I always suspected that Clinton's legacy would become more tarnished with the passage of time. This (long) editorial from the Sunday Times (of London) highlights how the shortcomings of his administration have come back to bite us in ways few could have imagined.
========================================
The Fruits of Negligence
The Clinton Administration's Security Legacy
In the initial shock of the September 11 Massacre, one small notion lodged itself into the mass psyche. It's perhaps best summed up by the phrase, "Who could have seen that coming?" Because of the sheer audacity of the attack, its novel use of kamikaze-style airplanes, its uniquely horrendous death-toll, most of us tended to exculpate the leaders of the United States for any responsibility for the lax security and failure of intelligence and foreign policy it represented. We put the blame - rightly - on the terrorists who bear sole responsibility for the massacre. But more than two weeks later, as the sheer extent of America's unpreparedness and vulnerability comes into better focus, one other conclusion is inescapable. The September 11 massacre resulted from a fantastic failure on the part of the United States government to protect its citizens from an act of war. This failure is now staring us in the face, and if we are to be successful in rectifying the errors, it's essential we acknowledge as plainly as possible what went wrong.
Two questions come to mind: How was it that the Osama bin Laden network, known for more than a decade, was still at large and dangerous enough this autumn to inflict such a deadly blow? Who was responsible in the American government for such a failure of intelligence, foreign policy and national security? These questions have not been asked directly for good reasons. There is a need to avoid recriminations at a time of national crisis. No good is accomplished by playing a blame game now. But at the same time, the American lack of preparedness on September 11 is already slowing our capacity to bring Osama bin Laden to justice and constricting some of the military and diplomatic options in front of us. And with a president only a few months yet in office, criticism need not extend to the young administration that largely inherited this tattered security apparatus and is now trying to repair the damage. Whatever failures of intelligence, security or diplomacy exist, they have roots far deeper than the first nine months of this year. When national disasters of unpreparedness have occurred in other countries - say, the invasion of the Falkland Islands - ministers responsible have resigned. Taking responsibility for mistakes in the past is part of the effort not to repeat them. So why have heads not rolled?
The most plausible answer is that no-one has been fired and no fingers pointed because this attack was so novel and impossible to predict that nothing in our security apparatus could have prevented it. The only problem with this argument is that it is patently untrue. Throughout the Clinton years, this kind of attack was not only predictable but predicted. Not only had Osama bin Laden already attacked the United States, its embassies and warships, he had done so repeatedly and been more than completely frank about his war with the United States. He had even attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993! Same guy, same building. To say that this attack came out of the blue is simply belied by any rudimentary examination of the facts. And to say that we couldn't have anticipated this type of attack is simply to say that our intelligence wasn't good enough to have found it out.
How prominent were the warnings of the danger of Islamic terrorism in the 1990s? Here's one: "The crater beneath the World Trade Center and the uncovering of a plot to set off more gigantic bombs and to assassinate leading political figures have shown Americans how brutal these [Islamic] extremists can be." This was written by Salman Rushdie in the New York Times in 1993. Did the Clinton administration overhaul its intelligence and defense priorities in response to the 1993 warning? The answer is clearly no. No effort was made to coordinate the various mess of agencies designed to counter terrorism - the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the airlines, local law enforcement, the Coast Guard. No effort was made to recruit more spies who could speak Arabic or go effectively undercover to preempt such terrorist attacks. Under the Clinton administration, a law was passed actually making it more difficult for the U.S. to use spies who had sleazy or criminal pasts - exactly the kind needed to infiltrate bin Laden's tight terrorist cells. The debacle of the Somalia expedition in 1992 and 1993 - which led to Delta Force units being humiliated - dramatically chilled the military's willingness to use such units in action again. This occurred despite the fact that aggressive use of those units - as we are seeing today - was critical to any successful effort to regain the initiative against terrorism.
