Sorting Through the Accusations...

THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
26 March 2004

Summary

The United States is in the process of picking apart the
intelligence and political failures that led up to the attacks on
New York City and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001. This is an
unprecedented process. Normally such reviews occur after the war
has ended. In this case, the review was made necessary by the
president's failure to clean house after Sept. 11. That said, the
truth of the matter would appear to be more complex than the
simplistic charges being traded. The fact is, in our view, the
Bush and Clinton policies were far more similar than they were
different. We are not quite certain who we have insulted with
that claim.

Analysis

...

Finally, there was a political aspect. The man who was
institutionally responsible for detecting Sept. 11 was CIA
Director George Tenet. He was 2001's Kimmel. Whether it was his
fault or not, Sept. 11 was an intelligence failure. Tenet was in
charge of intelligence, and it happened on his watch. Kimmel was
sacked -- but Tenet was not a Bush appointee. He had been
appointed by Bill Clinton. Bush began with a crippled presidency
due to the Florida fiasco. He did not have the national authority
of Roosevelt, and he badly needed bipartisan support. Bush
obviously respected Tenet since he kept him on after his
election. He might have decided to keep him on after Sept. 11 in
order to help bulletproof his administration. Tenet was, after
all, a Clinton appointee.

...

The very first briefings Bush was given when he took office had
to have been about Iraq. That is because U.S. and British
aircraft were carrying out constant combat operations over Iraq,
patrolling the no-fly zones. These missions had been carried out
from the end of Desert Storm -- during the administration of
President George H. W. Bush -- throughout the Clinton years,
under U.N. mandate. The Clinton administration at times
intensified these attacks. In December 1998, for example, it
carried out Operation Desert Fox in response to Saddam Hussein's
refusal to allow U.N. weapons inspectors into the country. The
Clinton administration also attempted on various occasions to
overthrow Hussein through covert operations; Clinton also
continued sanctions on Iraq.

None of these efforts were effective in bringing about change,
but Clinton did not discontinue the combat operations, sanctions
or desultory covert operations. Although it was generally felt
that these were unsuccessful, Clinton was trapped by a lack of
alternatives. He did not want to mount a full invasion. At the
same time, he did not want to halt the ineffective actions
against Hussein and signal American weakness, undermine the
regional alliance and embolden Hussein. The patrols continued, as
did occasional bombings of Iraq.

Given that the United States had been involved in combat
operations in Iraq for more than a decade, one would hope that
the first topic on President Bush's foreign policy agenda would
have been Iraq. What else would it have been? Bush shared the
view of the previous two presidents that halting operations was
not possible and bringing Hussein's government down was a major
U.S. foreign policy goal. The new administration obviously
conducted an early review of how to bring closure to the U.S.
Iraq policy.

In this review, it would have been noted that the Clinton policy
had failed to achieve the stated goals. Continuing the policy of
ineffective combat and covert operations coupled with sanctions
was soaking up U.S. military and intelligence resources without
achieving any goal. Bush accepted Clinton's premise that simply
walking away was not an option. That left only intensified
military options, the most certain of which would be an invasion.

Anyone thinking about Iraq in the spring of 2001 knew that the
Clinton policy could not continue indefinitely. Obviously one
faction was going to argue that since the United States could not
walk away, the only solution was an invasion. That appears to be
what several people thought, including Donald Rumsfeld. What is
most noteworthy is that they were -- for the time being at least
-- overruled. There was no invasion, nor any buildup in the
region for an invasion. Bush decided, essentially by default, to
continue Clinton's Iraq policy.

...

So too with the charge that Bush had failed to take al Qaeda
seriously. To be more precise, there had been a persistent
failure -- in both the Clinton and Bush administrations -- to
take al Qaeda and radical Islamists seriously. Part of the fault
lay directly with the CIA and the manner in which it collected
intelligence and analyzed it -- but Bush's CIA director was the
same as Clinton's. Blaming Bush for unique neglect of al Qaeda
for eight months, after Clinton's eight years, is hard to fathom.
Indeed, part of the fault lies with some of the terrorism experts
now critical of Bush. When their record is examined, many did
warn about al Qaeda, but over the course of their careers they
had issued similar warnings about so many groups that it was hard
to distinguish the real from the fantastic. It was a profession
that had cried wolf too many times.

The Bush failure was the same as the Clinton failure. Both
administrations looked at al Qaeda as the heir of the Palestinian
terrorist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. They would set off a
few bombs, kill no more than a few dozen people, hijack planes
and represent an irritant and a nuisance far more than a
strategic threat. Their rhetoric was extreme, but no more extreme
than that of other groups that never were able to match rhetoric
with action.

The misevaluation of al Qaeda was a systemic failure that ran
from the CIA to the American public. We recall no public outcry
for increased expenditures on intelligence and counterterrorism
in the 1990s. Nor was there massive public unrest when -- after
attacks against Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the East African
embassies or the USS Cole in Yemen, all of which claimed American
lives -- a major effort to destroy al Qaeda was not undertaken.
As a nation, the United States calmly accepted the danger. For
the Clinton administration to claim that it had devoted major
resources and made a great effort to hunt down and destroy al
Qaeda is simply not true. To their credit, both former Defense
Secretary William Cohen and Secretary of State Madeline Albright
testified this week that their efforts against al Qaeda were both
thin and constrained by public disinterest. In its policy of
inaction, the Clinton team was simply tracking the American
public's mood.

There are two charges that can be legitimately leveled against
George W. Bush. The first is that, in spite of knowing that the
Clinton policy on Iraq was ineffective, he neither ended the
containment of Hussein nor moved to destroy him. Bush carried on
Clinton's policies unchanged. The second charge is that Bush did
not increase the level of effort taken to destroy al Qaeda, but
essentially followed the Clinton administration's policy of
watching and hoping for a low-risk, low-cost moment to act -- a
moment that Osama bin Laden was too smart to give them.

...

This was, in our view, a serious error in judgment. It may be an
unforgivable one. But to hold Bush's eight months in office as
having been more responsible for al Qaeda's emergence than
Clinton's eight years in office -- not to mention the Carter and
Reagan administrations' responsibility for encouraging militant
Islam -- strikes us as strange reasoning. Sept. 11 was planned,
and it was being implemented while Clinton was president. Bush
simply adopted wholesale -- and extended -- Clinton's errors.

This is not an argument for Clinton or Bush. Given the mood of
the country, it is unlikely that any president would have done
much differently. Had either man proposed invading Afghanistan
prior to Sept. 11, both would have been labeled as certifiably
insane. The problem was rooted in the mind-set that had enamored
the American people after the end of the Cold War: a belief that
the world had become a safe place to live and that those who said
otherwise were alarmist cranks.

Sept. 11 was a systemic failure of the nation, for which both
Democrats and Republicans are equally guilty. Bush's errors in
judgment did not occur before the war, but after the war began.
The current attempt to prove some spectacular failure by Bush
before the war makes political sense, but it is intellectually
incoherent and misses the places where Bush made genuine errors.
Bush did fail. He failed to hold the intelligence community
responsible for its failures, tear it apart and rebuild it. He
failed to find a Nimitz to run the CIA. We regard this as an
enormously serious charge against him. For the rest, he shares
responsibility with his predecessor -- and with the rest of us.

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