Finally, I would like to remind readers that when I refer to the documents in my binder, I am doing so from memory. I studied those documents so closely and for so long, however, that I am confident that I am paraphrasing them correctly. For those interested in pursuing further study on these issues, I believe that I have described the binder (a black, four-or-five-inch, three-ring, government-issue binder) well enough to permit a fairly accurate Freedom of Information Act request for the material, which again has already been redacted by the CIA to eliminate all the concerns the CIA had in regard to the possible compromise of sources and methods. This is one case where the paucity of documents by government officials lamented by Jefferson is not a problem. Indeed, I think that many of these documents could be described as what Jefferson called on another occasion “morsel[s] of history” which are things “so rare always to be valuable.” 20
And their publication, along with other documents and testimony held by the 9/11 Commission, might begin to negate the effort of the George W. Bush administration and our overall governing elite to “dissuade Americans from peering too deeply at the events of 9/11. Were they to do so, they might just pose discomfiting questions about the competence of our leaders, the organization and purposes of government, and the rationale of U.S. foreign policy.”21
PART I
GETTING TO 9/11
If the liberties of America are ever completely ruined…it will in all probability be the consequence of a mistaken notion of prudence, which leads men to acquiesce in measures of the most destructive tendency for the sake of present ease.
Samuel Adams, 1771
On September 11, 2001, history began exacting revenge from America’s bipartisan governing elite for thirty years of ill-considered, path-of-least-resistance decisions and policies that had disinvested in U.S. security, as well as for its inability to alter the worldview that forms the basis for U.S. national-security policy—even as they chanted that the Cold War was over and fresh foreign-policy thinking was required. The 9/11 attacks found U.S. leaders ignorant both of America’s lack of options that had been created by a quarter-century of decisions taken “for the sake of present ease,” and of the dimensions and power of the Islamist foe their policies had nurtured. They also were boundlessly confident that the approaches that brought victory in the Cold War would ensure the quick and utter destruction of the forces led, inspired, and instigated by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Between 1973 and 9/11, U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world committed Americans to the untenable position of supporting and protecting the viability of an endless religious war-to-the-death between Israelis and Arabs. In economic policy, moreover, Washington ignored the warning shot fired by the Saudi Arabia–led 1973 oil embargo and decided to let the U.S. economy remain dependent on energy supplies from a group of foreign nations that had used oil as an anti-U.S. weapon. This steady and deliberate disinvestment in U.S. national security also encouraged the growth of Islamist militancy by allowing Islamist leaders to demonstrate to their audiences that America was an extraordinary and malignant hypocrite, rhetorically championing democracy and liberty for all peoples, while specializing in the killing and brutal oppression of Muslims, supporting Israel in the former and Muslim police states like Saudi Arabia in the latter.
Between 1996 and 9/11, Washington compounded the damage caused by its prolonged security disinvestment with an equally debilitating failure to shuck off Cold War thinking and accept that history had resumed with a vengeance. For the U.S. governing elite, the Islamists were not a threat to U.S. national security but a lethal nuisance that could be defeated at the pace and moment and with means decided by the United States. Washington was about to learn that security disinvestment and a Cold War hangover left it to confront Islamism with few good options, and so, to paraphrase what Mr. Lincoln once said in another losing situation: If there is a place worse than hell in 2008, Americans are now in it.1
CHAPTER 1
Readying bin Laden’s Way:
America and the Muslim World, 1973–1996
The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise might be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.
Hilaire Belloc, 1938
My young friends, history is a river that may take us where it will. But we have the power to navigate, to choose the direction, and make our passage together.
Ronald Reagan, April 1984
It has become a commonplace to argue that the world changed forever on September 11, 2001. Only rarely in history, however, can a specific date be pointed to with accuracy as such a landmark. Generally, important events that happen on specific days—July 4, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s 1914 assassination, and Fort Sumter’s surrender—are points of culmination, the end-points of lengthy series of events that occurred over years prior to the date that came to be seen as a historical breaking point. Independence Day was the culmination of a quarter-century of increasing alienation between Great Britain and her American colonies; the archduke’s murder triggered a war between two rival military alliances that had been rapidly arming and bumping against each other for a decade or more; and the cannonading of Fort Sumter capped two decades of political jockeying, acrimonious sectional partisanship, and finally a crisis over the westward extension of slavery.
