Who Lost Osama?
TWINING, DANIEL C.
Who Lost Osama? Richard Clarke is far tougher on the Clinton failures than advertised By DANIEL C. TWINING "This is the story, from my perspective, of how al Qaeda devel-.A. oped and attacked the...
...In Clarke's rendition, Secretary of State Warren Christopher "argued strongly on legal grounds that the list [of targets] be limited to one facility, the Iraqi intelligence headquarters...
...It is by this gap that the Bush administration's early counterterrorism policy must be judged...
...Today's proponents of rapprochement with Tehran should pay close attention...
...And yet, somehow, little came of all this...
...Without elaborating, Clarke calls reports that Sudan was prepared to hand bin Laden over to the United States for the right price "a fable" invented by "Americans friendly to the Sudan regime...
...But his administration could not or would not deliver...
...military assets were not in a position to fire on bin Laden, and the Predator was not armed with missiles to conduct an offensive strike, as it would be during the Bush administration...
...I believe that those in the CIA who claim the authorizations were insufficient or unclear are throwing up that claim as an excuse to cover the fact that they were pathetically unable to accomplish the mission...
...the last four years I was in office...
...In short, Clarke successfully makes the case that the administration was fully engaged and ready to take the offensive against al Qaeda—by the end of Clinton's first term...
...According to Clarke, Reagan "checkmated the Iranians by strengthening Saddam Hussein...
...In fact, only in his preface and the book's final sixty-five pages does Clarke's partisanship boil over into the invective, vitriol, and spite that have transformed this career national-security hawk into the anti-Bush Democrats' American Idol...
...the Bush administration eight months...
...could promise a full-scale fight to the finish, then the kingdom would probably tell all that it knew about the Iranian role in the Khobar attack...
...In 1998, al Qaeda issued a statement declaring war on the United States Clarke writes, "It did not come as a shock to us...
...Clarke's argument that the Bush administration did not accord the terrorist threat sufficient priority before September 11 is not wholly fair...
...In the final chapter of Against All Enemies, Clarke suggests that Clinton, were he still in office after September 11, would have tried to "understand" the phenomenon of terrorism...
...Hearing Clarke's wish list for American policy at a time when hardened terrorists are killing innocents from Madrid to Bali makes one glad that Clarke has given up his day job...
...Reagan's support of the Afghan opposition brought about the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan, a significant strategic defeat...
...The missiles were never fired...
...In 1996, Clarke's Counterterror-ism Security Group was already developing plans for a covert operation to snatch bin Laden from Afghanistan...
...On Pakistan, Clarke observes, "I believed that if Pakistan's [Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate] wanted to capture bin Laden or tell us where he was, they could have done so with little effort...
...He must be judged by the fact that he failed...
...Christopher won...
...The senior military did not and made it almost impossible for the president to overcome their objections...
...Listen," Clarke quotes Clinton as telling his national security staff after the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, "retaliating for these attacks is all well and good, but we gotta get rid of these guys once and for all...
...Equating the threat to that we faced in World War II and the Cold War, the president said, "Terrorism is the enemy of our generation, and we must prevail...
...After a warm-up chapter that offers a readable account of the first twenty-four hours of the White House's response to the attacks, a nonpartisan chapter on how America transformed its strategic posture in the Middle East during the 1980s, and a sensible chapter on the first Gulf War, the subsequent one hundred and fifty pages of Against All Enemies Daniel C. Twining, a former adviser to Senator John McCain, works for the German Marshall Fund of the United States...
...Clinton was committed to defeating terrorism, Clarke insists...
...Between late 1995 and April 1996, Clinton gave a series of speeches about the terrorist threat...
...The tragedy of recent American politics is not that President Bush acted to end the threat of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction from rogue states like Iraq, at the cost of angering allies and subordinating secondary American interests...
...oped and attacked the United States on September 11," Richard Clarke begins Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, his new book that has been widely bally-hooed as the bomb that will destroy President Bush's reelection campaign...
...Clarke succeeds in demonstrating that, by 1996, the administration was deeply aware of the threat al Qaeda posed, and that Clinton himself was "seized with" the issue...
...By Clarke's own admission, the Clinton administration had not done these things...
