Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series)

by Scheuer, Michael

  The first U.S.-Iraq war also provides a good example of the “fog of war,” in which unexpected and seemingly unrelated matters can be exceedingly costly. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait there was a good deal of informal discussion and debate within the U.S. Intelligence Community about whether President Bush would use enough U.S. military power to definitively eliminate the Saddam problem. Bush was well liked in the U.S. Intelligence Community—especially in the CIA, where he had been DCI under President Gerald Ford—but he did not inspire the same confidence as had Ronald Reagan. Reagan left the constant impression that he was out to protect America, first, last, and always. Bush and his closest advisers, on the other hand, were clearly what I have referred to as “nuancers” and “ballet of international politics” men, people who would make international affairs so complex and interconnected that the result was often either paralysis and no action or half-measures that left threats undefeated and simmering, ready to boil another day. And so it seemed likely to be the case in Iraq. Recognizing this eternally temporizing potential, some in the IC took comfort in the thought that Bush and his team would be kept up to mark because there was at least one manly, decisive leader in the Iraq war coalition—British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Having watched Mrs. Thatcher conduct the Falklands war, break relations with Syria on the terrorism issue, and face down and then smash Britain’s labor unions, she seemed likely to keep Bush from “going wobbly” and leaving a half-fought, eventually-to-be-resumed war in Iraq.

  Alas, however, such was not to be the case. As the war opened, a now deservedly forgotten Tory politician named Michael Heseltine led a successful party revolt and unseated Mrs. Thatcher, although he did not win the premiership. At precisely the instant President Bush and company were collapsing with wobbliness, Mrs. Thatcher was no longer on hand to provide the Oval Office with the requisite spine. And on such pedestrian events do great disasters pivot. Without the Iron Lady at his side, President Bush proved to be very much a man meant for turning. Quailing before the bloodbath that would have permanently protected America, Israel, the West, their allies, and the Iraqi people against Saddam, Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft joined hands and danced the nuancers’ minuet and explained away their lack of concern for Americans by dilating on the complex and unpredictable impact that annihilating Iraq’s military would have on regional and world affairs. To paraphrase a 1790s American who hated the diplomat John Jay for not adequately protecting U.S. trade from Britain, every American parent who has lost a son or a daughter in Iraq since 1990, and every Iraqi who lost a child because of the UN sanctions that became necessary because Bush and his dance partners refused to destroy Saddam’s regime, should once a day express their contempt by saying: “Damn George Bush! Damn everyone who won’t damn George Bush! Damn everyone that won’t put lights in their windows and sit up all night damning George Bush!”21

  The second momentous event of 1991 was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This event was, of course, a great victory for the United States and a singular achievement for the determination and vision of Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, Mr. Reagan was not president when the great moment came, and instead America was led by a very good man and a very bad politician, George H. W. Bush. While the fall of the wall was certainly an occasion to celebrate the victory of America and Mr. Reagan, President Bush turned out to be something of a weepy, dreamy Adlai Stevenson/Henry Wallace clone, talking endlessly about the arrival of what Noël Coward once called “the age of peace and plenty,” and the “New World Order” that the U.S. government would build from it.

  Well, the elder-Bush-designed and-managed New Jerusalem never arrived, but we went on speaking as if it had for the rest of the 1990’s and to this day—recall Madeleine Albright’s delusion that America is “the indispensable nation.”22 The major result of terminating the USSR was the destruction of the fairly well-ordered and world war–less international environment we had enjoyed for nearly half a century. In many ways the Cold War–era’s U.S.-USSR standoff had amounted to a genuine New World Order, but that framework of stability and peace was shattered by the American victory, and the world thereafter began a steady descent toward a new era of barbarity, an era whose arrival would be hastened by the happy talk and silly democracy-spreading notions of Messrs. Bush, Clinton, and Bush. While these three gentlemen put protecting Americans on the back burner in favor of occupying an office the U.S. Constitution does not provide for—President of the World—the forces that attacked us on 9/11 peacefully and quite openly, as noted above, gathered, trained, and prepared for war. Barbarism arrived to kill Americans, while our presidents were busy seeking the world’s applause, admiration, and cultural amalgamation.