If the world did change fundamentally for America on and after 9/11—and I tend to think that it did, and greatly for the worse—the change was caused not by the attack but by the foreign-policy decisions taken and implemented over the preceding three-plus decades. During that period, I will argue, the federal government, under both parties, steadily disinvested in U.S. national security vis-à-vis the Muslim world, both by the things it did and by those that it did not do. While Washington had invested heavily, and by the end of 1991 successfully, in defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, its ability to protect the country against other threats had simultaneously withered. Washington’s mindset seemed to be that the United States was vulnerable only to the USSR and that none of the other wars, problems, and threats in the international system would ever reach the status of endangering national security. The term national-security threat, for purposes of this book, is defined in the narrow (and I suppose old-fashioned) sense of a life-and-death threat to the nation’s survival. In turn, the term national interest is used herein to denote an issue of utmost importance because it involves the survival of the United States. Dependence on anti-U.S. energy-supplying states is a national security threat to the United States, for example, and therefore ending that debilitating dependence is a national interest of the United States. Establishing U.S.-like women’s rights regimes abroad, on the other hand, is an admirable ambition, but the lack thereof is not a national security threat to the United States, and by definition, the creation of such regimes overseas cannot be deemed a national interest.
As noted above, the discussion that follows will strike some as eclectic and even eccentric in its choice of the 1973–96 foreign-policy issues on which it focuses. In response I can only say that the topics covered in this chapter are those that, at least in my estimate, contributed substantially and directly to the unwitting but almost systematic elimination of U.S. foreign-policy options in regard to the transnational Islamist groups that began finding their legs in the years after Israel defeated its multiple Arab-state attackers in 1973. Some of the issues discussed below did not immediately sound alarms about the nascent Islamist threat, but over time they have proven to be nearly immovable obstacles in the path of America’s ability to plot a course that will deliver victory over that threat. No better examples of the ever-tightening shackles on America’s ability to maneuver and defend itself against the Islamist threat can be found, for example, than the policies Washington set in 1973 toward Israel, Saudi Arabia, and energy policy. In addition, several of the topics in this chapter have not received mu
ch public discussion, such as the enduring negative impact for America of the Clinton administration’s military response to Saddam Hussein’s 1993 attempt to kill former president George H.W. Bush. I have included lesser-known topics because I believe they contributed to the mess in which we now find ourselves mired in the Muslim world, and because I had first-hand exposure to how U.S. leaders perceived and handled the problems.
For Americans, I believe, their country’s current quandary is founded on the failure of its governing elite to study U.S. and world history and perhaps, even more, to recognize that their faith in American exceptionalism does not equate to America being exempt from the lessons, warnings, and wisdom acquired by studying history. How much less dangerous would America’s current confrontation with the Islamists be, for example, had its leaders simply followed the most important advice for foreign-policy makers available in the canon of Western political science and philosophy? “I am not ignorant that many have been and are of the opinion that human affairs are so governed by Fortune and by God, that man cannot alter them by any prudence of theirs, and indeed have no remedy against them,” Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in 1513, “and for this reason have come to think that it is not worthwhile to labor much about anything, but that they must leave everything to be determined by chance.
Often when I turn the matter over, I am in part inclined to agree with this opinion…Nevertheless, that our free will be not wholly set aside, I think it may be that Fortune is the mistress of one half our actions, and yet leaves the control of the other half, or a little less, to ourselves. And I would liken her to one of those wild torrents which, when angry, overflow the plains, sweep away trees and houses, and carry off soil from one bank to throw it sown upon another. Everyone flees before them, and yields to their fury without the least power to resist. And yet, though this be their nature, it does not follow that in the seasons of fair weather, men cannot, by constructing weirs and moles, take such precautions as to cause them when again in flood to pass off by some artificial channel, or at least prevent their course from being so uncontrolled and destructive. And so it is with Fortune, who displays her might where there is no organized strength to resist her, and directs her onset where she knows there is neither barrier nor embankment to confine her.1
From 1973 to this day I would argue that U.S. policymakers have done little to prepare for changes of what Machiavelli called “Fortune” in the Muslim world. As will be seen, U.S. policies were based on the assumption of an unchanging status quo and were designed to follow the path of least resistance. When war with the Islamists came, therefore, the United States had no policy options other than the status quo and had built no “weirs or moles” with which to deflect or channel the Islamists’ violence back toward its primary targets, Muslim regimes and Israel. This lack of prudent common sense left the United States adrift and in a state where reacting to the actions of others was the order of the day. “And so when occasion requires the cautious man to act impetuously,” Machiavelli wrote in words that exactly mirror the optionless reality faced by U.S. policymakers on 9/11, “he cannot do so and is undone; whereas, had he changed his nature with time and circumstances, his fortune would have been unchanged.”2
1973: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Oil—America’s Shackles
In 1973, America confronted two major challenges in the Middle East, and while it did not suffer an immediate outright defeat in dealing with either, both would prove to be paralyzing burdens on the United States when it moved to respond to the 9/11 attacks.
