Summing Up, 1973–96: Gulliver Recklessly Binds Himself
In the years between 1973 and 1996, then, U.S. leaders—the elected and unelected of both parties and their senior civil servants—made a number of decisions that severely limited America’s foreign policy options and military credibility by the time the 9/11 attacks occurred. The pattern of these decisions also encouraged al-Qaeda and other Islamists to strongly suspect that Washington would not respond with all the power at its command no matter what sort of attack was launched against the United States.
It would be foolish of course to argue that U.S. policymakers should have made none of the decisions discussed above in anticipation of the emergence of a foe like Osama bin Laden. Many things can and should be demanded of policymakers, but 20/20 foresight is not one of them. There was no way to anticipate the rise of a unique and history-altering figure like bin Laden, although the path he trod to that emergence was clear long before U.S. policymakers accepted the seriousness of the developments they were watching. Two remarkable points about the decisions, however, must cause one to wonder whether the foregoing decisions made any kind of common sense for the national-security interests of the United States and its citizens.
The decisions that bound America to very public, bipartisan, and unquestioning support for anti-Arab Israel, to a less public but just as firm support for the anti-Israeli Arab police states, and to our enduring acquiescence in allowing the latter to hold the life-and-death energy lever over the U.S. economy surely must be open to question solely on the basis of common sense, without any reference whatsoever to bin Laden and the Islamist threat. By unstintingly supporting both sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict U.S. policymakers consciously gave a set of potentially lethal hostages to fortune that were and are almost entirely beyond U.S. control. One-sided support for Israel in the conflict not only increasingly alienated the Muslim world but especially alienated Saudi Arabia, whose king’s status as the Protector of the Two Holy Mosques gives the kingdom at least symbolic leadership in the Arab war against Israel. Saudi Arabia, in turn, was and is the world’s key oil producer and as such constantly keeps at least a theoretical pistol trained on the head of the U.S. economy.
These two policy decisions allied us with the theocracies in Israel and Saudi Arabia—surely a vastly ironic situation for the secular American republic and its taxpayers, who are in effect forced to pay to support the regimes of religions to which almost none of them belong. The policies have made us responsible for the survival of two mortal enemies, one of which has developed a large undocumented, unmeasured, and uninspected arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and the other of which could bring the U.S. economy and military to a grinding halt in less than a year by closing the oil spigot.32 Both likewise know that they can play havoc with U.S. domestic politics, Israel via its powerful lobby, covert political action, and propaganda machine, and Riyadh via its own potent lobby, ability to hike prices at the pump, and holding of vast amounts of U.S. government securities. Because each holds a whip-hand over all presidential administrations, Israel feels free to do as it pleases vis-à-vis Palestine, and Saudi Arabia makes little effort to disguise the massively expensive and successful campaign it is running to spread a particularly virulent anti-American and anti-Western form of Islam worldwide, nowhere more aggressively than in the United States.
In addition, both of these de facto alliances traduce much of what the Founders intended America to stand for. America has been bound to a self-professed “Jewish state” and equally to self-professed “Islamic states,” neither of which is open to the kind of freedom the Founders envisioned, not even to the Protestant Christianity that so thoroughly informs America’s constitution, and the only faith on which the Founders believed the republic could endure. “Our Constitution,” John Adams wrote in October 1798, in reference to that Protestant Christianity, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”33
Washington’s resolute, bipartisan maintenance of these alliances, with countries renowned for political intolerance, religious bigotry, and studied duplicity, has done more than anything else to undercut the Muslim world’s perception of America as a model for fair-minded and tolerant self-government. Our willing, abject, and seemingly permanent surrender to a dependence on foreigners for the energy needed to keep our economy functioning, moreover, would have appalled the Founders, who prized the maintenance of foreign-policy options and complete American independence on the decision of peace or war. On energy, quite simply, Washington has voluntarily ceded control over our economic destiny to barely disguised enemies, and committed the nation to war in their defense if energy supplies are threatened.
The other set of decisions saw the U.S. government steadily develop the habit of pulling its punch whenever it was forced to formulate a military response to an attack on U.S. interests and citizens. These decisions likewise cannot be blamed on the failure to envision the emergence of militant Islam. But our now firmly ingrained reluctance—even fear—to respond with overwhelming force when attacked provided those who later formed al-Qaeda and its allies the loud-and-clear lesson that they had little to fear from U.S. military retaliation. Long before 9/11, the Islamists had pegged the United States as a super-talker rhetorically and as a super-diddler militarily.
