A day later, Bush pulled Richard Clarke aside and asked him to look into the evidence to see if Saddam was involved. Clarke said, “But al-Qaeda did this,” to which Bush replied, “I know, I know … but see if Saddam was involved.” Clarke’s deputy Roger Cressey remembers that this exchange with the president “struck us as odd, only because we knew there was no state sponsorship of al-Qaeda to do this type of thing. But it clearly reflected what their frontal lobe issue was. And they viewed Iraq as something that was an existential threat to the United States.” In response, Clarke and Cressey’s office worked up a memo that was sent to Condoleezza Rice a week after 9/11; titled “Survey of Intelligence Information of Any Iraqi Involvement in the September 11 Attacks,” it concluded that there was “no compelling case” that Iraq was involved.
On September 14, Bush for the first time visited “Ground Zero,” the smoking pile of what remained of the World Trade Center and the more than 2,700 people who had perished there. Three days earlier, when he had first spoken to the nation shortly after the attacks, Bush had appeared hesitant. On this day he was a man transformed. Standing on top of a wrecked fire truck, Bush grabbed a bullhorn to address the rescue crews working feverishly to find any survivors. When one of the workers said he couldn’t hear what the president was saying, Bush made one of the most memorable remarks of his presidency, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon.” Bush’s robust response to the attacks drove his poll ratings from 55 percent favorable before 9/11 to 90 percent favorable in the days after, the highest ever recorded for a president.
The plan to bring some justice to those who had knocked down the Trade Center buildings was first laid out to Bush by Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. Black briefed the National Security Council on September 13 in the White House Situation Room, a subterranean, wood-paneled conference room that sits behind a well-insulated door next to the White House Mess. Black had something of a personal interest in al-Qaeda; while he was the CIA station chief in Sudan, during the mid-1990s, the terrorist group had tried to assassinate him. Black handled the episode with admirable sangfroid, deciding to consider the attempt an exercise to see how al-Qaeda was running its operations. Black, given to a certain bombastic brand of deadpan theatrics, assured the president that the CIA-led operation to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban would take only a matter of weeks and that they would shortly have “flies walking across their eyeballs.”
During this meeting, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that Iraq was a threat, supported terrorists, and might give them weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld also pointed out that Iraq had far more military targets than the scant and rudimentary infrastructure in Afghanistan and that the United States could inflict on Iraq the kind of damage that would cause other terrorist-supporting regimes to take note. Bush replied that any U.S. military action in Iraq would have to go beyond simply making a statement and would have to bring about regime change. Only two days after 9/11, several of the key arguments for the Iraq War were discussed by Bush and his national security team. The discussions of military action against Iraq were more than merely academic. On September 13, Rumsfeld sent a directive to Third Army headquarters in Atlanta to draw up a plan within three days setting forth what it would take to seize Iraq’s southern oilfields.
Early the following morning, in his office at CIA headquarters, a modernist glass and concrete box surrounded by woodlands in suburban Virginia, Cofer Black met with Gary Schroen, a fifty-nine-year-old CIA officer who had recently started the weeks-long process of retiring from the Agency. Schroen’s three-decade career had taken him on many assignments around South Asia, including a clandestine trip into Afghanistan in 1996 to meet with Ahmad Shah Massoud to discuss efforts to capture bin Laden. Schroen had a good rapport with Massoud and his key aides and he also spoke Dari, the language of the Tajik ethnic group that dominated the Northern Alliance.
Black got straight to the point: “Gary, I want you to take a small team of CIA officers into Afghanistan. You will link up with the Northern Alliance and convince them to cooperate with the CIA and U.S. military as we go after al-Qaeda.” Putting his retirement plans on hold, Schroen accepted the assignment and began packing the various necessities for his mission, which included millions of dollars in cash to sweeten the coming negotiations with the various commanders of the Northern Alliance.
The next day, on Saturday, September 15, Bush again met with his national security team, this time at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland hills. Seated around the retreat’s large conference room table were the president, the vice president, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director Robert Mueller, CIA director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin. Bush, as was his custom, offered a prayer to begin the meeting and then the members of what was now effectively his war cabinet, casually dressed in windbreakers, khakis, and jeans, began to discuss the future outlines of the American response to 9/11.
The mood at the meeting was somber. The president went around the room and asked for everyone’s assessment about what had just happened, after which he said, “Let’s have lunch, and then everyone take an hour, take a walk or something, get your thoughts together, and then we’re going to come back and talk about what we’re going to do about this,” recalls John McLaughlin.
Bizarrely, the Department of Defense had almost nothing to offer in the way of a plan for attacking the Taliban. General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), whose area of operations covered the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia, recalled that the Pentagon did not have an “off-the-shelf” plan for attacking the militants in Afghanistan. Douglas Feith, the number-three official in the Pentagon, also remembers that there was no military plan ready for attacking al-Qaeda or overthrowing the Taliban. Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley says that the plan the military did present at Camp David “was heavily weighted toward an airpower-based approach. And the president said, ‘We’re not going to do it that way. We need to send a whole new message, that we are serious about this.’”
