Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (45 page)

16.
See Kenneth Katzman, “Afghanistan: Current Issues and U.S. Policy Concerns,”
Congressional Research Service Report
(Internet version), November 21, 2001. Richard Clarke also thought it better to bend to the will of the feminists than to protect all Americans. He told the 9/11 commissioners that he opposed a U.S. State Department proposal to ask the Saudis to give the Taliban $250 million in return for bin Laden because “the idea might not seem attractive to either Secretary [of State] Albright or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton—both critics of the Taliban’s record on women’s rights.” Kean et al.,
9/11 Commission Report
, 125.

17.
John Quincy Adams, “Speech on July 4, 1821,” Future of Freedom Foundation, www.fff.com.

18.
Maier,
Among Empires,
242.

19.
Joseph Nye,
Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics
(New York: Public Affairs, 2005), and more recently, Joseph Nye, “Our Impoverished Discourse,” www.huffingtonpost.com, November 1, 2006. To be fair to Dr. Nye, it should be noted that Washington’s feeble use of hard power over the past decade has perhaps created too much of a task for soft power to achieve. Our enemies no longer believe America will use its hard power in full measure, and so soft power does not have the hard-power partner—either in fact or in the foe’s expectations—that fueled its success during the Cold War. Today, as Mark Steyn has written, “‘Soft power’ is wielded by soft cultures, usually because they lack the will to maintain hard power.” See Mark Steyn,
America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
(Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2006), 46.

20.
Adams, “Speech on July 4, 1821.”

21.
Joseph S. Nye, “Propaganda Isn’t the Way: Soft Power,”
International Herald Tribune
, January 10, 2003.

22.
The CIA’s bin Laden unit—known as “Alec Station” at its inception—was given a charter of five tasks in late 1995.

These tasks were fully accomplished by mid-May 1998, although the federal indictment of bin Laden was not publicly announced until the following November. The bottom line here is that the CIA’s clandestine service delivered splendidly on all counts, and the Clinton administration did not act on the product it received.

23.
The consistent effort of senior U.S. government officials to prevent Americans from learning of Saudi perfidy is common under Democrats and Republicans. In September 2002, for example, Prince Turki al-Faisal wrote in a
Washington Post
op-ed: “In 1996…at the instruction of the Saudi leadership, I shared all the intelligence we had collected on bin Laden and al-Qaeda with the CIA.” Having been on the scene at the time, I can categorically say that this is untrue. The response of the Bush administration to criticism of the Saudis, moreover, continued the don’t-worry-they’re-our-pals mantra of President Clinton’s team. In November 2004 White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters, “I see no reason to believe that Saudi Arabia is not committed to the campaign against terrorism,” and Secretary of State Colin Powell followed by reminding critics of Riyadh “that Saudi Arabia has been a great friend to the United States for many, many years, and is a strategic partner.” See Prince Turki al-Faisal, “Allied Against Terrorism,”
Washington Post,
September 17, 2002, 21, and David E. Sanger, “Bush Officials Praise Saudis for Aiding Terror Fight,”
New York Times,
November 27, 2002. For Prince Bandar’s statement see “Ex-Saudi Ambassador: Kingdom could have helped U.S. prevent 9/11,” www.cnn.com, November 2, 2007. In a larger sense, Bandar’s November statement probably means that the Saudi rulers have decided the Democrats are likely to win the next presidential election and so are throwing them a few bones to help beat up both the Bush administration and the CIA—which the Democrats, of course, thrive on. Bandar is doing what the Saudis always do: They cozy up to the U.S. political party they think will win the White House. Soon after the next U.S. president is inaugurated you will see pictures of him or her holding hands with the Saudi king and walking around the Camp David grounds. This groveling will occur no matter which party wins; because America is so dependent on Saudi oil, neither party can afford to hold a grudge against America’s energy masters in Riyadh.

24.
Shaykh Nasir bin Hamd al-Fahd, “A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction against Infidels,” May 1, 2003.

25.
For an excellent analysis of the dimensions of the threat posed to the United States by the unsecured nuclear arsenal of the Former Soviet Union, and of the dereliction of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations in allowing that threat to fester, see Graham Allison,
Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe
(New York: Times Books, 2004).

26.
“The two keys in bello requirements,” just-war scholar Jean Bethke Elshtain has written,

27.
Machiavelli,
Prince,
10, 32.

28.
Quoted in Tsouras,
Civil War Quotations,
235.

29.
“Interview with Abu Jandal,”
Al-Quds Al-Arabi,
March 28, 2005. “One night before the [August 20, 2007] bombing,” Abu Jandal recalled, “Shaykh Usama bin Laden decided to go to the Khowst camps…I remember that when we reached a crossroads between Khowst and Kabul in Wardak Province, Shaykh Usama bin Ladin said: ‘Where do you think, my friends, where should we go, to Khowst or to Kabul?’ We said we should go to Kabul in order to visit our comrades at the front there. He said: ‘With God’s help, let us go to Kabul.’”

