda and its allies. Our only defenses against al-Qaeda-ism are changes in foreign policy and military or covert-action preemption, a notion that amounts to what was in Cold War thinking the then-morally repugnant idea of the first strike. Because of this reality the most senior U.S. political leaders and policymakers must abandon the leisurely Cold War approach to national security and learn to decide quickly, on less-than-perfect intelligence, and then act to protect Americans. They must accept that this is necessary against the transnational threat and that if they miss and cause other deaths or physical damage—so what? There is no coequal great power from whom we need fear military retaliation, we can endure criticism from the international community and simply prepare to try again to defend America.