How to explain such criminal negligence? One possible answer is that our leaders are still of a mind that genuine national-security threats come only from nation-states. But that seems unlikely given that post–Cold War Democratic and Republican administrations have specialized in undermining U.S. national security by ludicrous actions or inactions toward nation-states: not pushing Russia to secure its nuclear weapons; allowing Saudi Arabia to continue to hold the energy hammer over the head of the U.S. economy; and encouraging China to hold a percentage of U.S. debt that could be used as a kind of WMD in its own right. Unable or unwilling to recognize the threat posed by al-Qaeda and other transnational threats, and actively disinvesting in U.S. security by surrendering strategic advantages to ill-disposed nation-states, perhaps the best explanation is simple incompetence and a dearth of common sense.
Just-War Theorists: Like antinationalist organizations and soft-power advocates, the just-war theorists flourished under the umbrella of U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces and have grown livelier and more dangerous to U.S. national security since the end of the Cold War. Tracing their roots back to Saint Augustine, the just-war theorists have become ever more strident in their rhetoric and ever more influential with their doctrines, especially that of proportional and discriminate response—a theory that usually leaves America in an ineffective, tit-for-tat military response mode against its enemies.26
Like other antinationalist groups, the just-war theorists were abetted by U.S. and Western political leaders during the Cold War and have become even more popular with those political leaders since 1991. Indeed, the influence of the just-war theorists has increased in direct proportion to the downturn in the quality of political leadership that the West has experienced since the end of the Reagan-Thatcher era. The moral cowardice that is rife among today’s Western leaders makes them eager to use just-war doctrine and its totem of proportional response to avoid the popular opprobrium inherent in the effective use of military power. Today weak and ineffective military responses to attacks on or threats to the United States are not mistakes; they are rather evidence that elected leaders and too many U.S. strategists and generals have listened to the just-war theorists and are conducting war in a “civilized” manner.
Hogwash. The antinational and antihumanity triumph of the just-war theorists can be seen in the dozen half-fought, waiting-to-be-resumed wars that litter the world. Proportional and discriminate responses are the recipe for only one sure thing: wars that are never finished and enemies who always have the time and calm in which to regroup, reequip, and fight another day. From Haiti to the Balkans, and from Somalia to Afghanistan, proportional response has left America’s enemies intact and biding their time for another round. Half a millennium ago the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli reminded his readers that a nation cannot use patience and goodness to subdue enemies; it must exact vengeance through punitive actions that annihilate present enemies and make their successors think twice before pursuing attacks that risk the same response.27 Perhaps more pertinent words for Americans, though harsher sounding, are those of the Civil War era’s General Philip H. Sheridan. “The main thing in true strategy is simply this,” Sheridan wrote in his memoirs. “First deal as hard blows at the enemy’s soldiers as possible, and then cause so much suffering to the inhabitants of a country that they will long for peace and press their government to make it. Nothing should be left to the people but eyes to lament the war.” Al-Qaeda and its allies, of course, do not govern or possess countries, so the populations among which they live and hide will have to be punished until they will no longer allow the Islamists to base among them.28
The period between 1996 and 2001 demonstrated in detail how damaging the doctrine of proportional response was to U.S. interests, and how it simultaneously allowed our Islamist enemies to not only survive but also to proliferate, to train, and to believe as an article of faith that America would never use its military power effectively. We already have seen how both President George H. W. Bush and President Clinton fretted about what the world would think if they used the military power that Americans have paid for to protect their country. That thought process again carried the day in the summer of 1998. On August 7, 1998, al-Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in attacks that occurred less than ten minutes apart. Several hundred people were killed, and more than five thousand were wounded.
In response, President Clinton ordered the U.S. military to prepare cruise-missile attacks on al-Qaeda-related training facilities near Khowst, in southeastern Afghanistan, and against a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan. Intelligence reporting showed that the latter was handling precursor materials for chemical weapons, and the plant appeared to be part of the Sudanese government’s effort to develop weapons of mass destruction. On August 20, 1998, the U.S. military launched about one hundred cruise missiles at the two targets. Both attacks occurred after dark when few people would be in the vicinity. The end result was (as in the 1993 attack on Iraq’s intelligence headquarters) few enemy casualties and a lot of broken bricks and concrete. The U.S. military had begun using million-dollar-a-copy missiles to do the work of day laborers armed with thirty-dollar sledgehammers.
