Who would have thought that political leaders who had the realism and moral courage to stare down the nuclear-armed Soviets for half a century would be intimidated, after Moscow’s demise, by organizations that offered nothing but tripe and wasted time? But that is exactly what has happened. Organizations that were impediments to the political unity of nation-states but useful free-speech ornaments in defeating the Soviet Union (by ensuring that the Bolshevik model appealed to no one outside Western universities) became in the post–Cold War era serious obstacles to the national security of the United States by handicapping its ability to use military force effectively to defend itself. Today, for example, when U.S. ground forces deploy abroad for combat, the terrain is occupied not only by the enemy but also by any number of NGOs who assist the enemy’s survival by making more difficult the rapid and direct movement of military units and whose presence on the battlefield often makes impossible the immediate application of firepower on targets. This is not to say that NGOs do not do good work; many obviously run first-rate humanitarian relief operations, although large numbers of Western NGOs manifest a strong antimilitary and anti-U.S. bias. But they have no place on a battlefield. If there are NGOs in a theater of operations as war begins, they should quickly evacuate of their own accord or be forced out as combat commences. If they choose to stay and resist eviction, they should be treated as expendables and take whatever firepower comes their way. The only mercy in wartime is quick and utter victory, and U.S. forces should not be slowed in their quest for victory by the foolish stubbornness of NGOs.
A worse impediment to defending U.S. national security, however, is the interlocking network of human-rights organizations. No other organizations on earth are more anti-American or have less balance and contact with reality. When American forces deploy these days, they are not only confronted by the enemy and encumbered by NGOs, but every U.S. service person—man and woman, private and general—must, as they seek to kill the enemy in whatever numbers necessary to prevail, operate under the prying, biased, busybody, and war-crimes-litigation-eager eyes of human-rights groups, monitors, and advocates. Our military, as a result, now operates under rules of engagement that make them more targets than killers. I am not arguing that these organizations have no right to exist; our system is worth fighting for because it protects dissent by and debate among both the reasonable and the irrational. The human-rights mafia, however, has no standing to prevent America from defending itself, which in wartime means quickly annihilating the enemy and its support networks, whatever the niceties of Cold War–era human rights accords, treaties, and conventions that were designed specifically for a world of nation-states and an environment in which a war for survival was unlikely to occur.
In the 1996–2001 period these antinational organizations continued to be taken as seriously by U.S. leaders as they were during the Cold War era, perhaps even more so. The end of the Soviet Union saw the reemergence of a much more Hobbesian world; nation-states proliferated, transnational threats grew, religious militancy intensified, and the lack of a central existential threat made individual nations more insistent on pursuing their own interests and much less willing to subordinate them for the common Western good. While not yet a case of all against all, the trend line is in that direction. U.S. leaders took no notice, however, and instead of reverting to form and acting as a national government ought to act—that is, in a timely manner to protect its citizens and interests—they continued to heed the international law and norms of behavior established during the Cold War and most suitable for a world where nation-states are the main actors. More than that, these leaders continued to be intimidated by the groups noted above.
The absurdity of giving these groups and their often-celebrity spokespersons a telling voice at the table of government was apparent to the CIA officers working against bin Laden and al-Qaeda after their return to Afghanistan from Sudan in May 1996. Shortly thereafter the Taliban regime consolidated power over most of Afghanistan and offered bin Laden and his fighters the status of protected guests. There was, to be fair, never much chance that Washington could have negotiated with the Taliban to secure bin Laden’s arrest and extradition. No people are more protective of their guests than Afghans, and none is less likely to abide by the coercively phrased demands of a foreign power. Still, the Taliban did want Washington to recognize it as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, and it was no threat to the United States except that it hosted bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The Clinton administration underscored this reality with its ardor for a deal with the Taliban to allow Union Oil Company of California (UNOCAL) to build a natural gas pipeline through southern Afghanistan while bin Laden was resident there.15 For those of us working the issue, therefore, it seemed reasonable that Washington should use all the levers of its power to seek bin Laden’s turnover and to avoid giving the Taliban more reasons to refuse.
But such a commonsense approach was foreclosed by the voice and influence of a woman named Mavis Leno, the comedian’s wife, and her Hollywood sisters-in-feminism. While sitting around the pool, Mrs. Leno et al. apparently decided that social and political rights for Afghan women would be their cause-of-the-moment, and they had no problem getting a hearing in the White House given President Clinton’s adolescent passion for winning the admiration of the young and inexperienced and the applause and dollars of media celebrities; one might call it the Lewinsky-Streisand syndrome. Mrs. Leno, the chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation, and the leaders of NOW forced the Senate to pass a resolution (SR 68, May 5, 1999) calling on the president not to recognize the Taliban unless rights for women were secured.16
Thus, eliminating the threat from bin Laden and al-Qaeda—the most important U.S. national-security goal in Afghanistan—was encumbered by a second demand on which the Taliban was just as hard-over: Western-style rights for Afghan women. By allowing Mrs. Leno and her sisters-in-the-cause to shape U.S. Afghan policy in favor of an issue that is not remotely a genuine U.S. national interest, Clinton and his lieutenants blithely forfeited the admittedly small chance that Washington had to resolve the bin Laden issue with the Taliban before 9/11. I can think of about six thousand American families who today believe that it might have been better for Mr. Clinton to have told Mrs. Leno to stage a letter-writing campaign to Taliban chief Mullah Omar while Mr. Clinton pulled out the stops in using all the federal government’s powers and options to try to eliminate bin Laden.
