43*

by Jeff Greenfield

  In the wake of September 11, that fear seemed to have been realized with devastating consequences. On the surface, the link between the killing of Osama bin Laden and the coordinated attacks on the United States seemed undeniable, if not obvious. And what of the massive street demonstrations across the Arab and Muslim world, with mullahs proclaiming, “The Sheikh is avenged!”

  The suspicion of “blowback” quickly took root on the left side of the spectrum. On ABC’s late-night talk show Politically Incorrect, host Bill Maher rejected the term “cowards” to describe the 9/11 conspirators.

  “We have been the cowards,” Maher said unapologetically, “killing men, women, and children with a Hellfire missile controlled from thousands of miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building—say what you want about it; it’s not cowardly. Maybe what the right word is, is … payback. Evil, indefensible, but payback.” (Maher’s show was canceled two months later by ABC, ostensibly because of weak ratings).

  For counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, for Gore’s national security advisor, Leon Fuerth, and indeed for all the members of the intelligence team, Hersh’s article presented an agonizing dilemma. The premise of the story was wholly false; they had known for years that Al Qaeda had been targeting the United States for a major attack. Several had been in the United States long before bin Laden was killed. But that could not conceal the larger issue: They had already learned that the failure of the agencies to work with one another—the systematic concealment by the CIA of critical information, the bureaucratic walls and widespread ignorance that had crippled the FBI—painted a devastating picture of failure up and down the intelligence chain of command. And every member of the Gore administration understood the political implications of that failure.

  “It would have been completely different if Bush had been in the White House on 9/11,” one of Gore’s closest aides said bitterly as the critics’ voices grew louder. “Even if Bush and his team had no idea what Al Qaeda was, even if they had paid no attention to Clarke and Tenet, they would have gotten here too recently to be blamed. It’s the ultimate irony: the president knew full well what kind of danger we were facing, he was pounding the table again and again for every scrap of intelligence anyone could find—but it’s all going to come down to one line: You were there for eight and a half years—why couldn’t you stop it?”

  * * *

  It was a dispirited group that gathered in the Oval Office in late December 2001. The three months since the 9/11 attacks had, for the Gore administration, been a steady, steep decline from a spirit of “National Concord” to public pessimism and ceaseless rounds of political recriminations.

  The special elections in November had brought an unsurprising result—four new Republican senators, from North Dakota, South Dakota, Nevada, and Florida, giving the GOP a clear 54–46 majority. Along with their House majority, Republicans now controlled every congressional committee, and the incoming chairs were making it painfully clear that they intended to focus on two issues: first, the astonishing lack of preparedness that had let the 9/11 attacks happen, and second, the administration’s inexcusable failure to mount an effective, decisive campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

  The Republicans were doing so, moreover, at a time when, on almost every front, the fallout from the attacks had sent the United States into a profound sense of pessimism.

  Yes, the Afghanistan campaign had gone well. The multinational operation launched in early October had uprooted the Taliban from power within a few weeks and had met with near universal international approval. Even Pakistan, one of the few nations to have recognized Taliban rule (and whose powerful intelligence apparatus was widely assumed to be sympathetic to both the Taliban and Al Qaeda), had given U.S. forces staging areas and travel rights through and over its territory.

  But on every other front, America was in a crisis—more accurately, a series of crises.

  There was a rapidly worsening recession, triggered first by the collapse of the $700 billion-a-year travel-and-tourism business, with links to some ten million workers. There was the far greater hit to the financial sector, as the same doubts that were keeping travelers out of airplanes, hotels, and restaurants began to take root among those looking for a safe place to save their money. A top official of the People’s Bank of China, speaking at a private international conference in Geneva, was quoted as saying, “It gives us pause, quite frankly, when we see the presumably most powerful nation on the face of the earth unable to protect its most visible symbol of commerce and its most visible symbol of government.”

  Domestic confidence took a similar blow. Just as Americans stayed home in the weeks after 9/11, they kept their money at home as well. (“What do you suggest I do?” Gore asked an aide. “Tell America to go shopping?”) The holiday shopping season was a disaster, with retail sales slumping by some $80 billion. That, in turn, led to layoffs, from big-city department stores to small-town Main Street shops to the emerging world of online commerce. The jobless rate ticked up well past 7 percent, and tax revenues fell; the hundreds of billions of dollars in surpluses projected for the coming federal budgets began to seem more like a fading fantasy than a rock-solid reality.

  Compounding President Gore’s woes was an increasingly critical media tone. In October, The Weekly Standard, one of the most influential conservative magazines, devoted its cover to a lengthy article charging that “two successive administrations stand guilty of near-criminal negligence in failing the first, essential duty of every government: the protection of the populace.” Fox News produced a one-hour prime-time special, Asleep at the Wheel?, featuring interviews with present and former CIA and NSA agents who charged that the Clinton administration had “tied our hands” by imposing “endless legal roadblocks on the sharing of information that could have led to the unraveling of the 9/11 plot.” MSNBC produced its own special, relying heavily on the Seymour Hersh New Yorker article to suggest that the killing of bin Laden had been “a recklessly provocative” act. And Nightline aired a weeklong series with the title “The First Duty—How Washington Failed to Protect Us.”