Taken together, these two sets of decisions framed the conclusion in the minds of Osama bin Laden and our other Islamist foes that America is in a box of its own making, from which it will be hard put to extricate itself. Bin Laden and other Islamists believe that because of the American public’s unwarranted emotional guilt over the Holocaust, the wealth and resultant political influence of pro-Israeli figures and organizations in U.S. domestic politics, and Israel’s superb covert action inside the United States—which has created a situation where Americans damn other Americans for questioning the U.S.-Israel relationship and try to limit their willingness to speak out by slinging the anti-Semite slur—U.S. foreign policy is all but welded to support Israel without limit. Bin Laden and his like were and are confident that, of all the U.S. policies they could use as foils, America’s ties to Israel was among the most difficult for Washington to change or even to recognize as being in need of change.
Bin Laden also has come to count on the durability of Washington’s path-of-least-resistance willingness to see its economy, and those of its allies, stay dependent on oil produced on the Arabian Peninsula. This, in turn, binds Washington to its longstanding policy of supporting tyrannical governments in Saudi Arabia, elsewhere on the peninsula, and across the Muslim world, thereby discrediting Western calls for democracy for Muslims and creating ever more discontent toward America and the West among Islamic peoples who believe that U.S. support for their governments is an endorsement of the tyranny and repression imposed on them.
Believing that America has locked itself into nearly irreversible policies—ones that are simple to compellingly advertise as anti-Islamic—the icing on the cake for the Islamists is America’s repeated failure to annihilate enemies when opportunities arise. In the period between bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war and the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden, his lieutenants, and their allies experienced on a first-hand basis further validation of these conclusions via a series of U.S. actions and nonactions that seemed to prove that Washington’s worldview was still dominated by a Cold War mindset that worked well against nation-state opponents but has yielded almost no positive results against transnational threats such as those posed by the Islamists.
CHAPTER 2
Fighting Islamists with a Blinding Cold War Hangover, 1996–2001
The National Commission on Terrorism…issued its report last week…. It vastly exaggerates the terrorist threat [to the United States]…. On average, more Americans have died annually over the last five years from venomous snake or scorpion bites than at the hands of international terrorists.
Larry Johnson, 2000
The dogmas of the quie
t past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so must we think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Abraham Lincoln, 1862
How many times have Americans heard the leaders of political parties, as well as senior bureaucrats, pundits, generals, and academics, mimic Mr. Lincoln by solemnly proclaiming that “the Cold War is over,” that the “long nuclear nightmare has ended,” and that the post–Cold War world requires “new thinking” or (that most detestable, incorrect, and repellent of catch-phrases) “thinking outside the box.” In all likelihood, the endless repetition of these stock cant phrases is about the only thing that has outpaced the long-ignored training camps’ production of professional Islamist insurgents and terrorists. The “Cold War is over” phrases and the mujahedin, however, do have at least one thing in common: they both have the potential to defeat the United States.
I must admit up front that I am neither an expert on the Cold War nor one of those CIA officers who had the honor to spend his career in the ultimately successful, Ronald Reagan–capped effort to destroy the Soviet Union. Indeed, I made a decision early in my career to try to avoid any assignments that primarily focused on either Israel or the Soviet Union, both of which were intertwined in the general ambit of Cold War issues when I joined the Agency in 1982. I avoided Israel because the U.S. relationship with that state was clearly and inexorably drawing America into a religious war—Muslim versus Jew—in which we had no plausible interest and to which there was no imaginable solution. “Unlike most wars,” the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams wrote in summing up this dark reality in 2000, “which are rooted in territorial disputes, the unrest in the Middle East is, at bottom, a religious struggle. For either side—Jewish or Muslim—to compromise would be to commit suicide on those core values that endows each culture with its unique meaning.”1 I also steered clear of the Israeli account because the pro-Israel orientation of every presidential administration under which I worked was so pervasive that there was no call from or tolerance among policymakers and senior IC bureaucrats for intelligence (reports from the field or formal intelligence assessments) that pointed to the massive, obvious, and deadly handicap Washington’s succoring of Israel posed for U.S. interests in the Islamic world. Whenever such information surfaced, which was frequently, the administration of the day deployed the all-purpose, Cold War–era defense: no matter what the cost, America’s vital national interests demand that we must support Israel because it is an island of democracy in a region threatened by Soviet expansionism. This defense survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, with its champions simply deleting “Soviet” and replacing it with the now fashionable and deliberately misleading term “Islamofascist terrorists.” It is no more true to say that U.S. national security depends on the survival of an Israeli democracy—itself an oxymoronic term—than to say America is threatened only by a small number of Muslims, who are terrorists and criminals, who hate our freedoms, who have nothing to do with religion, and who in no way speak for any significant part of the Islamic world. When analyzed, each argument conduces to lethal nonsense. Israel’s survival is not essential to U.S. security, and the threat America faces from Islamist militancy is huge, growing, and motivated by a faith that perceives itself under attack by U.S. foreign policy, part of which is seen as U.S. subservience to Israel.2