Soft Power and Public Diplomacy: There has been no better description of what America’s brand of soft power should be than that proposed by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in a speech made on July 4, 1821. In the speech Adams advised his countrymen that when the world asks “what has America done to benefit mankind? Let our answer be this:
America with the same voice that spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has inevitably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, or equal freedom, or generous reciprocity…She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, equal justice, and of equal rights…Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.17
This is the sort of mind-our-own-business soft power that the Founders envisioned America using: the positive example of a republic’s disciplined self-government and the visible benefits derived from it by Americans. During the Cold War soft power provided the core of U.S. public diplomacy and was a key component of Washington’s comprehensive anti-Soviet policy. But the influence of such soft power in the defeat of the USSR has come to be greatly overestimated
in the period since that happy event. U.S. soft power operated and did its work under the overall umbrella of a nuclear balance that all but negated the chance of world war save via an almost unimaginable set of miscalculations. Once this balance was established, U.S. soft power was unchallenged, less because of its self-evident purity and beneficence than because its Bolshevik opponent had virtually nothing to offer in the soft-power category—freedom was pitted against tyranny, faith against atheism, meritocracy against nepotism, and material plenty against chronic shortages. For U.S. and Western appliers of soft power it was like shooting ducks in a barrel of vodka. As the historian Charles S. Maier has written, those in the West’s camp accepted “American hegemony because it had provided a defense against a rival and a far more oppressive domination.” Rather than persuasive soft power, Maier notes, “Washington’s fundamental asset was the capacity to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.”18
Once the Soviet system dissolved, America’s practitioners and advocates of soft power—often they are one and the same—took all too much credit for victory and began to see soft power as a potential future war winner. Truth to tell, had U.S. hard power and Moscow’s belief that Washington would use it not existed, U.S. soft power would not have been worth Cactus Jack Garner’s bucket of warm spit. In the post–Cold War world, U.S. soft power no longer has a corrupt, sclerotic, and sordid nation-state to attack, and moreover nationalism and religious faith have been reinvigorated with a vengeance. As a result, many nations, groups, and peoples—especially in the Muslim world—grew slowly resistant and then directly hostile to American soft power, seeing its attributes as something not to aspire to but to ward off for reasons of faith or national identity or both. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, however, Washington continued pushing the Cold War–era soft-power product as if the world had not changed after 1991, an effort at self-delusion that is supported by that tireless proponent of soft power, Harvard’s Joseph Nye.19
In addition, U.S. leaders either did not notice or lacked the courage to admit that large components of traditional American soft power were fast decaying. With the end of the Soviet threat, for example, both Western and Third World peoples became more acutely aware of the lethal hypocrisy inherent in a soft-power approach that preached democracy, individual rights, and liberty, while the U.S. and Western purveyors of that approach ever more handsomely kept police states on doles funded by their taxpayers. Over time funding, protecting, and apologizing for the likes of Mubarak, the al-Sauds, and other tyrants eroded the moral suasion the Founders intended their disciplined, self-governing polity to exude. In John Quincy Adams’s words, Washington was still able to “commend the general cause [of liberty] by the countenance of her voice” but because of her close ties to tyrants could no longer evoke popular support by “the benignant sympathy of her example.”20 Nowhere was this truer than in the Muslim world, where U.S.-and Western-backed dictators have suppressed their peoples since 1945 and have thereby built a wide and responsive audience for Osama bin Laden’s demand for liberation from those tyrants. America’s governing elite also failed to acknowledge—this they could not have missed—that the popular-culture component of U.S. soft power was becoming increasingly malodorous. Indeed, since the fall of the Berlin Wall American popular culture has come to stand in the same relationship to the Western canon of literature, music, and art as untreated sewage to potable water. Professor Nye has written that soft power “is the ability to get what you want by attracting others to adopt your goals,” but in an era of worldwide religious revival the combination of hatred for U.S. foreign policy and revulsion toward our increasingly pagan culture is a heavy and in the long run unsupportable burden for soft power to bear and still hope to “attract” Muslims.21
Between 1996 and 2001 Washington’s use of soft power was still very much based on the Cold War model. U.S. public diplomacy sang a never-ending hymn about the glories of secular democracy, yet has demonstrated an absolute willingness to ensure the survival of tyrannies that are either useful to us or hold us in their thrall. There is no better example than Washington’s alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In the period between December 1995 and June 1999, I was the chief of the CIA unit charged with collecting intelligence to help the U.S. government understand the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and to track, locate, and eliminate that threat.22 As one of the unit’s first actions in early 1996, we requested that the Saudis provide the CIA with basic information about bin Laden. That request remained unfulfilled on September 11, 2001, and when I resigned from CIA on November 12, 2004. The Saudis, moreover, refused to provide any sort of other help in regard to bin Laden and al-Qaeda. As a sign of the influence the Saudi regime wields within the U.S. government our continued requests to the Saudis were ultimately not supported by senior U.S. political and diplomatic officials in the Clinton administration. Clearly, the Saudis were not helping the United States to eliminate the man and organization that had declared war on America, but because of their close ties to the U.S. governing elite and their crucial role in providing energy to the United States and its allies, Washington continued to pretend they were our friends.