In a remarkably revealing and over-looked article in last week's New Yorker, Joe Klein argues that "there seems to be near-unanimous agreement among experts: in the ten years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, almost every aspect of American national-security policy-from military operations to intelligence gathering, from border control to political leadership-has been marked by ... institutional lassitude and bureaucratic arrogance." The decision to get down and dirty with the terrorists, to take their threat seriously and counter them aggressively was simply never taken. Many bear the blame for this: the clueless, stately secretary of state Warren Christopher; the tortured intellectual at the National Security Council, Anthony Lake; General Colin Powell, whose decision to use Delta Force units in Somalia so badly backfired; but above all president Bill Clinton, whose inattention to foreign affairs, especially when it meant military and security matters, now seems part of the reason why America was so vulnerable to slaughter earlier this month.
Klein cites this devastating quote from a senior Clinton official: "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defense than any other President in recent memory. He could learn an issue very quickly, but he wasn't very interested in getting his hands dirty with detail work. His style was procrastination, seeing where everyone was, before taking action. This was truer in his first term than it was in the second, but even when he began to pay attention he was severely constrained by public opinion and his own unwillingness to take risks." It is hard to come up with a more damning description of negligence than that.
Clinton even got a second chance. In 1998, after bin Laden struck again at U.S. embassies in Africa, the president was put on notice that the threat was deadly serious. He responded with a couple of fitful missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, some of which missed their targets and none of which killed or seriously impacted Osama bin Laden. Clinton's own former Defense Secretary, John Deutch, wrote in the New York Times that August: "We must insist on superior intelligence that will warn of potential terrorist actions. We must insist on tough and prompt responses to such acts and on developing an effective capability to manage the consequences of these acts when they occur. These are major challenges and, in general, public and private experts have concluded that our country is not fully prepared to act effectively on these matters." Clinton largely ignored the warning. The Post's Jim Hoagland warned in the same month: "There are troubling signs that this president could once again stage a pinprick raid, announce the problem solved and turn back to his own domestic and personal preoccupations. A single night of missile strikes against remote desert sites will not leave America's self-declared enemies off balance for long." Give that man a medal for foresight.
Again in the Washington Post that August, the following prescient words were written by L. Paul Bremer III, former anti-terrorism chief in the Reagan administration: "The ideology of such groups [as bin Laden's] makes them impervious to political or diplomatic pressures. They hate America, its values and its culture and proudly declare themselves to be at war with us. We cannot seek a "political solution" with them." Bremer then set out a list of what the U.S. should do: "Defend ourselves. Beef up security around potential targets here and abroad, especially "softer" targets such as American businesses overseas. Attack the enemy. Keep the pressure on terrorist groups. Show that we can be as systematic and relentless as they are. Crush bin Ladin's operations by pressure and disruption. The U.S. government should order further military strikes against the remaining terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. The U.S. government further should announce a large reward for bin Laden's capture -- dead or alive. This might work and at the least would exacerbate the paranoia common to all terrorists." Sound familiar? It's exactly what we're doing now, three years too late, with no element of surprise, and with far from adequate human intelligence.
This brings Bremer to the most critical point in his recommendations: "Improve our intelligence operations. Effective counterterrorism depends on good intelligence... We must preempt and disrupt attacks before they happen. This requires improved coordination of intelligence collection against terrorist groups. While it is difficult, we should expand the use of deep cover agents on the ground to infiltrate terrorist organizations." None of this happened. Agencies bickered, the president was too concerned with sexual harassment lawsuits, the C.I.A.'s feckless record went uncorrected.
Perhaps the most farsighted critic was a man called Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and the author, under the pseudonym Edward Shirley, of "Know thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran." In the Atlantic Monthly this past summer, he emphasized the extreme need for trained spies to go underground in the Muslim world of Afghanistan and Pakistan if the West were ever to get adequate intelligence on bin Laden's operation. But as late as 1999, not a single such "non-official-cover" spy had been trained or used for such a purpose. A former senior Near East Division operative told Gerecht, "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with ****ty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer summed up the policy to Gerecht thus: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
(to be continued....)