The bigger of the two raids was focused on the Khowst training facilities because several intelligence sources reported that bin Laden was going to meet other senior mujahedin leaders there on August 20, 1998. As it turned out, according to Abu Jandal, the al-Qaeda chief’s former bodyguard, bin Laden decided at the last minute to skip the trip to Khowst and go to Kabul instead.29 Interestingly, even if bin Laden had been there, it would have taken a good deal of luck to kill him. The camp facilities at Khowst are fairly extensive and cover a substantial piece of ground. So the best chance we had of killing bin Laden was to pinpoint the main mosque that would be used for the evening prayers; wherever he and the other mujhaedin chiefs were in the Khowst complex, they were (given what we knew about their behavior) very likely to gather at the mosque to pray. The White House, however, did not order the missile strike to occur at evening prayer time but rather several hours afterward.30 Why? Because even if it meant severely degrading the chances of killing the man who a fortnight earlier had caused nearly six thousand casualties in east Africa, U.S. leaders thought it was more important to avoid offending the Muslim world (and, of course, Europe’s elites) than to use the disproportionate force that might have ensured the death of bin Laden, even at the cost of hundreds of other Islamist fighters at prayer, many of whom surely had not been involved in the embassy bombings. The application of the just-war theorists’ concept of “proportionate response,” in short, almost certainly would have spared bin Laden’s life had he been at Khowst that night, leaving him alive to plan—as he did—the attacks on the USS Cole, New York, and Washington.
Ahistorical Thinking: The Cold War, I think, was a historical anomaly; in many ways, it was a fifty-year, out-of-the-box experience that absolutely required out-of-the-box thinking. For the first time in human history, national leaders had the ability to kill many tens of millions of people over the course of twenty-four hours, while simultaneously making large swaths of the world uninhabitable for generations if not centuries. Indeed, these leaders theoretically held in their hands the potential for ending human life on earth. The task of managing this just-around-the-corner Armageddon had no precedent; U.S. leaders learned as they went, and all praise and honor is due to them for their success. But in many ways these leaders enjoyed a luxury that their predecessors and successors did not and do not enjoy. The leaders of the Cold War era worked in an environment where the balance of contending forces, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, and the development and deployment of multiple technologies to provide early warning more or less deleted unexpected threats, surprise attacks, and the need to stage preemptive attacks from their list of things to lose sleep over in regard to other nation-states.
What should have struck the Cold War’s elected le
aders, policymakers, bureaucrats, and generals was that they were living through an ahistorical era. In few periods of modern history were the chances lower of surprise attack and total war between great powers. These individuals should have reveled in the great good luck they enjoyed in serving America during Pax Atomica, but they should have likewise been consistently reminding themselves that their luck might someday run out. More important, they should have been mentoring their successors, to the point of hectoring, that history suggested that such good fortune could not last forever and that the much more unpredictable pre–Pax Atomica world would someday return and with it the requisite resumption of thinking inside the historical box. Our leaders did not perform this reality check on themselves; nor apparently did they press it upon their subordinates. The result in the 1996–9/11 period was that history resumed while the U.S. governing elite continued to think about and perceive the world as if the out-of-the-box Cold War era were still moving along in full swing. “The problem…that unpleasantly confronts us here at the beginning of the 21st century,” Georgetown University scholar Joshua Mitchell has argued, is that the Cold War’s end removed “the temporary masking of those darker aspirations in the human heart: order, honor, and tribal affiliation…The people of the Middle East know nothing of the victory of freedom and the end of history. That myth is ours, not theirs.”31
Proof of this failure can be found most eloquently in the words of the cochairmen of the 9/11 Commission and the NSC’s counterterrorism chief under President Clinton and George W. Bush, Messrs. Lee Hamilton, Thomas Kean, and Richard Clarke. Each of these gentleman led off his post-9/11 evaluation of what went wrong before al-Qaeda’s attacks by claiming that U.S. policymakers, politicians, generals, and senior intelligence officers had suffered a “failure of imagination” about what al-Qaeda and Islamist militants intended to do to the United States. There was, this troika (and many other graybeards) claimed, not enough out-of-the-box thinking about the Islamist threat to America.32
These assertions irrefutably prove that even after 9/11 these gentlemen all remained firmly rooted in the historically anomalous, outside-the-box, Cold War experience. The years from 1996 to 9/11 were chock-a-block with evidence that history had resumed with great gusto. Granted, the reality of a powerful, transnational entity like al-Qaeda took some getting used to, but its attributes were easy to learn, and the fact that the blessed peace and predictable world of the MAD era was over should have shocked U.S. leaders down to their shoes. Al-Qaeda declared war twice, attacked U.S. targets a half-dozen times, and regularly and publicly described the kind of increasingly lethal wringer it intended to put the United States through until Washington changed its foreign policies toward the Muslim world. The failure of the U.S. governing elite to take heed of these things and unleash U.S. forces to wipe out their authors root and branch is the best possible proof that they collectively failed to imagine that the world could ever leave Pax Atomica behind. Warned repeatedly by working-level military, intelligence, and State Department officials that the al-Qaeda threat was genuine, imminent, and potentially devastating, the governing generation, of which Hamilton, Kean, and Clarke are deservedly distinguished members, continued to think in the anomalous, patient, outside-the-box, nonpreemptive, worry-about-European-opinion manner—and three thousand Americans died on 9/11. They were still seeking to manage rather than eliminate the threats to America, believed that there was always enough time to handle problems at our own pace, and counted the likelihood of unexpected threats and surprise attacks as minimal and acceptable. None seemed to realize that with the demise of the ahistorical Pax Atomica, history had resumed, and with that resumption came those troubling things with which the statesmen of centuries past had had to contend—limited time in which to make life-and-death decisions, the rapid and unexpected emergence of smart, flexible, and adaptable enemies, and the likelihood of surprise attack. What Messrs. Kean, Hamilton, and Clarke and so many others failed to see after 1991 was that U.S. national security required a return to the inside-the-box historical thinking that is pertinent to the unpredictable and often uncontainable threats that have dominated human history on either side of the Cold War.