...It is true that the bureaucracy failed Clinton in some ways, but the more complete answer is that the president was unable to impose his will on a reluctant government, including his senior cabinet officials responsible for national security affairs...
...In November 2001, after he left office, Clinton said, "I tried to take bin Laden out...
...His principal complaint is that the Bush team's focus on Iraq after September 11 diverted America from the war against al Qaeda...
...It had discovered Ramzi Yousef's plots to assassinate President Clinton and Pope John Paul II...
...If the U.S...
...Clarke explains that "because of the many known terrorism events of 1993, the Clinton team, from the president down, was seized with the issue by 1994...
...Clarke later criticizes the Bush administration for failing to push aggressively for deployment of Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles before September 11...
...Although critical of the failure to retaliate against Iran for the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Clarke credits President Reagan with transforming the United States' strategic posture in the Middle East...
...Clarke explains al Qaeda's rise, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing through subsequent foiled and successful terrorist attacks in Mogadishu in 1993, the Philippines in 1995, Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, Africa in 1998, and Yemen in 2000, as well as the foiled Millennium Plot—all of which is required reading for those who want to understand what the government knew about al Qaeda on President Clinton's watch (a lot) and what it did about it (considerably less than it should have...
...The failure of Bush's father to end Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq segued into the first test of the Clinton administration's determination to act against terrorism...
...Rumors connected him to attacks in New York, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen...
...It had learned of Yousef's plot to blow up eleven American airliners over the Pacific...
...Unquestionably, the Bush administration, once it fully grasped the threat, acted decisively to end it...
...You understand what I'm telling you...
...This is where things stood at the end of Bill Clinton's first term as president...
...gone to Saudi Arabia to "address the Muslim people" in "a moving appeal for religious tolerance...
...The mullahs wouldn't cooperate, and the Clinton administration threatened them with nothing more than negotiations...
...There was no support for bombing [within Clinton's national security cabinet...
...And it had seen the hand of al Qaeda at work in Bosnia, which Clarke calls "a guidebook to the bin Laden network, though we didn't recognize it as such at the time...
...Clarke's review of the diplomacy preceding the first Gulf War is also interesting...
...Clarke recalls the breathless pace at which American officials flew from one capital to another around the Gulf...
...Who the sh—t do they think attacked the Cole, f—in' Martians...
...He also tells us that it was impracticable to seize bin Laden in Sudan, where the administration knew his whereabouts...
...By 1995, the Clinton administration had witnessed the World Trade Center bombing, for which it had "a lot of evidence" pointing to bin Laden's organization...
...The strike was an early indicator of the schizophrenia that characterized Clinton's national security policy: a laudable willingness to use military force strangely matched with a fierce determination that it cause the least possible pain to our enemies...
...tried to build a "world consensus" to address its root causes...
...it did engage in serious strategic planning to counter it...
...He also wanted it hit on Saturday night, to minimize casualties...
...In sketching an image of an engaged president who, in his own words, believed that the United States was at war with al Qaeda, but who failed to weaken the organization, Clarke paints a portrait of Clinton in some ways more devastating than the caricature created by his political opponents...
...Clarke unwittingly highlights the Clinton administration's lack of credibility by linking Saudi Arabia's failure to cooperate on the Khobar Towers investigation to Saudi skepticism about Clinton's backbone: "Some in the Saudi royal family . . . reportedly welcomed the possibility of a U.S...
...Reagan's policies not only transformed America's position in the wider Middle East but enabled the military response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990...
...The critique comes down to this fact: President Clinton, who commanded the world's most powerful military and presided over nearly a decade of peace between the world's great powers, knew al Qaeda was operating in fifty countries, running agents and sleeper cells inside the United States, seeking weapons of mass destruction, churning out terrorists from its Afghan training camps, attacking targets around the world, and planning major terrorist offensives against the United States...
...In Against All Enemies, Clarke laments that political appointees often move aside career national security officials who possess valuable institutional knowledge on national security matters...
...Clarke reports actually seeing Osama bin Laden in Afghan training camps on three occasions in real time as he watched live video from a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle hovering over the sites...
