How The Bushies Got It Wrong & Dick Clarke Isn't Right

Why did we attack Iraq when the enemy was Al Qaeda? Think "Axis of Evil" in the 2003 State of the Union address. The source of terror was not this amorphous gang of terrorists. The source was the rogue state: Syria, Iran, and North Korea. Al Qaeda is still on the loose because the U.S. still operates under the false assumption of state-sponsored terror. The Saudi royal family shovels money at Al Qaeda so that Al Qaeda stays the hell away from the Kingdom. The sole state-sponsorship of Al Qaeda was provided by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Look at that example. However, the U.S. diversion of military assets to Iraq has made Afghanistan into a no-man's land of warlords and outlaws and Al Qaeda is still at large. Peter Neuman is right. It's not neglect that caused 9/11, it's stupidity. If this is (fair & balanced) revisionism, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Why Nobody Saw 9/11 Coming
By PETER R. NEUMAN

LONDON — Did the Bush administration, before the 9/11 attacks, fail to take terrorism seriously enough? At first the contention seems unlikely. Isn't this the most hawkish administration in living memory? Wasn't it President Bush who coined the phrase "war on terror"?

Yet in the current hearings on the attacks — and in the controversy surrounding the new book by Richard A. Clarke, the administration's first counterterrorism chief — the words "neglect" and "failure" keep cropping up.

And there is something to these accusations — although perhaps not in the sense that the people making them intend. The administration's early failures on terrorism cannot be pinned down to individual instances of "neglect." To understand what really went wrong, we need to go back to the last decades of the cold war, when people like Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney first started to make sense of terrorism.

In the 1970's and 80's, the predominant view among Washington hawks was that none of the various terrorist groups that operated in Western Europe and the Middle East was truly independent. They were all connected through a vast terrorist network, which was created and supported by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. The Communists' aim, the hawks believed, was to destabilize the Western societies without being directly linked to violence.

It all seemed to make perfect sense, and books like "The Terror Network" by Claire Sterling, which argued the network hypothesis with considerable force and conviction, became essential reading for anyone who wanted to make his way in the Reagan White House.

The idea that the sinister hand of the Kremlin was behind groups like the Italian Red Brigades and even the Irish Republican Army revealed the deep sense of paranoia within political circles at the time. More important, the idea of the Communist terrorism network buttressed the conservative fixation on states as the only major actors in the international political system.

According to the classically "realist" mindset, only states can pose a significant threat to the national security of other states, because lesser actors simply do not have the capacity, sophistication and resources to do so. Hence, if terrorists suddenly became effective in destabilizing countries like Italy, they couldn't possibly have acted on their own. They must have had state sponsors, and it was only by tackling the state sponsors (in this case, the Soviet bloc), that you could root out the terrorists.

During the cold war, the paradigm of "state-sponsored terrorism" was useful, if not entirely correct. Most terrorists did receive help from states, and there were some links between disparate groups, although not to the extent that many in the United States believed. And some of the worst atrocities — like the 1983 attack on United States military headquarters in Beirut — were in fact carried out by groups that had been created by "rogue states" like Iran, Libya and Syria.

With the end of the cold war, however, things changed. While there was no longer a prime state sponsor for any "terror network," there was also no longer any need for one. It became easy to travel from one country to another. Money could be collected and transferred around the globe. Cell phones and the Internet made it possible to maintain tight control of an elusive group that could move its "headquarters" across continents. In fact, by the end of the decade, it seemed as if the model of state-sponsored terrorism had effectively been reversed: Al Qaeda was now in charge of a state — Afghanistan under the Taliban — rather than vice versa.

But the Washington hawks failed to see what was happening. The world around them had changed, but their paradigm hadn't. For them, states continued to be the only real movers and shakers in the international system, and any serious "strategic" threat to America's security could only come from an established nation.

Consider an article in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine by Condoleezza Rice, titled "Campaign 2000 — Promoting the National Interest." Ms. Rice, spelling out the foreign policy priorities of a Bush White House, argued that after years of drift under the Clinton administration, United States foreign policy had to concentrate on the "real challenges" to American security. This included renewing "strong and intimate relationships" with allies, and focusing on "big powers, particularly Russia and China." In Ms. Rice's view, the threat of non-state terrorism was a secondary problem — in her to do list" it was under the category of "rogue regimes," to be tackled best by dealing "decisively with the threat of hostile powers."

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that there was relatively little interest in Al Qaeda when the Bush team took over. For most of 2001, the national security agenda really consisted of only two items, neither of which had anything to do with the terrorist threat of radical Islam. First, the administration increased its efforts to bring about regime change in Iraq, which was believed to be the prime source of instability in a region of great strategic importance.

The second goal was a more competitive stance toward China. Missile defense — this time against attack by China and North Korea — was put back on the table. Even the collision of an American spy plane with a Chinese fighter in 2001 is an indication of the administration's mindset — intelligence resources were deployed not to find Osama bin Laden, but to monitor what many White House hawks considered the most likely future challenger of American power.

Sept. 11, 2001, brought about a quick re-orientation of foreign policy. What didn't change, however, was the state-centered mindset of the people who were in charge. According to Mr. Clarke, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld immediately suspected Saddam Hussein, and suggested military strikes against Iraq. While cooler heads prevailed at the time, and there was a real effort to track down and destroy the Qaeda network, there was also a reluctance to abandon the idea that terrorism had to be state-based. Hence the administration's insistence that there must be an "axis of evil" — a group of states critical in sustaining the terrorists. It was an attempt to reconcile the new, confusing reality with long-established paradigm of state sponsorship.

In the end, the 9/11 hearings are likely to find that the intelligence failure that led to the horrific attacks stemmed from the longstanding problems of wrongly placed agents, failed communications between government departments and lack of resources. But it was also a failure of vision — one for which the current administration must take responsibility.

Peter R. Neumann is a research fellow in international terrorism at the Department of War Studies, King's College London.

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company