Preserved In Amber
I can’t wait for this interview with Richard Clarke on 60 minutes and I can’t wait to read the book. Judging by this article on the CBS website, it looks to be a doozy, as predicted.
First we find out that Rumsfeld wanted to bomb Iraq on 9/11. This does not surprise me. He wanted to bomb Iraq on 9/10 and the attacks on the WTC were a dandy excuse to go ahead with it. But, what’s interesting is Clarke’s account of the meeting in which he said it as opposed to the account of that meeting as duly recorded by Bob Woodward.
Woodward’s version has a bold and manly Bush taking charge of his confused and befuddled advisors who have more questions than answers until the steely-eyed rocket man gives them proper direction:
Shortly after 9:30 p.m., President Bush brought together his most senior national security advisers in a bunker beneath the White House grounds. It was just 13 hours after the deadliest attack on the U.S. homeland in the country’s history…
“This is the time for self-defense,” he told his aides, according to National Security Council notes. Then, repeating the vow he had made earlier in the evening in a televised address from the Oval Office, he added: “We have made the decision to punish whoever harbors terrorists, not just the perpetrators.”
Their job, the president said, was to figure out how to do it.
That afternoon, on a secure phone on Air Force One, Bush had already told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that he would order a military response and that Rumsfeld would be responsible for organizing it. “We’ll clean up the mess,” the president told Rumsfeld, “and then the ball will be in your court.”
Intelligence was by now almost conclusive that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, based in Afghanistan, had carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the aides gathered in the bunker-the “war cabinet” that included Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and CIA Director George J. Tenet-were not ready to say what should be done about them. The war cabinet had questions, no one more than Rumsfeld.
Who are the targets? How much evidence do we need before going after al Qaeda? How soon do we act? While acting quickly was essential, Rumsfeld said, it might take up to 60 days to prepare for major military strikes. And, he asked, are there targets that are off-limits? Do we include American allies in military strikes?
Rumsfeld warned that an effective response would require a wider war, one that went far beyond the use of military force. The United States, he said, must employ every tool available-military, legal, financial, diplomatic, intelligence.
The president was enthusiastic. But Tenet offered a sobering thought. Although al Qaeda’s home base was Afghanistan, the terrorist organization operated nearly worldwide, he said. The CIA had been working the bin Laden problem for years. We have a 60-country problem, he told the group.
“Let’s pick them off one at a time,” Bush replied
And then he hitched up his codpiece and went to bed. It was, after all, 9:30.
Here’s Clarke’s version from the CBS article:
After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.
“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl. “And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.
“Initially, I thought when he said, ‘There aren’t enough targets in– in Afghanistan,’ I thought he was joking.
“I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we’ve looked at this issue for years. For years we’ve looked and there’s just no connection.”
Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.
“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’
“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.”
Clarke also describes the foreign policy advisors in the administration as “preserved in amber,” (much more evocative than my earlier characterization of them as fossilized) which supports my observations over the last couple of years that the central problem with these guys is that they are unable to get past the cold war mythology that hooked them somewhere in their formative years and never let them go. It’s like watching a bunch of middle aged freaks at a LOTR convention. Not a pretty sight.
And what’s even more staggering about all this is that they still haven’t learned their lessons. CBS reports that Steven Hadley of the NSC describes the Iraq misadventure as a success by basing it on the lie that al Qaeda and Saddam were in cahoots AND on the dangerous fallacy that terrorism has something to do with rogue states:
“Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center of the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone; their sanctuary in Iraq is gone. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies on the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way in narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists.”
Jayzuz. The bombings in Madrid, Istanbul and Bali sure as hell didn’t need any rogue state sanctuary — they were all carried out by terrorist factions loosely connected to al Qaeda and managed on local soil. I can’t even begin to comment on the ridiculous concept that we’ve somehow provoked a positive change in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But, we can be sure that the Iraq war has contributed to terrorism all right. It served as an extremely useful rallying cry and cause for manipulation for no goddamned good reason other than a total lack of imagination and openness to changing facts on the ground.
It’s not only the White House that refuses to see terrorism for what it is instead of what they’d like it to be, the right wing punditocrisy is similarly clinging to their outmoded cold warrior worldview. All this talk of appeasement in the Spanish elections fails to account for the fact that it doesn’t really matter how any single country reacts to these Islamic terrorist actions. You can’t appease them or not appease them because they are not operating from any real premise.
Al Qaeda terrorists have a delusional view of world events that’s only rivaled by the neocons here in the US. And they share a similar misunderstanding of the forces that bring about change in the world. For instance, they BOTH believed that they destroyed the Soviet Union through their own superior military prowess. I think we all know that the American right wing is dedicated to the proposition that their God Ronald Reagan single handedly ended the cold war. Osama bin Laden takes similar credit. From a 1998 interview:
Allah has granted the Muslim people and the Afghani mujahedeen, and those with them, the opportunity to fight the Russians and the Soviet Union. … They were defeated by Allah and were wiped out. There is a lesson here. The Soviet Union entered Afghanistan late in December of ’79. The flag of the Soviet Union was folded once and for all on the 25th of December just 10 years later. It was thrown in the waste basket. Gone was the Soviet union forever.
[…]
Today however, our battle against the Americans is far greater than our battle was against the Russians. Americans have committed unprecedented stupidity. They have attacked Islam and its most significant sacrosanct symbols … . We anticipate a black future for America. Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.
You couldn’t make this shit up. Al Qaeda thinks it brought down the Soviets and thinks it can bring down the US, too. Yep. And meanwhile, here in the new capital of Western Civilization we’ve got President Hopalong spewing nonsense about Good n’ Evul while the SecDef says that we should bomb the countries with the best targets.
Dr. Strangelove, your table is ready.
Oh, and by the way, somebody ought to send a memo to the White House that its attempted character asissination of Clarke is extremely lame. They say he wrote this book to “audition” for the Kerry campaign. Yeah. The guy who ran counter-terrorism for Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Junior would need to audition. I hear Tom Cruise is doing a screen test for the next Mission Impossible movie, too. Paramount needs to see if he can do the job.