  1993: An Unshared Revelation, Another Pulled Punch

  In February 1993 Ramzi Ahmed Yusuf and a team of minimally talented and intelligent individuals spent about twenty thousand dollars on explosives and other materials and detonated a bomb that came within an ace of collapsing the two towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City. If it had been completely successful, the attack would have killed many times more Americans than died on 9/11. After the bombing, Yusuf scurried out of the United States and continued to roam the world looking for U.S. targets to attack. In January 1994, Yusuf barely escaped from Philippine police in Manila but was captured the next month in Pakistan in an operation led by Pakistani security officers. The effort yielded Yusuf in chains and the opportunity for the FBI to falsely claim credit for the success. This claim established a now-hallowed FBI tradition regarding its efforts against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda: claiming credit for other agencies’ successes. Such claims now amount to a fabricated litany of Bureau “successes” that probably explains why the FBI continues to be involved in counterterrorist operations. There is no other plausible reason. Without these claims of overseas successes, the FBI could do no more than its standard operating procedure: find some addled U.S. Muslims, recruit a slightly brighter Muslim, and then use the latter to frame the former in a sting operation that makes them look like terrorists. We all have seen this method of operation in practice in such places as Lodi, Minneapolis, Albany, and Miami.23

  Anyway, Yusuf’s near-miss attack on the WTC should have persuaded U.S. officialdom that one icily brilliant Islamist militant and his retinue of mostly half-baked colleagues had demolished the doctrine of deterrence, as it had come to be known during the Cold War. Al-Qaeda would later publish a brilliantly written essay explaining the strategic importance of the 9/11 attacks and claiming that the attack had destroyed the three pillars of U.S. security policy: early warning, preemption, and deterrence.24 Al-Qaeda was wrong. What the attack on 9/11 did was definitively drive home for U.S. political leaders and policymakers the great lesson of Ramzi Yusuf’s failed 1993 attack; namely, that deterrence was useless against religiously motivated nonstate actors, and that our ability to detect and preempt them before they attacked was extremely limited.

  One of the senior U.S. government officials who seemed to intuitively grasp this reality was Richard A. Clarke, then the National Security Council’s chief for transnational issues. In the spring of 1995, I headed the unit at CIA headquarters that was responsible for managing worldwide operations against Sunni militants, and the pursuit and capture of Yusuf and his associates fell under that unit’s mandate. After Yusuf’s arrest in Peshawar by U.S. and Pakistani officials, I briefed Mr. Clarke several times on the operation and on the hard-copy and electronic materials that were confiscated from Yusuf and his subordinates in Manila, Bangkok, and Peshawar. One of the most troubling discoveries made during the examination of a computer seized from Yusuf’s apartment in Manila was a file that contained a detailed plan (Yusuf had code-named the plan “Bojinka”) to down a dozen or so U.S. commercial airliners in midflight over the Pacific Ocean. The planes were to be brought down by the detonation of liquid-explosive bombs brought onto them at their points of origin by Yusuf’s operatives. The explosives and the necessary
electrical components would be concealed in carry-on luggage as innocuous-looking items—contact-lens-solution bottles, compact disk players, wristwatches, etc. During the first leg of the flight, the attacker would assemble the bomb, position it in the cabin, set the timer to detonate on the aircraft’s second leg over the Pacific, and then deplane. The Bojinka attacks were not to be suicide operations.

  U.S. government forensics specialists examined the formula for the liquid explosive, as well as the schematic for the electric-detonating system, and concluded that the bomb would have worked. Then, after interrogations of Yusuf and his colleagues, we learned that the bomb had already been used once. Yusuf himself had boarded a Japanese airliner in Manila that was flying to Sebu, in the Philippines, and then on to Tokyo. He successfully smuggled the components on board in Manila, assembled and set the bomb on the flight’s first leg, and deplaned in Sebu. The bomb detonated over the Pacific, killing one Japanese national. Yusuf later said that he used only a small amount of explosives on this trial run because there were not enough Americans on board to justify destroying the aircraft.25