But the CIA and its cigar-chomping, back-slapping director Tenet did have a plan, because from the time that the Taliban had first seized Kabul five years earlier, the Agency had remained in touch with the Northern Alliance. From February 1999 to March 2001, the CIA had inserted five teams successively into Massoud’s Panjshir Valley stronghold to build up relations with the commanders of the Northern Alliance. Those relationships were supplemented by a rich CIA intelligence collection program inside Afghanistan that included tips and information flowing in from tribal leaders, criminals, low-level members of the Taliban, and al-Qaeda support staff such as drivers and cooks. On 9/11 the Agency had a total of some one hundred sources and subsources inside Afghanistan.
While the plan that Tenet presented to Bush’s war cabinet was seemingly a somewhat risky one—inserting Agency officers into Afghanistan with the various warlords of the Northern Alliance armed with suitcases of cash to buy loyalty and fighters—it was the only plan on offer. Once on the ground in Afghanistan, CIA officers would coordinate the insertion of U.S. Special Forces teams who would then guide American bombing strikes on Taliban positions.
Rice remembers that when a map of Afghanistan was rolled out on the conference room table at Camp David, “the color drained from everybody’s faces.” Surrounding Afghanistan were potentially unstable Pakistan, hostile Iran, and autocratic states like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Rice says, “I think everybody thought: Of all the places to have a fight a war, Afghanistan would not be our choice.”
At the Camp David meeting, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, long an advocate of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, interjected that he estimated there was a 10 to 50 percent chance that the
Iraqi dictator was involved in 9/11. There was no evidence at all for this assertion, but Wolfowitz seemed to have internalized his boss Donald Rumsfeld’s well-known dictum that “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” This phrase, which posed as deep thinking about the real world, will no doubt serve as an ironic epitaph for the Bush administration, which again and again after 9/11 took the position that the lack of hard evidence for its assertions in no way undercut their truthfulness.
Wolfowitz, whose bookish manner belied his ultrahawkish views, also made the case for striking Iraq in “this round” of the war on terror. John McLaughlin, the CIA deputy director, who spoke in the measured tones of the college professor he would later become, argued that this was “not the right conclusion to draw at this point. … We had been projecting a spectacular attack by al-Qaeda. Here it was. We had the names of some of the people involved that we recognized: They were al-Qaeda.” The cabinet then voted to go to war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, although Rumsfeld abstained. At the end of the meeting Bush said, “I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not going to strike them now.”
Later that evening, Attorney General Ashcroft, a talented amateur musician, gathered the war cabinet around a piano for a sing-along of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and “America the Beautiful.”
On Monday morning, September 17, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Bush started barking instructions to his assembled national security team. “I want the CIA in there first,” the president demanded. Bush also signed a top-secret directive about the war plan for Afghanistan, which also instructed the Pentagon to begin planning for an invasion of Iraq, one of many indicators that the march to war there began immediately after 9/11. That same day Wolfowitz wrote Rumsfeld a memo arguing that the odds were better than one in ten that Saddam was involved in 9/11, citing his praise for the attacks and (long-discredited) theories that Iraq was behind the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. Wolfowitz argued that eliminating Saddam needed to be a top priority. He met little resistance from Rumsfeld, who on September 29 instructed his incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard Myers, to begin preparing military options for Iraq, including plans for an invasion with a much smaller force than the army of five hundred thousand that had taken Kuwait back from Saddam following his 1990 invasion of the country.
Gary Schroen and his team of CIA officers left Washington on September 19 for the long trip to Uzbekistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor to the north, where an Agency-owned helicopter was waiting to fly them over the border and insert them into the small patch of northeastern Afghanistan where the Northern Alliance continued to hold out against the Taliban. Before they left they met with Cofer Black at Agency headquarters for their final marching orders. They were unambiguous. Black told them, “I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the president.” This appears to have been the first time in decades that a CIA officer had been directly ordered to kill an enemy of the United States.
The next day President Bush gave the speech that would define his presidency. On September 20, nine days after 9/11, he addressed both houses of Congress and laid out the strategic doctrines of what for the first time he publicly referred to as the “war on terror.” The doctrines laid out in the speech would set the course of the foreign policy of the United States for the next decade and would reshape the Middle East in then-unforeseen ways.
Before a packed congressional chamber and watched on TV live by eighty million Americans, Bush explained, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been defeated.” This war then would extend not only to the perpetrators of 9/11 but to other groups that might potentially threaten the United States, and the war could theoretically last for decades: “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign.”