========================================
The Fruits of Negligence
The Clinton Administration's Security Legacy
In the initial shock of the September 11 Massacre, one small notion lodged itself into the mass psyche. It's perhaps best summed up by the phrase, "Who could have seen that coming?" Because of the sheer audacity of the attack, its novel use of kamikaze-style airplanes, its uniquely horrendous death-toll, most of us tended to exculpate the leaders of the United States for any responsibility for the lax security and failure of intelligence and foreign policy it represented. We put the blame - rightly - on the terrorists who bear sole responsibility for the massacre. But more than two weeks later, as the sheer extent of America's unpreparedness and vulnerability comes into better focus, one other conclusion is inescapable. The September 11 massacre resulted from a fantastic failure on the part of the United States government to protect its citizens from an act of war. This failure is now staring us in the face, and if we are to be successful in rectifying the errors, it's essential we acknowledge as plainly as possible what went wrong.
Two questions come to mind: How was it that the Osama bin Laden network, known for more than a decade, was still at large and dangerous enough this autumn to inflict such a deadly blow? Who was responsible in the American government for such a failure of intelligence, foreign policy and national security? These questions have not been asked directly for good reasons. There is a need to avoid recriminations at a time of national crisis. No good is accomplished by playing a blame game now. But at the same time, the American lack of preparedness on September 11 is already slowing our capacity to bring Osama bin Laden to justice and constricting some of the military and diplomatic options in front of us. And with a president only a few months yet in office, criticism need not extend to the young administration that largely inherited this tattered security apparatus and is now trying to repair the damage. Whatever failures of intelligence, security or diplomacy exist, they have roots far deeper than the first nine months of this year. When national disasters of unpreparedness have occurred in other countries - say, the invasion of the Falkland Islands - ministers responsible have resigned. Taking responsibility for mistakes in the past is part of the effort not to repeat them. So why have heads not rolled?
The most plausible answer is that no-one has been fired and no fingers pointed because this attack was so novel and impossible to predict that nothing in our security apparatus could have prevented it. The only problem with this argument is that it is patently untrue. Throughout the Clinton years, this kind of attack was not only predictable but predicted. Not only had Osama bin Laden already attacked the United States, its embassies and warships, he had done so repeatedly and been more than completely frank about his war with the United States. He had even attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993! Same guy, same building. To say that this attack came out of the blue is simply belied by any rudimentary examination of the facts. And to say that we couldn't have anticipated this type of attack is simply to say that our intelligence wasn't good enough to have found it out.
How prominent were the warnings of the danger of Islamic terrorism in the 1990s? Here's one: "The crater beneath the World Trade Center and the uncovering of a plot to set off more gigantic bombs and to assassinate leading political figures have shown Americans how brutal these [Islamic] extremists can be." This was written by Salman Rushdie in the New York Times in 1993. Did the Clinton administration overhaul its intelligence and defense priorities in response to the 1993 warning? The answer is clearly no. No effort was made to coordinate the various mess of agencies designed to counter terrorism - the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, the airlines, local law enforcement, the Coast Guard. No effort was made to recruit more spies who could speak Arabic or go effectively undercover to preempt such terrorist attacks. Under the Clinton administration, a law was passed actually making it more difficult for the U.S. to use spies who had sleazy or criminal pasts - exactly the kind needed to infiltrate bin Laden's tight terrorist cells. The debacle of the Somalia expedition in 1992 and 1993 - which led to Delta Force units being humiliated - dramatically chilled the military's willingness to use such units in action again. This occurred despite the fact that aggressive use of those units - as we are seeing today - was critical to any successful effort to regain the initiative against terrorism.