  When briefing Mr. Clarke on this information, it was clear that he “got it” immediately. Men like Yusuf, he said, could not be deterred. As important, Mr. Clarke ruminated that if Yusuf been successful in bringing down the World Trade Center towers and/or a dozen U.S. airliners flying Pacific routes, the United States—by that time the world’s only superpower—would have suffered a massive, costly, and humiliating defeat. Worse, Washington would have had absolutely nothing against which to militarily respond. The superpower and its massive military machine would have been seen looking at the ruins, quivering with rage, pressed by a population eager for revenge, and yet impotent to respond in any meaningful way. Mr. Clarke clearly saw what many CIA counterterrorism officers saw: Yusuf had irrevocably ended the comfortable era of Cold War deterrence by proving it irrelevant to at least the transnational threat posed by Islamist militants. Mr. Clarke’s effectiveness in conveying to the Oval Office this vital, Yusuf-taught lesson about a new kind of national-security threat demanding preemption is unclear. I do know though that from the spring of 1995 until I temporarily left the CIA’s bin Laden operations, Mr. Clarke and his superiors turned down every opportunity provided by the U.S. clandestine service to conduct a preemptive covert-action or military attack against bin Laden. But while the Clinton administration was fatally slow on the pickup, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda learned Professor Yusuf’s lesson by heart.

  The other event that would have lasting impact on the perceptions of America’s Islamist foes involved the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s (IIS) reliably clumsy and ham-fisted attempt to kill former president George H.W. Bush during his visit to Kuwait in February 1993. The attack was preempted by Kuwaiti security officials, who initially tried to hide their success for fear that its publication would cause the visit’s cancellation. In this judgment, the Kuwaitis clearly were ignorant of the enormous personal courage of that fine gentleman.

  After the CIA acquired the information from the Kuwaitis about the disrupted attack, an intense multiweek and multiagency effort ensued to prove what was obvious before the investigation began: Saddam had ordered his security service to murder Mr. Bush. By reason of my position at the time, I and several other CIA officers—analysts, lawyers, and operations officers—worked with FBI and Department of Justice (DoJ) officials to prepare a paper for the National Security Council and President Clinton assessing whether Iraq was culpable for the attempted assassination. This was a testy and at times acrimonious process. The CIA knew who conducted the attack: the human intelligence and physical evidence were complete and the forensic evaluation was conclusive. The FBI and DoJ officials, however, were looking for court-quality evidence and were decidedly gun-shy about vouching for the validity of information acquired by the clandestine service and the Kuwaitis. At one point, I recall, a very senior FBI official threw his pen across the conference table at the CIA team out of frustration over the fact that CIA reporting contained so much detail, some of which might be exculpatory if used in a courtroom situation. As he launched the pen, he barked something like “if one of my officers ever wrote down that much of what a source told him, he would find himself packed off to the FBI office in Juneau.” Refraining from firing a return volley of Paper Mates, we simply told our FBI counterpart that CIA officers are trained to write down exactly what their assets tell them, whether or not U.S. judges, law enforcement officials, or policymakers want to hear it.26

  We eventually put together a paper that brought us all the way back to where we began—Saddam had ordered the assassination attempt. The NSC and President Clinton accepted the paper’s conclusion and ordered the U.S. military to prepare a retaliatory cruise-missile attack on IIS headquarters in Baghdad. While preparations for the raid were ongoing, I was assigned the task of traveling to New York to brief the then-U.S. ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright on the paper’s conclusions, as well as to explain the nature and quality of the evidence that supported them. The goal was to prepare Ambassador Albright to present UN members with an explanation and justification for the cruise-missile strike we were about to launch on Iraq. The briefing did not begin until almost midnight on a Saturday evening in the ambassador’s residence, but Ms. Albright proved to be a very quick study and asked pointed questions; indeed, she struck me as the sharpest, toughest, and most aggressive individual I had so far encountered in the Executive Branch while dealing with this issue. This was, of course, before Ms. Albright’s champagne-glass-clinking days with Kim Jong Il. In any event, the next day Ambassador Albright delivered an excellent briefing to the assembled UN grandees and received virtually no pushback from anyone.