Exiles, Expatriates, and Ethnic Experts: For most of its history, the United States has benefited from the advice and assistance of individuals who voluntarily came from abroad to help us wage war or who were themselves exiled from the country or countries at which we were at war. At America’s birth, Casimir Pulaski and Baron von Steuben came from Europe to train and lead Washington’s soldiers in our revolutionary war against Britain; Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense inspired Americans to seek independence and reminds us today how much of our independence we have surrendered to foreigners. In the 1930s Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and many other European scientists came to America and helped develop the atomic bombs that America so effectively used to smash Imperial Japan into final defeat. During the Cold War Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and other external and internal exiles of the Soviet Empire bravely spoke the truth about a monumentally criminal system and helped the West to understand the threat and hold on until Ronald Reagan arrived and brought victory. All of these individuals helped America prevail against its enemies, and they did so in the name of liberty and freedom, in a common effort to defeat tyrannies that threatened the United States.
In our war against Islamist militancy, however, more exiles, expatriates, and ethnic experts than ever before are helping less than any of their predecessors. Why? The most important reason for this reversal, I think, is that the exiles we deal with today are unrepresentative of the great mass of Muslims across the Islamic world. They have been displaced by revolutions or hounded by security services, were ineffectual in insurgencies, or were philosophically so far out of touch with their countrymen that they chose to emigrate. These men and women talk the talk of freedom but at bottom want the United States to do something that they themselves cannot do. And that phrasing is important because from Ahmed Chalabi to Fareed Zakaria to Zalmay Khalilzad to the late Shah of Iran’s son to Walid Phares, the current roster of these types of experts have argued that America should act to install secular democracies in Muslim lands—without a shred of evidence that such an action would be welcomed by anyone except the experts and their Westernized friends. Indeed, the distinguishing characteristic of the current crew of such advisers is that they have been dead wrong in almost all of the recommendations for policy that they have made to the U.S. governing elite. They seem, moreover, ashamed and embarrassed by the reality that the great bulk of their brethern want no truck with secularism, and they project their own ambitions for their homelands as achievable foreign policy goals for the United States. As Abdel Bari Atwan, editor in chief of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, has written, the George W. Bush administration “listened to Arabs or so-called Arab ‘experts’ who gave it advice and studies to fit its anti-Arab and anti-Muslim strategy and not the advice or studies that reflected reality.”33
Complexity: The Cold War’s edge-of-Armageddon nuclear standoff created an environment in which U.S. leaders of all kinds—political, military, academic, and media—were able to create in their minds a world of stunning complexity, one that was far more complex than the reality that existed. Because Mutually Assured Destruction protected Americans against everything save the ultimate catastrophe (the chance of which the same doctrine likewise reduced to near zero), U.S. leaders lost track of the only organizing principle that is essential for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy: protect Americans, their liberties, and independence; maintain a domestic environment that cultivates liberty and equality of opportunity; and let no domestic interests or foreign countries stand as an obstacle to those objectives. This view of what the U.S. government should be about is singular, not simplistic; it simply follows George Washington’s sage advice, “We ought not to convert trifling difficulties into insuperable obstacles.”34 It would encourage our governing elite to always use a clear and inflexible priority when f
ormulating national-security policy by simply asking and answering the question: “Where do America’s interests lie in this or that issue?” This query automatically would put a brake on the enduring Cold War propensity to make the setting of national-security policy unnecessarily difficult and complex. When this Cold War leftover predominates, the American people see—and some unreflectively come to share—a number of odd and self-defeating ideas. For example, U.S. leaders, even in wartime, equate the life of an American with that of a foreigner, even an enemy and his supporters; the U.S. response to attacks on American citizens and interests becomes proportionate, leaving the enemy intact and ready to kill again; and the U.S. government goes to war not against peoples, groups, or countries but against individuals like Milosevic, Saddam, bin Laden, and Qaddafi. This is the nuanced, international-ballet-of-politics approach to U.S. foreign policy. Since 1991 the men and women who practice this sort of diplomacy have produced policies that have consistently yielded dead Americans, undefeated U.S. enemies, and new crops of foes for the United States. These individuals are the enemies of common sense and the security of Americans that David Brooks identified as “bourgeoisophobes.”
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