...An attempt to catch September 11-mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Qatar in 1997 failed because the administration felt obliged to inform officials in Doha, one of whom promptly warned Mohammed to flee...
...chronicle the formation and rise of al Qaeda—and the American government's failure to prevent it from metas-tasizing into the existential threat it had become by the time Clinton left office...
...the threat did consume the president and his senior staff...
...After al Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, killing seventeen American sailors, Clarke proposed the United States bomb every al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan...
...The Pentagon brass won't even let the Air Force carpet-bomb the place...
...This should have been grounds for war, and we learn in Against All Enemies the White House considered it, examining options including a full-scale invasion, attacking Iranian-sponsored terrorist camps in Lebanon, persuading our allies to impose a multilateral economic boycott, and conducting an unspecified "intelligence operation...
...The Clinton administration did not...
...Whether it was catching war criminals in Yugoslavia or terrorists in Africa and the Middle East, it was the same story," Clarke adds...
...He had given the CIA unprecedented authority to go after Osama bin Laden personally and al Qaeda, but had not taken steps when they did little or nothing...
...Presidential Decision Directive 39, the "United States Policy on Counterterror-ism" issued in 1994, called for both offensive and defensive actions to "reduce terrorist capabilities" and minimize the nation's vulnerabilities...
...Clarke himself points out that a memo he prepared for the incoming Bush administration listed key antiter-rorist initiatives that the Clinton administration had not agreed to take...
...It stated that U.S...
...Clarke blames most of this on the failure of the CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon to cooperate with the Clinton administration...
...According to Clarke, the CIA "had no capability to stage significant operations against al Qaeda in Sudan...
...When Reagan took office, the Central Command, now arguably our most important command, was a backwater...
...Later, Clarke tells us that the State Department was "hard at work trying to put pressure on the Taliban" to close terrorist camps and hand over bin Laden...
...Yet it was Clarke who, by his own admission, authored the founding document of Clinton counter-terrorism policy in 1994 underlining the threat of terrorists' acquiring weapons of mass destruction and stating that the United States had "no greater priority" than preventing it—an argument the Bush administration employed in its decision to go to war against Iraq nearly a decade later, at a time when terrorists had demonstrated their ability to attack the United States and were actively seeking weapons of mass destruction, which Iraq had a demonstrated record of producing and using...
...promoted peace between India and Pakistan...
...Clarke contradicts his own claim that the covert operation against Iran ended Iranian terrorism by acknowledging that "the Iranian security services continued to support escalating terrorism against Israel and allowed al Qaeda safe passage and other sup-port"—including, I would add, after September 11, 2001...
...Is he right...
...CIA Director George Tenet later confirmed that bin Laden was present at the suspected site on one of those occasions...
...And in a White House meeting one week before September 11, Clarke cites a source quoting CIA director Tenet as saying, "It would be a terrible mistake for the [Deputy of Central Intelligence] to fire a weapon like this...
...Traveling with Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to Riyadh, Clarke was at the pivotal meeting in which the king of Saudi Arabia agreed to the stationing of American forces in his country, even as his intelligence chief, Prince Turki, was secretly asking Osama bin Laden to assemble Afghan volunteers to defend the kingdom from Saddam's army...
...and events in Iran had left the United States vulnerable to the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and another wave of devastating oil shocks...
...war with Iran, if America could remove the Tehran regime...
...Bush in Kuwait...
...The challenges facing any new administration—appointing and confirming senior staff, conducting broad-ranging policy reviews, and generally getting its sea legs—as well as the Bush administration's determination to set a course in foreign policy radically different from that of its predecessor, may have hindered a clear assessment of the threat al Qaeda posed to the United States...
...So who is at fault...
...The principals had decided to do nothing, to wait for proof of who committed the attack...
...The rest of the book, Clarke's unwitting indictment of the Clinton administration's terrorism policy, ought to make the whole of the nation vote for four more years of Bush...
...National Security Advisor Tony Lake ruled out a proposed Special Forces operation against al Qaeda facilities in Sudan on the grounds that, in Lake's words, "This is going to war with Sudan...
...Given what every serious intelligence service in the West believed it knew about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction capabilities, the Bush administration's decision to go to war was a prudent response to what, by Clarke's own standard, constituted a credible threat to the United States in an age of catastrophic terrorism...