  On the outer fringes, a different assertion began to appear on websites and blogs: that President Gore knew an attack on the United States was imminent, and he did nothing to stop it. Why, asked ExecutiveTerror.com, had the president conveniently opened the air corridors to commercial flights? To ensure that the hijacked planes could effect a coordinated strike? (“Had any of those planes been delayed,” the website asserted, “the passengers might well have been alerted that this was no mere hijacking, and one of the Twin Towers—or perhaps even the Capitol—might well have been saved.”) And why exactly would President Gore want the Capitol destroyed? “What better excuse to assert broad, even dictatorial executive action against ‘enemies foreign and domestic.’ The flames in New York and Washington might well come to be seen as America’s version of the Reichstag fires that helped cement Nazi totalitarianism nearly seventy years ago.”

  That argument never reached beyond the various wingnut communities. But among a much more respectable, much more influential segment of the media, a different assertion was rapidly gaining credence: that the Gore administration was ignoring the real source of the attacks—a threat located not in the caves of Afghanistan or a hideaway in Pakistan but in Baghdad. It was an assertion that the president and his national security team unanimously rejected—and would lead to one of the most astonishing twists in America’s political history.

  January 30, 2002

  “Whatever happened to ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’?” asked White House Communications Director Chris Lehane during a meeting of the president’s inner circle in the Oval Office in late January of 2002.

  Gore responded with a mirthless smile.

  “You mean like when the Republicans railed against FDR’s ‘failures’ a year after Pearl Harbor? Or when they went after Truman for not winning the war in Ko
rea? Or when the Democrats cut off funding for South Vietnam or exposed the CIA’s darkest secrets or almost impeached Reagan when he tried to get money to the contras? And do you really think Clinton wanted to sign that ‘Iraqi Freedom Act’? God knows how many millions Chalabi will be dishing out to his friends.”

  Elaine Kamarck, Domestic Policy Council Chair, shook her head. “Those damn anthrax stories sure didn’t help.”

  “Well,” President Gore said, “our friends in the press didn’t exactly let a complete and total lack of facts get in the way of a great story.”

  In the very first days after 9/11, with voices in Congress and the media already beginning to raise the specter of an “Iraqi Connection,” envelopes with anthrax spores were found in the district offices of senators Trent Lott and Pat Leahy and in the offices of NBC News, the Washington Post, and other news outlets. With their crude messages—“09-11-01” … “THIS IS NEXT” … “TAKE PENACILIN NOW” … “DEATH TO AMERICA” … “DEATH TO ISRAEL” … “ALLAH IS GREAT”—it seemed obvious at first that the anthrax mailings were linked to the attacks; almost immediately, some stories linked the anthrax to Iraq. ABC’s Brian Ross reported on October 26 that the anthrax was laced with bentonite. “The potent additive is known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons: Iraq. … It is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program.” The Wall Street Journal and the Guardian carried the same allegations. When later information disproved these stories, the allegations simply disappeared but left millions of Americans with the clear impression that Iraq had tried to poison American politicians and journalists as part of its terrorist assault on the United States.

  It was an impression that pleased the men and women who would have guided the foreign policy, the defense strategy, and the intelligence gathering in a George W. Bush administration, the might-have-been insiders who had gathered at Richard Perle’s home back on Inauguration Day. To them, it was ludicrous to think that an independent band of terrorists could have possibly launched so devastating an attack on the most powerful, advanced nation on earth. The sheer scope of the 9/11 operation—obtaining passports and visas, learning to fly large commercial airliners, expending large sums of money for travel, training, lodging—all pointed to the impossibility of such an attack without the support of a nation-state with a ruler gripped by strong anti-American malevolence and the ruthlessness to assist in the murder of thousands of innocents.

  And they were sure they knew exactly which nation-state and which leader it was: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

  President Gore and his team had a very different perspective. To them, the notion that Iraq had been part of the 9/11 attacks, or that it should be a target for a strong message on terror, was nothing more than a fantasy. But it was a fantasy embraced not just by his political adversaries but by many in his own party who believed that Saddam was a direct menace to national security.

  In a taunting speech on the Senate floor, Senator John McCain asked, “Who was it who said, ‘We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction program’? Right—President Bill Clinton. Who was it who warned, ‘The risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face’? Right—former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. And who was it who had written to Clinton back in 1999, ‘We urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs’? My good friends, it was the distinguished gentleman from Michigan, Carl Levin, and the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts, John Kerry.”

  But Gore, in his years as vice president, had come to believe something else: Along with most of Clinton’s national security team, he had come to regard Ahmed Chalabi as a flimflam artist, a fabulist, whose vision of an Iraqi people rising up to overthrow their leader at the first sign of revolt was not only ludicrous but dangerous, requiring a massive, all-out commitment of American military force. (“I’ve seen this movie before,” Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, said. “It’s called The Bay of Pigs.”)

