Posted on 09/15/2002 11:26:33 PM PDT by ThePythonicCow
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Asleep at the switch
Jean Chrétien is right, in a way. The United States partly brought this on itself. So did the other Western democracies. America has been too arrogant and smug. If only it had acted differently, thousands of people might still be alive today. Make that tens or hundreds of thousands. The U.S. foreign policy establishment has a lot on its conscience. Unfortunately, Mr. Chrétien is a little muddled in his analysis of where America went wrong. He believes the problem is that the U.S. is too rich and greedy, and that it's a big bully, and that it projected its power on the world too much. But the real problem is that the U.S. went to sleep. It tolerated tyrannies, betrayed its friends, fatally weakened its intelligence capability, and willfully ignored the mounting evidence of a sophisticated state-sponsored terror network. It was guilty of monumental cultural arrogance and moral cowardice. It thought those guys with beards and turbans were just harmless crazies, and the genocide of the Kurds was of no importance, and the Saudis were their friends. The problem is that the U.S. completely failed to project its power where it mattered most. "I find myself in total disillusion with democracy," said Tanja Tomasevic this week. I spoke with her in New York, two days before the memorial service at Ground Zero. She and her husband, Vladimir, immigrated to Canada from war-torn Yugoslavia. Vladimir died in the World Trade Center attacks. The Tomasevics thought democracy would safeguard their freedom. But democracy let them down. "Every president since Jimmy Carter has vowed to fight terrorism," says Michael Ledeen, a U.S. political analyst. "But this is the first one to actually do it." Mr. Ledeen's new book, The War Against the Terror Masters,is a depressing and extremely useful account of what went wrong with the U.S. Its failure to move against terrorism and its state sponsors, he concludes, "was very wide and very deep." It was, at root, a failure of political leadership stretching over many years. Sept. 11 was only the last in a long string of terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens and sovereign territory -- the first World Trade Center bombing, the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, and so on. Before Sept. 11, the cumulative death toll had reached the hundreds. But the U.S. never retaliated. And so the terrorists quite rationally concluded that it never would. America was soft. Americans didn't fight like men, and hated body bags. They could be had. Meantime, in Washington, the conventional wisdom was that a surprise attack on America was impossible, so there was no need to guard against one. Even the head of the CIA said so. The next threats to the U.S. would be economic, not military, and those who argued otherwise were discounted as nuts or conspiracy theorists. (Among the nuts was the FBI's counterterrorist chief, John O'Neill. He became security chief for the World Trade Center, and died on Sept. 11.) By the 1990s, both the FBI and CIA had lost their way. Neither agency knew how to find or fight the bad guys in a post-Cold War world. On Sept. 11, the CIA did not have a single case officer in Iran, Iraq or Syria, or anyone who could pass as a Muslim fundamentalist. "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen," said one case officer. In any event, Bill Clinton despised the CIA. The agencies were incapable of sharing information. And both had been absurdly hamstrung by legislators eager to rein them in. The CIA, for example, wasn't allowed to recruit terrorists as agents. The FBI wasn't permitted to collect newspaper clippings on groups that had openly declared their intention to destroy the United States. And so the intelligence establishment missed the biggest story of the '90s -- the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, richly financed by the West's good friends, the Saudis. Not that you needed all that much intelligence to find it. You only had to visit the mosques in Saudi Arabia and listen to the mullahs. But no one bothered. After the Persian Gulf war, the CIA did try to back various dissident factions in Iraq from time to time. But it was ludicrously incompetent. (One coup plot was so clumsy, Mr. Ledeen relates, that Saddam Hussein's security chief used the covert communication system that the CIA had given to the coup leaders to phone the CIA and tell them their man had just been executed.) Besides, Washington kept yanking the rug out at the last minute. America's bungling doomed hundreds of dissidents to torture and execution, and its reluctance to finish the war against Saddam Hussein (something Mr. Clinton declared in 1998 to be a moral necessity) doomed thousands of others as the Iraqi leader continued to siphon money meant for food and medicine into guns and germ factories. No wonder so many Iraqis came to hate America. America kept promising to rescue them, and it never did. And so the forces of terrorism grew, fed by an endless stream of recruits indoctrinated in the madrassas and trained by Hezbollah and branches of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Mr. Ledeen says the terror networks have operated in these states for nearly 30 years, with varying degrees of co-operation. He identifies the terror masters as Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Two are secular states and two are religious ones. Their common denominator is that all are tyrannies, and all actively support terrorism. "Think of them as Mafia families," he says. "They fight each other until the feds show up, and then they fight the feds." (Saddam Hussein's favourite movie, by the way, is The Godfather,according to a former mistress.) Iran, he says, is the biggest and most dangerous. It is also the one most ripe for democratic revolution; since last September, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets for pro-American demonstrations. Mr. Ledeen is sanguine about a war against Iraq. He thinks it would be reasonably fast and reasonably benign, and extremely popular with most Iraqis. What worries him is what happens after. Will the U.S. stick around to see things through? Or will it go home again, and forget about democracy and liberation, and leave the freedom fighters and the brave Iranian students and the oppressed Saudi women twisting in the wind? Those Americans have a notoriously short attention span. And the failure of America was not that it is rich and greedy, but that its leaders forgot one fact of life. You can't protect your freedom by making yourself inoffensive to your enemies. Dean Acheson said that once. So did Tanja Tomasevic, just the other day. |
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Just asking.
L
Exactly....there's no better dissection of one such "rug-pulling" from an ally's feet than in Robert Bauer's book 'See No Evil, Hear No Evil'. I get the impression that Mr. Bauer is NOT very fond of Bill Clinton either...
Just in case anyone missed that line.
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