Posted on 03/27/2004 6:05:50 AM PST by Ranger
ONDON — Did the Bush administration, before the 9/11 attacks, fail to take terrorism seriously enough? At first the contention seems unlikely. Isn't this the most hawkish administration in living memory? Wasn't it President Bush who coined the phrase "war on terror"?
Yet in the current hearings on the attacks — and in the controversy surrounding the new book by Richard A. Clarke, the administration's first counterterrorism chief — the words "neglect" and "failure" keep cropping up.
And there is something to these accusations — although perhaps not in the sense that the people making them intend. The administration's early failures on terrorism cannot be pinned down to individual instances of "neglect." To understand what really went wrong, we need to go back to the last decades of the cold war, when people like Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney first started to make sense of terrorism.
In the 1970's and 80's, the predominant view among Washington hawks was that none of the various terrorist groups that operated in Western Europe and the Middle East was truly independent. They were all connected through a vast terrorist network, which was created and supported by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. The Communists' aim, the hawks believed, was to destabilize the Western societies without being directly linked to violence.
It all seemed to make perfect sense, and books like "The Terror Network" by Claire Sterling, which argued the network hypothesis with considerable force and conviction, became essential reading for anyone who wanted to make his way in the Reagan White House.
The idea that the sinister hand of the Kremlin was behind groups like the Italian Red Brigades and even the Irish Republican Army revealed the deep sense of paranoia within political circles at the time. More important, the idea of the Communist terrorism network buttressed the conservative fixation on states as the only major actors in the international political system.
According to the classically "realist" mindset, only states can pose a significant threat to the national security of other states, because lesser actors simply do not have the capacity, sophistication and resources to do so. Hence, if terrorists suddenly became effective in destabilizing countries like Italy, they couldn't possibly have acted on their own. They must have had state sponsors, and it was only by tackling the state sponsors (in this case, the Soviet bloc), that you could root out the terrorists.
During the cold war, the paradigm of "state-sponsored terrorism" was useful, if not entirely correct. Most terrorists did receive help from states, and there were some links between disparate groups, although not to the extent that many in the United States believed. And some of the worst atrocities — like the 1983 attack on United States military headquarters in Beirut — were in fact carried out by groups that had been created by "rogue states" like Iran, Libya and Syria.
With the end of the cold war, however, things changed. While there was no longer a prime state sponsor for any "terror network," there was also no longer any need for one. It became easy to travel from one country to another. Money could be collected and transferred around the globe. Cell phones and the Internet made it possible to maintain tight control of an elusive group that could move its "headquarters" across continents. In fact, by the end of the decade, it seemed as if the model of state-sponsored terrorism had effectively been reversed: Al Qaeda was now in charge of a state — Afghanistan under the Taliban — rather than vice versa.
But the Washington hawks failed to see what was happening. The world around them had changed, but their paradigm hadn't. For them, states continued to be the only real movers and shakers in the international system, and any serious "strategic" threat to America's security could only come from an established nation.
Consider an article in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine by Condoleezza Rice, titled "Campaign 2000 — Promoting the National Interest." Ms. Rice, spelling out the foreign policy priorities of a Bush White House, argued that after years of drift under the Clinton administration, United States foreign policy had to concentrate on the "real challenges" to American security. This included renewing "strong and intimate relationships" with allies, and focusing on "big powers, particularly Russia and China." In Ms. Rice's view, the threat of non-state terrorism was a secondary problem — in her to do list" it was under the category of "rogue regimes," to be tackled best by dealing "decisively with the threat of hostile powers."
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that there was relatively little interest in Al Qaeda when the Bush team took over. For most of 2001, the national security agenda really consisted of only two items, neither of which had anything to do with the terrorist threat of radical Islam. First, the administration increased its efforts to bring about regime change in Iraq, which was believed to be the prime source of instability in a region of great strategic importance.