America’s first major 1973 challenge flowed from the Arab-Israeli war of that year. Under President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the U.S. government went to Israel’s rescue during the Yom Kippur War by providing unlimited financial support and military equipment, as well as by standing toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union—risking nuclear war—to prevent Moscow’s all-out support for Israel’s Arab foes. After the superb and U.S.-resupplied Israeli military rallied to defeat the Arab armies, U.S. aid proved to be, not a stopgap, wartime measure, but the opening of a spigot through which would flow unlimited, no-strings-attached financial, military, and diplomatic support for Israel. As the level of this support grew, so too did efforts by pro-Israel Americans in both parties and large parts of academia, the media, and Hollywood—complemented by what can only be described as superbly effective covert political action by Israel’s intelligence services3—to entwine U.S. support for Israel ever more deeply and inextricably into U.S. domestic politics. Indeed by the morning of the 9/11 attacks, unquestioning U.S. support for Israel was as much a domestic political issue—exactly the same kind of politically sacrosanct “third rail” as Social Security—as it was a foreign-affairs matter. Of all the foreign policy issues that have come before the American people in their history, support for Israel was and is perhaps the only one that is certainly immune to challenge or change and very nearly exempt from comment, criticism, or debate. And Israel, of course, is not the real problem here. Reasonable people can disagree over what the nature of U.S. support for Israel—if any—should be. The problem lies, rather, in the reality that such disagreement and the debate it would naturally engender are not possible in America because critics of the relationship are shouted down as anti-Semites by the bipartisan governing elite and Israel’s U.S.-citizen acolytes and agents.
The inauguration and domestication of the U.S.-Israel relationship surely ranks as one of the least debated and most undemocratic watershed events in American history, one that is now costing us both blood and treasure and will cost us much more of each in the future. The U.S. federal government, without any initial authorization save the president’s decision, tied America’s future relations with the Islamic world to an ever-tightening, one-way relationship with the state of Israel, a country devoid of any natural, political, or geographic resources needed by the United States; virtually undefendable against a united foe; and then as now absolutely irrelevant and manifestly counterproductive to the national-security interests of the United States. All of President Nixon’s successors and all successive Congresses have tied the United States more closely and expensively to Israel, to the extent that an attack of any sort on Israel is responded to by Washington as if an enemy had reached out and smashed Delaware or some other state of the Union.
While Nixon risked nuclear war with Moscow for Israel’s sake, today America, as the unquestioning superpower supporter of anything and everything that Israel does, confronts more than a billion Muslims. One cannot help but wonder what the Founders would have thought of such an absurd situation, one in which Americans and their future are put increasingly at risk to further the interests of a state that contributes nothing to America’s economic welfare or strategic security but rather is a drain on both. Reflect for a moment on George Washington’s advice to his countrymen on the occasion of his retirement from the presidency, then decide for yourself if America’s current relationship with Israel is in the national interest. In foreign policy, Washington wrote,
a passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and Wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite Nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the Nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained; and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom eql. [equal] privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite Nation) facility to betray, or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable
zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption or infatuation.4
Is there a better description of the dangers America faces because of its governing elite’s “passionate attachment” to Israel? Is not our adversarial relationship with the Palestinians and Muslims generally an example of the “infusing” into America of the “enmities” of Israel? And what better definition of the double standard that our Islamist foes cite is there than the “concessions to the favorite Nation of privileges denied to others” in the form of the constant U.S. veto of any UN resolution condemning Israeli actions?
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