  Whatever the merits of President Gore’s position, the political reality of the post-9/11 world made it almost impossible to defend. His major initiative, revealed in a speech before Congress in early November that called for a ten-year push for energy independence and a multi-billion-dollar investment in alternative energy, simply lacked the political muscle to have any staying power. Instead, all through the first months of 2002, the case for decisive action against Iraq was front and center all across the political landscape.

  A hearing by the Senate Intelligence Committee featured an empty witness chair with a large TV monitor atop a table. A face covered in shadow was identified as a “high-level defector from Saddam Hussein’s inner circle” who spoke of a training site in Iraq’s Salman Park where would-be terrorists practiced hijackings on a Boeing 707. Later that day, intelligence photographs showed refrigerated trucks that—according to a onetime major in Saddam’s Mukhabarat—were biological weapons laboratories, made mobile to evade weapons inspectors. The hearing would have attracted attention under any circumstances, but front-page stories by Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post and Judith Miller in the New York Times, previewing the testimony of the defectors, guaranteed massive coverage on broadcast and cable television.

  For the Gore White House, as one insider later said, “it was like being in a maze where there was no way out. We could offer CIA and Defense Department experts to argue that Saddam was not a threat—but how do you prove a negative? There were all those Democrats—President Clinton and President Gore included—who were saying over and over how big a danger Saddam was. And beyond all of that,” the insider said with a sigh, “there was September 11. It was just impossible not to see Iraq through that prism.”

  And what of the CIA’s doubt that Saddam had such capability?

  “For heaven’s sake,” argued former defense secretary Dick Cheney to a receptive House Armed Services Committee, “tell me the last time the CIA’s intelligence was right about anything of consequence. They failed to see the vulnerability of the Shah of Iran; they failed to see the collapse of the Soviet Union; they failed to see Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait; and God knows they failed to see the worst attack on our country in our history. I don’t think we can wait,” George W. Bush’s former running mate said, “until the smoking gun becomes a mushroom cloud.”

  “I guess it’s kind of a perfect storm,” pollster Stan Greenberg told the Oval Office gathering. You’ve got a battered country wanting revenge, a villain right out of central casting, a body of evidence that he’s been up to no good. I’m surprised Gallup says only 60 percent of the public thinks Iraq was ‘directly or indirectly involved’ with 9/11.”

  Well,” President Gore sighed, “we better start working on one hell of a press conference.”

  * * *

  “Let me be blunt,” the president said as he looked out over the two hundred reporters gathered in the East Room. “If there were any sign—any sign—that Iraq was part of what happened on September 11, or if there were any sign at all that Iraq was in the process of acquiring or developing weapons of mass destruction, I would use every tool at our disposal to stop them.

  “But I have to tell you,” he added, pointing to National Security Advisor Fuerth, CIA director Tenet, and counterterrorism chief Clarke, who were standing behind him at the podium, “these men have been on the front lines of the fight against terrorism for a decade. They have, at my direction, looked for any sign that Iraq may have been involved with the attacks on our country or, indeed, involved with any Al Qaeda operations. And there is simply no evidence at all that Iraq was involved in any way with those atta
cks. Going to war with Iraq because of September 11 would be like FDR hitting the Philippines after Pearl Harbor. And there’s one more point to keep in mind. Less than two miles from here, just off Constitution Avenue, is a wall with 58,272 names on it. Each of those names is a reminder of the cost of ordering our young men into harm’s way. I can think of no greater dereliction of duty than for me—for any president—to give such an order based on false assumptions, or faulty evidence, or misjudgments about a potential adversary.”

  The reaction was brutal. On Fox News, Charles Krauthammer noted, “I was not aware that the Philippines had used chemical weapons against its own people, invaded a sovereign nation, and tried to murder an ex-president of the United States.”

  On Nightline, Senator John McCain, the front-runner for the 2004 Republican nomination in every national poll—was equally acerbic. “I used to accuse President Clinton of running a ‘feckless, photo-opportunity’ foreign policy,” he said. “But compared with Al Gore, Bill Clinton looks like Teddy Roosevelt.”

  And that was the perfect storm in which the Gore administration found itself all through the next months. On a weekly if not daily basis, fresh news reports offered damning—if unverifiable—testimony from defectors from the Iraqi military of ambitious weapons programs and terrorism training. TV news programs competed with one another to bring these reports to life. And these stories of Iraqi perfidy often played in synchronization with more and more revelations about just how porous America’s defenses against terrorism had been—none more dramatic than the May 12, 2002, Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings presided over by now-chairman Jesse Helms.

  For years, Helms, the most conservative of all senators, had been the bane of administrations of both parties. From his vantage point, the State Department was home to striped-suit weaklings prone to yielding to America’s enemies and abandoning America’s friends; the United Nations was a nest of vipers; and the CIA was filled with careerists, unable or unwilling to properly measure the dangers to United States national security in a dangerous world.