The second goal was a more competitive stance toward China. Missile defense — this time against attack by China and North Korea — was put back on the table. Even the collision of an American spy plane with a Chinese fighter in 2001 is an indication of the administration's mindset — intelligence resources were deployed not to find Osama bin Laden, but to monitor what many White House hawks considered the most likely future challenger of American power.
Sept. 11, 2001, brought about a quick re-orientation of foreign policy. What didn't change, however, was the state-centered mindset of the people who were in charge. According to Mr. Clarke, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld immediately suspected Saddam Hussein, and suggested military strikes against Iraq. While cooler heads prevailed at the time, and there was a real effort to track down and destroy the Qaeda network, there was also a reluctance to abandon the idea that terrorism had to be state-based. Hence the administration's insistence that there must be an "axis of evil" — a group of states critical in sustaining the terrorists. It was an attempt to reconcile the new, confusing reality with long-established paradigm of state sponsorship.
In the end, the 9/11 hearings are likely to find that the intelligence failure that led to the horrific attacks stemmed from the longstanding problems of wrongly placed agents, failed communications between government departments and lack of resources. But it was also a failure of vision — one for which the current administration must take responsibility.
Peter R. Neumann is a research fellow in international terrorism at the Department of War Studies, King's College London.
I am in no way implying we need approval or a permission slip from the UN to fut-her our countries interests.
But the PR disaster of unilaterally going into Afghanistan and having the 9-11 attacks passed off by Al Qaeda and the world as retaliation for our attacking Afghanistan would mean we would never have gone into Iraq.
Bush would be blamed for the deaths of 3,000 Americans in NY and beaten over the head with that to the point I don't think he would have pressed for an invasion of Iraq,
And if he did invade Iraq in that environment, and no WMDs were found he probably would get impeached for reckless and dangerous behavior as commander chief.
So I'll say it again:Could you imagine what would have happened if we had invaded Afghanistan before 9-11...We were saved from a major PR blunder by our own incompetence. -Tom
Actually, only Russia can physically destroy much of this country. But even a "limited" nuclear attack by a state or sub-state actor can destroy or severely undermine our national ethos...and replace it with something else that we probably would not like. (My guess: we go on a war of extermination.)
Well, yeah, with nukes. But
a biology wiz kid
with a billion bucks
from some fanatic
can bio-engineer bugs
(or even prions,
I'd guess) and cause more
loss of life and chaos than
a big nuke attack.
(Biology is,
comparatively, so cheap,
I'm puzzled no one
has used this path yet.
Some of the eco nuts are
educated nuts . . .)
Faulty tin foil hat... -OR- Tin foil boots weren't grounded...
Can't happen here... Famous last words.
That was a very large problem.
Any Grand Jury testimony, ie. law enforcement route, was secret and could not be dispensed to the CIA and FBI.
He refers to her as "Ms. Rice."
That was enough for me.
I will concede that 9/11 galvanized this country to action as no other event could have. If Clinton had been more of a leader, we could have used the bombings of our embassies in East Africa to marshall world and domestic support.
I take objection to your use of "PR blunder" as a reason not to take action. When our vital national interests are at stake, I want a President who will take action regardless of how it may affect the polls or our international standing or the personal consequences. One of the functions of leadership is to lead and build a national consensus. Clinton saw foreign policy as an extension of domestic politics and acted accordingly. We are reaping the whirlwind due to Clinton's failures.
With the end of the cold war, however, things changed. While there was no longer a prime state sponsor for any "terror network," there was also no longer any need for one. It became easy to travel from one country to another. Money could be collected and transferred around the globe. Cell phones and the Internet made it possible to maintain tight control of an elusive group that could move its "headquarters" across continents.
No Oklahoma bombing, no World Trade Center bombing, no embassy bombings. It was easy to miss, you see, howe, the cell phones creeped up on us.
Consider in contrast the next paragraph:
But the Washington hawks failed to see what was happening. The world around them had changed, but their paradigm hadn't.