  When I returned to CIA headquarters the next morning, I learned that the White House had launched the cruise-missile strike against Saddam’s intelligence headquarters in the middle of the night so as to limit casualties.27 Thus the hard and contentious work of the U.S. Intelligence Community was completely wasted. Saddam’s regime had tried to murder a former American president, and the mightiest military power the earth had ever seen responded by breaking some cheap Iraqi concrete and cinder-block and killing a few members of the janitorial staff and a very unlucky female Iraqi poet who lived nearby. What was the point? Well, here was another instance where the nuancers and “ballet of international politics” sermonizers—this lot from the Democratic Party’s ranks—easily persuaded themselves that protecting Americans and U.S. interests was not really their top priority. President Clinton and his advisers pulled their punch because they did not want to upset Moscow, which still had a strong relationship with Iraq; they did not want to be seen to deliver a militarily disproportionate response to what, after all, had been an unsuccessful attempt on Mr. Bush’s life, if we did so, they fretted, the Europeans and Muslims would be angry with them; and they reliably dragged out that traditional bipartisan Executive Branch excuse for moral cowardice and not protecting Americans—they wanted to limit collateral damage. In this case, of course, the last justification was absurd because the timing of the attack ensured that only innocent Iraqis sweeping floors, cleaning toilets, and composing verse would be killed.

  All these justifications amounted to just one thing—pure hooey. The sum of this useless raid on IIS headquarters totaled one probable and one definite loss for U.S. security and the safety of Americans. The probable loss: Saddam’s grip on power might have been undermined. It depended in large measure on the strength and loyalty of his intelligence service, a brutal, murderous, and effective internal-security service if there ever was one. Had the U.S. military been ordered to strike the intelligence headquarters in Baghdad in the late morning of a workday, there is every chance that many hundreds of Iraq’s intelligence officers, including some of the service’s senior leaders, would have been killed. In thereby tearing a large human chunk out of the Iraqi service (and breaking up some concrete to boot), we would have denigrated the capabilities and manpower of one of the ma
in instruments Saddam relied on to maintain power. Such an eminently positive and valuable slaughter would have merited Machiavelli’s praise for well-used cruelty28 and might have had the added benefit of causing Iraqi intelligence officers to begin thinking about whether Saddam was worth keeping around if his personal desire for revenge against former president Bush earned such a retaliatory massacre. While a coup probably was too much to expect, CIA operators surely would have found a few candidates for recruitment as penetrations of Saddam’s regime among IIS officers worried about the possibility of another surprise visit by a cruise missile on their headquarters.29 In wartime, as a general rule, the steady application of intense violence produces increased opportunities for the collection of high-quality intelligence.30

  In the definite-loss category, our Islamist enemies went to school on this feckless, noncasualty-causing U.S. military raid. Al-Qaeda and its allies live in a police state–dominated culture whose lingua franca is the sturdy and remorseless application of power. While we in the West detest that reality because it does not mesh with our fantasy that all cultures and societies have equal value, the routine, arbitrary, and excessive use of force is a fact of everyday life for Muslims who live under the tyrannies that America supports and that govern much of the Islamic world. Thus what our foes saw was that Saddam Hussein had tried to kill the former U.S. president, in a manner that made little or no effort to hide Iraq’s hand. Indeed, Saddam expected the attack to succeed and wanted the world to know that he was responsible for exacting revenge against his persecutor. In response, the Clinton administration loudly rattled the American saber and reduced a mass of cinder-blocks and concrete to gravel. The lesson drawn by al-Qaeda was that the U.S. response to an attack was liable to be wordy but weak. The nuancers had again triumphed, and Richard Clarke later wrote that the cruise missile sent a message to Saddam that brought cessation of Iraqi terrorist attacks on U.S. interests. The reality is that there was no sustained Iraqi terrorist campaign against the United States before the cruise-missile strike, and Mr. Clarke’s claim is just part of his book-length apologia for the ineffective Clinton national-security team of which he was a key member.31 When ineffective U.S. military attacks are used to “send messages” to our Muslim and Islamist enemies, a message is indeed delivered. Unfortunately, the message delivered causes mirth, not trepidation. The message read by the Islamists is: “The Americans are stupid, they have the strongest military in history and are afraid or embarrassed to use it; we can, with prudence, do what we want.” That is the message delivered by Washington’s military half-measures, and it is heard by all but those in the White House who are too busy congratulating themselves for successfully modulating the use of violence so as not to disrupt the sophisticated ballet of international politics.