Thus the U.S. government knowingly put itself in a no-win position. At one and the same time we publicly supported a brutal, medieval Arab tyranny—denigrating the soft-power potential of championing democracy—and took no action against a government that helped ensure that bin Laden and al-Qaeda remained beyond the reach of the United States throughout the pre-9/11 years. Even today, the Saudis know they have taken our measure and are eager to show they have nothing but contempt for both soft and hard U.S. power. In November 2007, for example, Saudi Prince Bandar—former ambassador to the United States and now the Saudi king’s national security adviser—told Al-Arabiya television that Saudi intelligence was “actively following” most of the 9/11 plotters “with precision” and “[i]f U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened [the 9/11 attacks].” Incredibly, not a single U.S. government official or politician of either party challenged, let alone denied, what I would evaluate as Bandar’s fabrication; instead, by their silence, all condoned Bandar’s implicit claim that U.S. negligence alone prevented the preemption of the 9/11 attacks. If the Saudis knew the bombers and were following them before 9/11 and did not tell us, Bandar and the Saudi ruling clique withheld information that makes them culpable for the 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 and all the others that have died in war since.23
Nation-State Fixation: Of all the aspects of the U.S. governing elite’s post–Cold War hangover, its fixation on threats from nation-states is the most understandable: America’s half-century face-off against the USSR was preeminently a state-vs.-state confrontation. The durability of the fixation was obvious in both Bush administrations’ wars against Iraq: the elder Mr. Bush echoed World War II rhetoric about thwarting aggression against Kuwait, while the younger Mr. Bush and his advisers looked for a nation-state to assign culpability for 9/11. It can also be seen in the war drums that both Republicans and Democrats beat more or less regularly vis-à-vis the supposed threats from Iran and North Korea. And this focus is not misplaced, only myopia-inducing. The just-mentioned states, plus Russia and China, do to a greater or lesser degree threaten America. The nation-state threat has not disappeared, but for the moment it is eminently containable.
But the nation-state threat invariably remains at the head of the line in Washington’s formulation of foreign and defense policies. While the last three administrations have talked the talk of transnational threats, the walk they have walked—from weapons systems and NATO expansion, to wars, air strikes, and economic sanctions on Iraq—is nation-state centric. This reality is very marked in regard to al-Qaeda and its threat to use weapons of mass destruction inside the United States. As noted, bin Laden made this threat before 9/11, and the U.S. Intelligence Community has consistently told the Executive Branch tha
t in 1992 al-Qaeda formed a special unit—staffed by engineers, technicians, and hard scientists—to try to build, steal, or purchase such weapons. Indeed, the U.S. government held first-hand reporting from an individual who had participated in a failed al-Qaeda attempt to purchase uranium. Then after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan U.S. personnel recovered documents showing that al-Qaeda’s deputy chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been running two programs to develop chemical weapons, each of which was compartmented from the other and proceeding on different paths. Finally in May 2003 al-Qaeda secured a treatise from an important Saudi Islamic scholar that sanctioned the use of nuclear weapons in the United States and set the upper limit of religiously permissible American casualties at ten million.24 Americans can take minor comfort, I suppose, in the fact that bin Laden must go back to the clerics and win their approval if he plans to kill more than ten million Americans. They should take no comfort, however, from the fact that the Saudi authorities “persuaded” the cleric to recant the approval expressed in his treatise. Such recantations are produced by Riyadh and other Arab regimes simply to deceive Western governments and publics. Few Muslims, radical or otherwise, put stock in such reversals because their prevailing and probably accurate assumption is that the individual’s reversal of view was prompted by threats or physical punishment directed at him or his family.
One can agree or disagree about whether al-Qaeda has a nuclear device, as well as about whether it would know how to detonate one, but it is impossible to argue that bin Laden is not pursuing such a weapon or that al-Qaeda would not use it if acquired. And yet that is exactly how the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have behaved. They have not been bashful about warning Americans about this possibility, but twelve years after bin Laden declared war, and six-plus years after 9/11, U.S. borders remain porous to the point of being wide open. Instead of seeing border control as perhaps the single most vital element of homeland security, our governing elite have turned it into a political issue with which to court Hispanic voters, a tactic that can only be seen as meaning our leaders value their offices more than the lives of Americans. More disastrously, sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the three post-1988 U.S. presidential administrations have failed to push to conclusion the U.S.-Russian program to secure the 22,000 nuclear devices that form the former USSR’s nuclear arsenal. The Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, in fact, have cut funding and manpower for the program.25 Open borders and unaccounted-for nuclear devices are a dangerous combination, especially because al-Qaeda and America’s other enemies have been on the trail of the latter since 1992.
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