...Clarke wants to give the Clinton administration credit for trying...
...In 1996, the work of a newly created bin Laden station at the CIA revealed a "widespread and active" al Qaeda organization with bin Laden as its "mastermind...
...The administration was putting in place a domestic program to respond rapidly in the event of a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction...
...Unlike their successors in the Bush administration, they were not willing to risk other American interests, and public and world opinion, for the sake of defeating al Qaeda—and unlike President Bush, President Clinton was unwilling to force the issue...
...Yet the president and his national security cabinet made accomplishing the mission difficult...
...So, according to Clarke, "Clinton talked incessantly about what it would be like if terrorists used a weapon of mass destruction to attack a United States city...
...By his act, Clarke has made it difficult, if not impossible, for future presidents to retain senior national security staff members from previous administrations...
...As Clarke explains, "In three meetings during 1998 and 1999, the [Counterterrorism Security Group] requested emergency meetings of the principals to recommend to the president a cruise missile strike on the facility in which bin Laden was believed to be at the time...
...Reagan also built new military relationships with Egypt, Oman, and Bahrain, and established the headquarters of the Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain to patrol the Persian Gulf...
...Clarke admiringly recalls how Reagan moved the United States closer to Israel, instituting joint exercises and extensive military-to-military cooperation...
...Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention...
...Of course, Clinton did not take such measures, and Saudi Arabia never told us what it knew about the Khobar bombing...
...The administration ruled out an assault on bin Laden's farm in Afghanistan, for fear the CIA's Afghan assets could be killed in the attempt...
...During his long years as the nation's counterterrorism czar, working for both Clinton and Bush, Clarke never put in place a workable system to screen airline passenger manifests—yet was shocked to learn, on September 11, that known terrorists had freely boarded American airlines...
...Inevitably, the Clinton administration chose the lesser option of a covert operation against Iran, underscoring another theme of the Clinton years: hawkish instincts ("Clinton told us that if it came to using force against Iran, 'I don't want any piss-ant half measures'") that invariably devolved into a policy that did not accomplish the objective but gave the illusion of having acted decisively...
...tried "one more time" to forge an Israeli-Palestinian settlement...
...Yet despite the continuing string of attacks, and intelligence warning of more to come, Clarke doesn't blame Clinton...
...Clarke's decision to release his memoirs in an election year, and to do so in a way that violates confidentiality and transparently benefits the political opponent of the last president he served, makes it more likely that future administrations will not retain people like Dick Clarke...
...An attack on an al Qaeda meeting at which bin Laden was present failed when, as Clarke himself had predicted, Navy destroyers positioning to fire their cruise missiles were detected by Pakistan, which may have warned bin Laden to clear the area before the strike...
...credibility with Pakistan, burdening a stretched military, and reinforcing a perception abroad of the United States as a "Mad Bomber...
...As with Iraq and Iran, the best of intentions and initially sound instincts achieved brief tactical goals without defining a strategic course for victory...
...It had witnessed a terrorist assassination attempt against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak...
...It did recognize the threat, he insists...
...Unfortunately, we had little leverage with the Taliban...
...Clinton "identified terrorism as the major post-Cold War threat," but "could not get the CIA, Pentagon, and FBI to act sufficiently to deal with this threat...
...yet each time fear of collateral damage or considerations of subsidiary American interests prevented the administration from pulling the trigger...
...President Bush demonstrated otherwise—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq...
...the United States had no bases in the Persian Gulf...
...Because Clinton was criticized as a Vietnam War opponent without a military record, he was limited in his ability to direct the military to engage in anti-terrorist commando operations they did not want to conduct . . . . In the absence of a bigger provocation from al Qaeda to silence his critics, Clinton thought he could do no more...
...Against All Enemies is too serious to be called a farce, for it highlights the tragedy of American foreign policy in this age of terrorism...
...On Clarke's watch as counterterrorism czar, the United States apparently never acquired that capability...
...Blow them up every once in a while and recruits won't want to go there...
...Says Clarke, Because of the intensity of the political opposition that Clinton engendered, he had been heavily criticized for bombing al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, for engaging in 'Wag the Dog' tactics . . . . For similar reasons, he could not fire the recalcitrant FBI director who had failed to fix the bureau or uncover terrorists in the United States...