In a remarkably revealing and over-looked article in last week's New Yorker, Joe Klein argues that "there seems to be near-unanimous agreement among experts: in the ten years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, almost every aspect of American national-security policy-from military operations to intelligence gathering, from border control to political leadership-has been marked by ... institutional lassitude and bureaucratic arrogance." The decision to get down and dirty with the terrorists, to take their threat seriously and counter them aggressively was simply never taken. Many bear the blame for this: the clueless, stately secretary of state Warren Christopher; the tortured intellectual at the National Security Council, Anthony Lake; General Colin Powell, whose decision to use Delta Force units in Somalia so badly backfired; but above all president Bill Clinton, whose inattention to foreign affairs, especially when it meant military and security matters, now seems part of the reason why America was so vulnerable to slaughter earlier this month.
Klein cites this devastating quote from a senior Clinton official: "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defense than any other President in recent memory. He could learn an issue very quickly, but he wasn't very interested in getting his hands dirty with detail work. His style was procrastination, seeing where everyone was, before taking action. This was truer in his first term than it was in the second, but even when he began to pay attention he was severely constrained by public opinion and his own unwillingness to take risks." It is hard to come up with a more damning description of negligence than that.
Clinton even got a second chance. In 1998, after bin Laden struck again at U.S. embassies in Africa, the president was put on notice that the threat was deadly serious. He responded with a couple of fitful missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan, some of which missed their targets and none of which killed or seriously impacted Osama bin Laden. Clinton's own former Defense Secretary, John Deutch, wrote in the New York Times that August: "We must insist on superior intelligence that will warn of potential terrorist actions. We must insist on tough and prompt responses to such acts and on developing an effective capability to manage the consequences of these acts when they occur. These are major challenges and, in general, public and private experts have concluded that our country is not fully prepared to act effectively on these matters." Clinton largely ignored the warning. The Post's Jim Hoagland warned in the same month: "There are troubling signs that this president could once again stage a pinprick raid, announce the problem solved and turn back to his own domestic and personal preoccupations. A single night of missile strikes against remote desert sites will not leave America's self-declared enemies off balance for long." Give that man a medal for foresight.
Again in the Washington Post that August, the following prescient words were written by L. Paul Bremer III, former anti-terrorism chief in the Reagan administration: "The ideology of such groups [as bin Laden's] makes them impervious to political or diplomatic pressures. They hate America, its values and its culture and proudly declare themselves to be at war with us. We cannot seek a "political solution" with them." Bremer then set out a list of what the U.S. should do: "Defend ourselves. Beef up security around potential targets here and abroad, especially "softer" targets such as American businesses overseas. Attack the enemy. Keep the pressure on terrorist groups. Show that we can be as systematic and relentless as they are. Crush bin Ladin's operations by pressure and disruption. The U.S. government should order further military strikes against the remaining terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. The U.S. government further should announce a large reward for bin Laden's capture -- dead or alive. This might work and at the least would exacerbate the paranoia common to all terrorists." Sound familiar? It's exactly what we're doing now, three years too late, with no element of surprise, and with far from adequate human intelligence.
This brings Bremer to the most critical point in his recommendations: "Improve our intelligence operations. Effective counterterrorism depends on good intelligence... We must preempt and disrupt attacks before they happen. This requires improved coordination of intelligence collection against terrorist groups. While it is difficult, we should expand the use of deep cover agents on the ground to infiltrate terrorist organizations." None of this happened. Agencies bickered, the president was too concerned with sexual harassment lawsuits, the C.I.A.'s feckless record went uncorrected.
Perhaps the most farsighted critic was a man called Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and the author, under the pseudonym Edward Shirley, of "Know thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran." In the Atlantic Monthly this past summer, he emphasized the extreme need for trained spies to go underground in the Muslim world of Afghanistan and Pakistan if the West were ever to get adequate intelligence on bin Laden's operation. But as late as 1999, not a single such "non-official-cover" spy had been trained or used for such a purpose. A former senior Near East Division operative told Gerecht, "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with ****ty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer summed up the policy to Gerecht thus: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
(to be continued....)