See? All of the concrete bombings during the Clinton years was easy to miss, but the abstrac changes in the wold should have been notices by the Bush administration -- and, more so, immediately upon its arrival in Washington, despite of the shortened transitional period due to recount.
Not only is this man anti-American --- he is increadibly dumb to be so overt. I would fire him for just that reason.
Apparently you haven't read what I wrote carefully.. I never said PR should have been a reason not to invade. I believe inadvertently we lucked out by not going into Afghanistan until afer 9-11.- Tom
By the end of the '80s, however, that was beginning to dry up...the Russians realized that the Islamics were maniacs and that the Euros were slowly dying out on their own as they became dissolusioned.
After the fall of the Eastern Bloc, notice that in both Europe and Latin America, homegrown Terrorist groups have been either rolled up, shut down, or are moribund. Also, so-called "insurgencies" in Central America also weakened and died off.
After the Soviets fell, the only terr groups able to find signifigant funding and support were the Islamics, and to a much lesser extent, the IRA (sadly, theirs comes from the US, mostly from Irish-Americans with an incorrect, romantic view of the "boyos", and who know little or nothing of their communist ambitions).
The position of those who made descisions then (that the Soviets were primarily responsible for such destabilizing things as terrorism) was FAR from "paranoia", it was in fact correct. Unfortunately, after the smoke from the fall of the Soviets cleared, we were left with a President who had no idea or interest in what to do about Islamic terrorism, which essentially is all that was left.
Right after my post,
by a weird coincidence,
a librarian
handed me a new
non-fiction book, and told me
I might think it's cool --
 |
Book Description -- Nestled near the Hamptons, the fashionable summer playground of America's rich and famous, and in the shadow of New York City, lies an unimposing 840-acre island unidentified on most maps. On the few on which it can be found, Plum Island is marked red or yellow, and stamped U.S. government—restricted or dangerous animal diseases. Though many people live the good life within a scant mile or two from its shores, few know the name of this pork chop–shaped island. Even fewer can say whether it is inhabited, or why it doesn't exist on the map. That's all about to change. Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory blows the lid off the stunning true nature and checkered history of Plum Island. It shows that the seemingly bucolic island on the edge of the largest population center in the United States is a ticking biological time bomb that none of us can safely ignore. Based on innumerable declassified government documents, scores of in-depth interviews, and access to Plum Island itself, this is an eye-opening, suspenseful account of a federal government germ laboratory gone terribly wrong. For the first time, Lab 257 takes you deep inside this secret world and presents startling revelations including virus outbreaks, biological meltdowns, infected workers who were denied assistance in diagnosis by Plum Island brass, the periodic flushing of contaminated raw sewage into area waters, and the insidious connections between Plum Island, Lyme disease, and the deadly 1999 West Nile virus outbreak. An exploration of the complex world of microbiology, viruses, and bacteria, Lab 257 also shows how the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which ran Plum Island for the last half century, is far more than wholesome grade-A eggs and the food pyramid. The book probes what's in store for Plum Island's new owner, the Department of Homeland Security, in this age of bioterrorism. And for those interested in questions of national security and safety, it is a call to action for those concerned with protecting present and future generations from preventable biological catastrophes. |
Good post. Something else the media never mentions is this -- throughout Clinton's term, particularly during impeachment, we heard about his great job approval numbers. Bush, on the other hand, became president after the most divisive campaign in modern history, with millions of Democrats claiming he was selected, not elected. Anyhow, my point is that Clinton could have used his popularity to do strong things, like really fight a war on terror. Instead, he talked about school uniforms and such. On the other hand, there is no way Bush would have been able to get approval from the public, or from Congress, to have preemptively struck at Al-Qaeda before 9/11, given the 2000 election. Heck, look at the way the libs screech about Iraq -- can you imagine what their reaction would have been if Bush had declared war on Al-Qaeda in the first few months of his term?
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