I also tried to avoid working on the Soviet Union because after serving as a CIA analyst for a few years it became apparent that the overall attitude of senior Agency managers was (notwithstanding Reagan’s clearly stated goal of defeating the USSR) that the Soviet Union had a lot of life in it and that the Cold War would be perking along long after all current CIA employees had tottered off into retirement. Like many Americans, I have a fairly short attention span, and I had no intention whatsoever of working on an issue that had been in play for thirty-seven years when I joined the Agency and that all my betters believed would be in full swing on the day I was slipped a gold watch. The closest I came to working on the Soviet Union was to do all I could to help the Afghan mujahedin kill as many Soviet military personnel as possible. I accepted this job in late 1985 because I was weary of working in the Directorate of Intelligence on the stultifying issue of the ballet of Cold War politics in Western Europe—my first and last purely analytic assignment—and because I thought the Soviets deserved to die, and because the Afghans were doing America’s work for us by trying to give them their just deserts. It also was a job that provided a strong suggestion that the federal bureaucracy had a tendency to be “protective” regarding the Soviet Union,3 and that at least some officers working on the USSR tended toward a view that attributed a rough moral equivalency to the two superpowers. In addition, I took the job because working on covert-action wars at the CIA is great fun and brought two other possibilities—infamy if the war went badly, promotion if the war progressed or was won. Because the Afghans won, helping them to kill Russians was definitely a career enhancer and I hope in some very small way helped Reagan’s effort to overcome an Intelligence Community bureaucracy that was largely happy and content with the Cold War status quo.
I say all this in prelude to a discussion of what seems to me to be Cold War leftovers (ways of thinking about and perceiving the world) that continue to this day to plague the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Unless, as Mr. Lincoln said, U.S. leaders disenthrall themselves from this Cold War hangover, they will never formulate a precisely accurate estimate of the threat posed by the Islamist forces led and inspired by bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Again, I claim no Kissinger-or Richard Pipes-like experience or expertise on either Cold War history or the USSR as a political entity, but I can at least claim to be an informed observer of both, and a bit-better-than-average student of America’s steadily worsening confrontation with the Islamic world.
Sense of Time: After the Soviet Union acquired a nuclear capability and the means of delivering it to the continental United States, the Cold War settled in and, certainly by the mid-1950s, took on the appearance of permanence. Decade after decade the Cold War continued and, aside from an occasional harrowing blip that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war (the Berlin blockade, the Cuban missile crisis, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the tense 1983–84 period), U.S. elected officials and their senior foreign-policy bureaucrats planned policy based on a vision that saw no end to the Cold War. And once the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) kicked in, the Cold War’s nuclear-standoff scenario seemed to be mankind’s earthly destiny.
This reality came to be accepted as the definition of normality, and time moved for politicians and policymakers at a steady and relatively undisturbed pace. To say that the Cold War world was a nine-to-five affair with weekends off for the U.S. politicians, civil servants, and military personnel managing the U.S.-Soviet relationship would be an exaggeration, but it would not be much of one. If, for example, U.S. intelligence found that the Soviets had begun designing a new military aircraft, such information would cause a flurry of activity, debate, staff work, and decision-making. That activity would yield a U.S. program to design a better aircraft that could be fielded in the same time frame as the Soviet plane. The decision was an important one for U.S. security, but the time line for accomplishing its goal was quite a few years in the future. So while the discovery of Soviet intentions was essential, and immediate remedial action was required, most Cold War “emergencies” allowed response times numbered in years and not in months, weeks, days, or hours.
Cold War–era military conflicts also tended to last for years: Vietnam, 1963–75; Afghanistan, 1979–92; and Korea, 1950–today, the last outliving the Cold War itself. Once begun, these conflicts of course needed to be managed and decisions had to be made, but the decisions were intended to calibrate the pace of the ongoing conflict, not to make a final decision where victory or defeat hung in the balance. And decisions about these wars were never take
n in the context of having to prevent an imminent attack on U.S. territory. Superpower arms-control negotiations also went on for multiple decades in Geneva, during U.S.-Soviet summits, and at the United Nations, as did the talks pertaining to the Arab-Israeli conflict, each side of which had a superpower supporter. These gab-athons seldom yielded surprises or results, and decisions could be made when the time was right—or not made at all—at these forums; indeed, success was often defined as the continuation of discussions without much eagerness or even hope for a culmination.
Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Page 8