fyi
"It never hurts in Washington to be fashionably wrong, but what is lethal is to be right ahead of your time."
The 9/11 attacks represent the greatest US intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor. That is not a controversial statement, but the nature of that intelligence failure certainly is, as it involves the question of who bears responsibility.
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The central aspect of that intelligence failure is easily explained. Before the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center--one month into Clinton's first term in office--the prevailing assumption was that major terrorist attacks against the US were state-sponsored. Thus, terrorism was considered a national security issue and the key question after any attack was which terrorist state was responsible.
But starting with the attack on the World Trade Center, the Clinton administration claimed that a new kind of terrorism had come into being that did not involve states. It turned terrorism into a law enforcement issue, with the focus on arresting and convicting individual perpetrators. For Clinton, who, particularly in his first years in office, did not want to deal with any serious national security problem except by way of a "peace process," this was very convenient.
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Incredibly, the terrorist defendants had the results of the FBI investigation into their case, but the U.S. government agencies responsible for defending the country against terrorism did not. This was corrected to some extent, although not entirely, by the post 9/11 counter-terrorism legislation.
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I briefed Clinton personally on Iraq. It was July 1992. Tony Lake and Sandy Berger were there. They advised me that they wanted only "a little daylight" between them and Bush, because this was the campaign, and the campaign was not about foreign policy. So, I briefed accordingly. Clinton saw through the artifice. He asked, "If the problem is that bad, why are your policy recommendations so limited?" Lake and Berger replied, almost in unison, "Mr. President" (even then that is how they addressed him), explaining this was just the campaign and once he became president, he could take care of the problem.
So I was shocked, when Indyk, still formally my boss, called me one evening shortly before the inauguration. Clinton had just given an interview to Thomas Friedman in which he essentially said that he was prepared to reconcile with Saddam. Indyk wanted me to be prepared for reporters' questions the next day.In fact, Indyk sounded as stunned as I was. I thanked him for letting me know, but I also told him that Clinton had to take that back. He had to deny he had said it, otherwise he would set off shock waves throughout the region that would take a long time to repair, if they could ever be repaired at all.And the next day, Clinton denied what he had told Friedman. That was the interview in which Clinton said he believed in death-bed conversions, and if Saddam were sitting on the couch next to him, he'd tell him to pay more attention to the welfare of his own people than to his weapons. Of course, Clinton had said it, as Friedman then claimed, but it was better to do what could be done to disavow the statement, rather than let it stand.When I look back, that illustrates a significant part of a much bigger problem that developed. Clinton made decisions about the Middle East on who knows what grounds, but above the head of his Middle East advisor. And when that advisor, Indyk, learned about them, he lacked what it took to say that the decision was wrong and dangerous. In fact, I got so furious at Indyk during that time, I warned him about the consequences for his career, if more Americans died, because of the way they had handled the Trade Center bombing. But I was completely wrong. Three thousand Americans can die in the most lethal foreign assault in this country's history, because of mistakes that you were party to, and it won't harm your career one bit.
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The role of ego in human affairs and the self-serving nature of human beings is not to be underestimated, particularly as they climb the greasy pole of ambition. It doesn't matter whether the issue at hand is fairly trivial--a football game, for example--or deadly serious, involving the national security interests of this country and the lives of large numbers of its citizens.And I'll give you an example: in the 1990s, the overwhelming majority of Iraq experts accommodated Clinton's desire not to hear that he had a very serious problem with Saddam, and that, basically, Saddam had to go. In late 1998, I pushed a colleague on the question of where responsibility would lie, if Saddam succeeded in doing something absolutely terrible because he had been left in power. What if he carried out a biological attack? What if he developed a nuclear bomb and used it?This quite well-respected fellow didn't dispute the danger, but replied, "The times are very cynical and everyone must do what he must do for his career."
- Dr. Laurie Mylroie (excerpts)
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/1058
Dr. Mylroie received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and her B.A. from Cornell. She was an Assistant Professor in Harvard's Political Science Department, before becoming an Associate Professor in the Strategy Department at the U.S. Naval War College. Subsequently, she was a member of the staff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. She also served as advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign and has worked as a consultant on terrorism to the Departments of Defense and Energy; ABC News, the BBC, and Newsweek; as well as several law offices. She is presently an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and publisher of Iraq News.
Comment: Mylroie confirms through personal direct knowledge a) Berger was a political stooge; b) the Clinton administration as a matter of policy devalued the terrorism issue, and isolated and disarmed those charge with monitoring and investigating terror threats; c) bureacratic interia (incompetence) was/is a major factor in sabotaging America's response to terror; and d) Clinton and Rabin and their top advisors were pre-occupied with their delusional quest for negotiated mid east peace and rejected any inconvenient truths that conflicted with their fantasies. Also, the Left, the Media and the Bureacracy continue to refuse to take this monumental failure of intelligence and state sponsored terrorism seriously. For them to do so they would have to confront their own guilt and admit that Bush had a more realistic view than they of the world situation.