Stuck In The Cold War?
News Analysis By David Paul Kuhn, CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer
As National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice prepares to testify before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House is hoping to refute charges that President Bush led an "administration in amber," focused on obsolete security concerns in a world that had already changed.
At the end of the Cold War, the paradigm of state-sponsored terror, of symmetric state security threats, had fallen with the Soviet Union. Did the Bush administration recognize that America's chief enemies were no longer states but decentralized terror groups? The question now haunts this White House, which, it's fair to note, was only in office for eight months at the time the United States suffered its first continental attack since the war of 1812.
"The argument is if you would have been more vigilant, you would have been more lucky," said Michael O'Hanlon, a prominent national security analyst at the Brookings Institution. "Clearly there is something to this critique. The mentality was not as focused on al Qaeda as Clinton had been in the later years."
O'Hanlon says there are probably two reasons for this: "The specialty of seniors in the administration harkens back to Cold War and traditional state-on-state issues. And as you know, there was a little of an anything-but-Clinton attitude on issues."
During the Sept. 11 hearings on Capitol Hill, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel Berger, said that he briefed Rice in December 2000 that she was going to "spend more time during your four years on terrorism generally and al Qaeda specifically, than any other issue."
This Thursday, Rice will respond for the record to charges that the administration primarily focused on Cold War security concerns, on state threats, rather than non-state actors like al Qaeda.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that on the very day of the attacks, Sept. 11, 2001, Rice was scheduled to deliver a speech on the major security concerns facing the United States. In remarks prepared for the speech, she never mentions al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden; instead, she focuses on the need for a missile-defense system.
In February 2001, and again in August of that year, President Bush said, respectively, that "We must develop and we must deploy effective missile defenses," and that the United States was "committed to defending America and our allies against ballistic missile attacks."
In effort to spell out the administration's main security concerns, Rice wrote in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs that the "real challenges" to the United States were from "big powers, particularly Russia and China."
Yet by the late 1990s, the Clinton administration had concluded that al Qaeda – or related Islamic extremists – were behind a series of attacks including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa and the USS Cole attack of 2000, as well as the thwarted 1995 plan to blow up 11 U.S. passenger jets over the Far East and an alleged plot to bomb Los Angles International Airport.
"Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney had a realpolitik view of the world that says it is the great powers that matter and balance of power and strengthening our defense forces against this traditional threat," explained Michael McFaul, a Russia expert at Stanford University and a former colleague of Rice. "So that's why the focus on Russia, that's why the focus on China, that's why missile defense."
The recent Washington firestorm began last week after President Bush's former top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, published his book, "Against All Enemies," and testified before the Sept. 11 commission that the Bush administration undercut the war on terror with its preoccupation with Iraq.
More to the point was Clarke's statement to CBS "60 Minutes" that, "It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier."
Indeed, most of the key players who forged the Bush administration's anti-terror policy were veteran Cold Warriors who served in previous Republican administrations:
Biographies notwithstanding, the Bush White House did make a major policy shift following the Sept. 11 attacks, focusing on asymmetrical warfare and the non-state threat of Islamic extremism.
Nevertheless, prior to Sept. 11, 2001, a CBS News review of speeches and public remarks by President Bush suggests he did not mention al Qaeda once, although he did send a letter to Congress extending Clinton-era sanctions against the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden.
As O'Hanlon put it, the question is not one of prevention of the Sept. 11 attacks but whether the Bush administration had prioritized the threat posed by al Qaeda above that of states viewed as rogues, like Iran, and major powers, like China – and whether greater vigilance might have meant a greater likelihood of thwarting the attacks.
"It is an argument that is suggestive, not conclusive, but it is still moderately persuasive and I've heard some Clinton people make the argument in off-the-record internal discussions here at Brookings and elsewhere," O'Hanlon said. "We do know now that it was knowable. That there were certain people on the terrorist watch list that were in the country, that there were certain tactics for using airplanes that had been discussed before and not given sufficient attention."
Clarke's book argues that President Bush and Wolfowitz on the day of Sept. 11, and the week following, had a preoccupation with Iraq as the culprit in spite of top terrorism officials reporting that al Qaeda was responsible.
Similar accounts have come from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil and former Democratic presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark, who says he voted for Republican Presidents Nixon and Reagan because of their strength on national security. Clark said that when he was in the Pentagon prior to Sept. 11 there was wide discussion of an impending attack on Iraq, that "taking down Saddam became a hobbyhorse" for the group around Rumsfeld.
"These folks never took their eye off Saddam in the '90s and then obviously after 9/11 they had a new argument which to them was partly an opportunity," O'Hanlon said. "So I think it really symbolized not-so-much their Cold War thinking as their Desert Storm thinking. The hawkish part of the Bush 41 crowd that increasingly saw Saddam as a threat onward. That was the great strand of continuity."
By David Paul Kuhn