While Bubba Slept Losing Bin Laden
Miniter, Richard
BOOKS IN REVIEW While Bubba Slept Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror by Richard Miniter (Regnery, 317 pages, $27.95) Reviewed by Rich Lowry HE '90 s WILL BE...
...Defense Secretary William Cohen argued that the attack on the Cole was insufficient provocation, reflecting the risk-averse posture of the military...
...Miniter's sources in Sudanese intelligence help to illuminate this much-disputed episode...
...Clinton responded with two pin-prick strikes, against a cluster of bin Laden training camps in Afghanistan and a factory in the Sudan allegedly involved in the manufacture of chemical weapons...
...Why did Clinton "lose" bin Laden...
...A germ was planted in bin Laden's mind: If eighteen dead could shake America, what could be accomplished by killing thousands...
...He gives readers an inside account of Clinton decision-making while maintaining a much needed critical distance, which makes the book all the more devastating...
...That year featured the handoff of bin Laden from the Sudan to Afghanistan...
...At a time of unparalleled global strength, the United States projected an image of weakness to the world and failed to put down a terrorist who would later carry out the most grievous attack on the American homeland since Pearl Harbor...
...His book, Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years, is published this month...
...Bin Laden struck next in Somalia...
...The double- and triple-minded Clinton lacked the will, and wasn't interested in taking actions that might require serious follow-up...
...He wasn't comfortable with wielding force, either intellectually or temperamentally...
...Temperamentally, because making war required moral certainty and political risk...
...In response, the Clinton administration stopped the hunt for Mohammed Aideed, the warlord responsible for the attack, and withdrew American troops from Somalia...
...with few restraints...
...This was a shameful rout, which must have planted a germ of an idea in bin Laden's mind: If 18 dead could shake America, well then, what could be accomplished by killing thousands...
...Miniter says the Sudan target was a mistake, a product of the administration's haste to hit two targets for symbolic purposes (bin Laden hit two targets, and so can we...
...Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a syndicated columnist...
...But Attorney General Janet Reno and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet wanted more investigation to determine who carried out the attack, reflecting the high standard proof the administration often demanded in keeping with its view of terrorism as fundamentally a law-enforcement problem...
...Not that they would necessarily have taken Sudan up on that offer...
...According to Miniter, federal court indictments and FBI documents all attribute the 1993 attack to him...
...Clinton was still "focused like a laser beam" on the economy, and didn't want to be distracted from domestic politics by a foreign terrorist threat...
...Clarke wanted to hit al Qaeda targets in a "bolt out of the blue...
...A frustrated, hawkish State Department official said at the time, "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan...
...The White House considered getting bin Laden out of the country a victory, because it thought it would cost him plenty in lucrative local business dealings...
...Intellectually, because he still shared McGovern's guilty attitude about the use of American power...
...It meant bin Laden could wage war against the U.S...
...So Clinton told the Pakistanis beforehand of the strike and the notorious, terror-tainted Pakistani intelligence service likely passed the information 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 along to bin Laden, giving him a heads-up and time to escape...
...The administration worried that the cruise missiles flying over Pakistani airspace would be misinterpreted as an Indian nuclear attack...
...The bin Laden threat steadily built over the 1990s...
...In the first of many sins of omission, Clinton shrugged off the bombing, never giving it concerted attention or having his administration investigate the foreign connections of the perpetrators...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW While Bubba Slept Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror by Richard Miniter (Regnery, 317 pages, $27.95) Reviewed by Rich Lowry HE '90 s WILL BE REMEMBERED as the decade T when, in Churchill's haunting words, "the locusts ate...
...None...
...Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon...
...In Losing bin Laden, Richard Miniter fills in the fine lines and color...
...Miniter doesn't credit bin Laden's denial that he knew the bombing's ringleader, Ramzi Yousef, and notes that Yousef traveled in bin Laden circles before and after the bombing...
...Miniter skewers both strikes for their haste and poor conception...
...Secretary of State Madeleine Albright argued that the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians was more important than responding and that "bombing Muslims wouldn't be helpful at this time...
...By 1996, the Clinton administration should have known what it was dealing with—the world's most lethal terrorist, with an anti-American chip on his shoulder...
...The Clinton administration made no response...
...The broad outline of this story we already knew...
...It was a study in inaction, as each major player exhibited a particular aspect of the administration's muddled foreign policy thinking...
...In 1998, he bombed two American embassies on the same day, in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania...
...Bin Laden easily adjusted in Afghanistan, which he helped convert to a terrorist state, and he was able to quickly reorganize his operations...
...Miniter, anAmerican journalistwho has done investigative work for the Sunday Times of London, gained access to top Clinton counter-terrorism officials, traveled to Sudan, where bin Laden made his home for a number of years, and mucked about the terrorist's old haunts, from the United Arab Emirates to Pakistan...
...If there was any doubt that America was at war, bin Laden's next successful operation was the bombing of the USS Cole that nearly sank the ship and killed 17 sailors...
...His men showed Somali fighters how to shoot a rocket-propelled grenade at the tail rotor of American helicopters...
...This OCTOBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 51 BOOKS IN REVIEW tactic that proved all too successful in the battle memorialized in the book Black Hawk Down: 18 marines lost their lives fighting in the streets of Mogadishu...
...He reports that Sudan did indeed offer to handbin Laden over to the U.S...
...But Miniter casts doubt on even this supposed advantage, reporting that most of bin Laden's businesses were money-losers...
...before sending him to Afghanistan (Clinton officials have denied this), although the offer was made to a CIA officer and probably never passed along to the White House...
...Nothing happened, and the Clinton administration punted the problem of bin Laden—his training camps intact, his support from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia undisturbed—to George W. Bush...
...Miniter links bin Laden to the first World Trade Center attack in February 1993, a case that is still the subject of controversy and has many mysterious loose ends...
...Through former NSC official Richard Clarke, Miniter reports in detail on a crucial meeting at which the decision was taken to do . . . nothing...
Vol. 36 • October 2003 • No. 5