...and worked to stabilize Pakistan...
...Clarke's decision to write what he means to be an indictment of the Bush administration's counterterror-ism policy, at a time when the president he served is still in office—and, particularly, to record the president's conversations with him on sensitive matters of national security—is unprecedented...
...Yet he also quotes a report that the head of the CIA's directorate of operations opposed use of the armed Predator against bin Laden on the grounds that it would "endanger the lives of CIA operatives around the world...
...Full awareness of al Qaeda was not some slow awakening that came only late in the Clinton presidency...
...As it happens, Republican officials were putting in place these very policies when the terrorists struck on September 11...
...We had considered ourselves at war with al Qaeda even before we knew its name or its reach...
...In Clarke's words, "I still to this day do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afghans, Americans, third-country nationals, or some combination who could locate bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him . . . . The president's intent was very clear: kill bin Laden...
...The Clinton administration had eight years to deal with the threat...
...Did the United States, under Clinton's leadership, have so little leverage over other nations on an issue it had identified as a top national priority...
...During their first months in office, officials who had been out of office for eight years may not have had the same sense of urgency about terrorism as Clarke, who had spent every day of those same eight years watching the terrorist threat spread...
...At the time, the CIA judged that "further Iranian-sponsored terrorism against the United States was likely...
...By far the most fascinating part of Against All Enemies, and the bulk of the book, chronicles the rise of al Qaeda as seen by the Clinton White House...
...The tragedy is that President Clinton, knowing al Qaeda was at war with us and understanding both its global reach and its plans to kill Americans, did not act in a similarly bold manner...
...The answer would appear to be yes...
...The White House wanted action...
...Clarke blames in particular the CIA's professed doubts about their authorization to use lethal force against the terrorists...
...The administration had conducted covert operations against suspected terrorists and was discussing an operation to snatch Osama bin Laden himself...
...Clarke has no doubt the Iranian government sponsored the Khobar bombing, which killed nineteen Americans: "The larger attack in Saudi Arabia at Khobar was conducted by Saudi Hezbollah under the close supervision of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Qods Force," he writes...
...Had they, the Bush administration may have found themselves confronting a significantly reduced terrorist threat...
...Saudi Ambassador Prince] Bandar . . . suggested that all that was stopping the Saudis from implicating Iran was the fear that American retaliation would be halfhearted...
...The Clinton administration failed to coerce the weak and failing states of Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to capture bin Laden...
...The views expressed here are his own...
...Again and again, Clarke proposed attacking bin Laden's training camps, whether or not the terrorist mastermind was confirmed to be there, telling his colleagues, "We have to stop this conveyor belt, this production line...
...Clarke lost his access to the president when the Bush administration came to power...
...The [Clinton] principals had asked me to update the pol-mil plan for the transition, flagging the issues where there was not a consensus, where decisions had not been agreed...
...Clarke quotes his colleague, Mike Sheehan, as asking, "What's it gonna take, Dick...
...Clarke's deep anger with the current administration notwithstanding, he has performed a service by reminding America of how the Clinton administration failed to protect us from the terrorist threat...
...Clarke helped plan the initial use of force in the Clinton administration, to retaliate against Iraq for its plot to assassinate George H.W...
...Each time, U.S...
...He dissects the famous judgment to stop General Barry McCaffrey's forces from finishing off Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard as they retreated from Kuwait, and the flawed American decision "to stand by and let the Republican Guard mass murder the Shia and Kurds...
...So what happened...
...According to Clarke, "There were signs in 1995 of [bin Laden's] money and support in Bosnia, Chechnya, the Philippines, Egypt, Morocco, and in Europe...
...In addition to ending, purportedly, Iraqi terrorism against the United States by bombing Iraq's empty intelligence headquarters, Clarke also claims credit for ending Iranian terrorism against the United States after the Khobar Towers attack...
...policy would have "no greater priority than preventing the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction" by terrorists...
...But the principals objected—for reasons as diverse as wasting million-dollar missiles, undermining U.S...
Vol. 9 • April 2004 • No. 30