Then Bush turned to his analysis of why the United States was attacked on 9/11: “Why do they hate us? … They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another.” Yet in all the tens of thousands of words that bin Laden had uttered, he was largely silent about American freedoms and values. He just didn’t seem to care very much about the beliefs of the “Crusaders.” Instead his focus was invariably on American foreign policies in the Middle East. If the first rule of war is “know your enemy,” it would have been helpful if Bush had been more knowledgeable about the motives of al-Qaeda leaders, who cared far more about how U.S. foreign policy was conducted in the Middle East than about how Americans conducted themselves in their daily lives.
Bush then asserted that al-Qaeda followed in the footsteps “of the murderous ideologies of the 20th century … in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.” Certainly “bin Ladenism” seemed to share some commonalities with the Nazis and the Soviets: their anti-Semitism; their antiliberalism and general contempt for Enlightenment values; their cultlike embrace of charismatic leaders; their deft exploitation of modern propaganda methods; and their bogus promises of utopia here on Earth if their programs were implemented. But the threat posed by al-Qaeda was orders of magnitude smaller than that posed by the Nazis, who instigated a global conflict that killed tens of millions and who perpetrated the Holocaust, and if the Cold War had ended with a bang instead of a whimper much of the human race would have vanished. Yet immediately after 9/11, President Bush raised al-Qaeda to the status of the strategic, existential threat that the group craved to be, rather than the serious-enough problem that it in fact presented.
Such a supposedly existential struggle merited that the coming war would have to be fought in black and white: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” said Bush. An alternative formulation could have been “If you are against the terrorists, then you are with us,” and that formulation would have vastly increased the number of potential allies of the United States. Instead, much of the foreign policy of the first Bush term would be conducted in a high-handed and unilateral manner.
What went unsaid in Bush’s speech was the idea that the United States, the consumer of a quarter of the world’s energy, should launch a Manhattan Project–style energy policy to make Americans less dependent on the Middle Eastern countries that had helped to incubate al-Qaeda. This was a squandered opportunity, since at no other point in history would the American public have been more receptive to such a call. Bush would style himself as a “wartime president,” but by way of sacrifice he stopped playing golf, cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans, and did not institute a draft. At the height of the Battle of Britain in 1940, Churchill could say with some truth, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” After 9/11, never was so little asked from so many.
On 9/11 there was little question that al-Qaeda was at war with the United States; the critical question in the months that followed was, What kind of war was the United States going to fight against it? The dean of military strategists, Carl von Clausewitz, explained the importance of this decision making in his 1832 treatise On War: “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something that is alien to its nature.”
Clausewitz’s excellent advice about the absolute necessity of properly defining the war upon which one is about to embark was ignored by Bush administration officials, who instead declared an open-ended and ambiguous “war on terror.” Sometimes known as the Global War on Terror, or by the clunky acronym “GWOT,” it became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. The GWOT framework propelled the Bush administration into its disastrous entanglement in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 but was launched under the rubric of the “war on terror” and the
erroneous claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he might give to terrorists, including al-Qaeda, to whom he was supposedly allied, and that he therefore threatened American interests. None of this, of course, was true.
On September 14, 2001, Congress passed an “Authorization for Use of Military Force” against “those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks.” The coming American war against the Taliban was backed by the world; two days earlier the UN Security Council had passed an unusually forceful and unambiguous resolution “to combat by all means … terrorist acts.” On the same day NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history, which meant that the nineteen member states of the alliance considered the 9/11 attacks as an attack against all of them, to be responded to with force. (Interestingly, major Muslim clerics did not declare that the subsequent American war in Afghanistan necessitated a “defensive jihad,” as had happened after the Soviets invaded the country in 1979.)
Bin Laden disastrously misjudged the possible American responses to the 9/11 attacks, which he believed would take one of two forms: an eventual retreat from the Middle East along the lines of the U.S. pullout from Somalia in 1993, or another ineffectual round of cruise missile attacks similar to those that followed al-Qaeda’s bombings of the two American embassies in Africa in 1998. Of course, neither of these two scenarios happened. The U.S. campaign against the Taliban was conducted with massive American airpower, tens of thousands of Northern Alliance forces, allied with some three hundred U.S. Special Forces soldiers working with 110 CIA officers.
The first Americans into Afghanistan, Gary Schroen’s seven-man CIA team, code-named JAWBREAKER, touched down on the afternoon of September 26. Two weeks later, on October 7, the American bombing campaign against the Taliban began. As it did, bin Laden made a surprise appearance in a videotape shown around the world. It was the first time he had been seen publicly since the 9/11 attacks. In an uncharacteristically brief statement, the al-Qaeda leader, dressed in a camouflage jacket with a submachine gun propped at his side, said that the attacks were revenge for the long-standing Western humiliation of the Muslim world, consistently his most important theme.
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