30.
On August 19, 1998, the day before the attack, I was told by one of the top officials in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center that the White House had told the DCI that it was adjusting the timing of the cruise-missile strike so as not to attack at the time of evening prayers. Killing bin Laden and other insurgent chiefs at prayer, the White House had decided, carried too much risk of offending the Muslim world. Interestingly, the missiles did hit the main mosque, but it was empty because prayers were over.

31.
Joshua Mitchell, “Not All Yearn to be Free,”
Washington Post
, August 10, 2003, B-7.

32.
For a discussion of this supposed need for “imagination” and even for “institutionalizing” it, see Kean et al.,
9/11 Commission Report,
339–48.

33.
Abdel Bari Atwan, “Saudi Incidents: Causes and Results,”
Al-Quds Al-Arabi,
June 1, 2004, 1.

34.
George Washington to Marquis de Malmedy, May 16, 1777, quoted in Melton,
Quotable Founding Fathers,
63.

35.
David Brooks, “Among the Bourgeoisophobes,”
Weekly Standard,
April 15, 2002, 25.

36.
The 9/11 Commission Report
quotes an officer from the Joint Chiefs of Staff as saying that “Bin Laden had left his quarters before the strike would have occurred.” I was running this operation from the CIA side in Washington, and I have no recollection of ever learning that bin Laden had departed before we could have launched an attack. Even if this is true, however, it was unknown before the decision was made not to shoot, and we were operating on that Sunday on the basis of first-hand, eyewitness information that bin Laden had entered the building for the night. If he left before the missiles would have hit the target, it was because the NSC had taken many hours from the time the targeting data arrived in Washington before reaching any kind of decision. And they made a negative decision, at a moment when our best data said bin Laden was still in the targeted building. Thus, the Clinton team’s decision not to attack amounted to a conscious decision to forgo an opportunity to protect Americans. See Kean et. al.,
9/11 Commission Report,
131.

37.
For the stark and substantive differences between Shias and Sunnis not only on the importance and appropriateness of shrines but on myriad other issues, see the excellent and wonderfully informative Vali Nasr,
The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future
(New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2006), esp. 31–61.

38.
Andrew J. Bacevich, “A Less than Splendid Little War,”
Wilson Quarterly
(Winter 2001), 83.

39.
Ernest Hemingway,
Islands in the Stream
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 41–42.

40.
Ibid., 42.

41.
Ralph Peters,
New Glory: Expanding America’s Global Supremacy
(New York: Sentinel, 2005), 30.

42.
Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, USMC (Ret.),
The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century
(St. Paul, Minn.: Zenith Press, 2004), xi.

43.
Perhaps a good deal of blood and treasure could have been saved if Secretary Rumsfeld, his military transformers, and the RMA’ers had read a little history. The folly of depending on relatively few soldiers and specialized modern weaponry, as well as the reality that man-to-man combat would remain the central feature of war, was explained by Machiavelli in the sixteenth century. Writing to dismiss the reliance of Italian princes on artillery and cavalry—the specialized modern weaponry of the era—Machiavelli argued “that it suits whoever wishes to make a good army to accustom his men with exercises either feigned or true to get close to the enemy, to come at him wielding the sword, and to stand chest to chest with him. And one ought to found oneself more on infantry than on horse for the reasons that will be said below [He argues: “Ordered infantry can easily break a horse, and only with difficulty be defeated by them.”] If one found oneself on infantrymen and on the modes said before, artillery becomes all together useless. For in getting close to the enemy, infantry can flee the blows of artillery…[T]he foundation and the sinew of the army, and that which should be esteemed more, should be the infantry.” See Niccolò Machiavelli,
Discourses on Livy,
trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 166–69.

44.
Kean et al.,
9/11 Commission Report,
126–43.

45.
See Benjamin and Simon,
Age of Sacred Terror
, 282, and Clarke,
Against All Enemies,
200.

46.
The problem with SIGINT collection against al-Qaeda in Khandahar and the other issues that are the focus of the documents in my report are described in general terms in a letter I sent to the two congressional intelligence committees in September 2004. Neither committee responded to my letter. The letter was acquired by and much of it printed in
The Atlantic
in December 2004. See “Verbatim: How Not to Catch a Terrorist,”
Atlantic Online,
December 2004. In addition
The 9/11 Commission Report
notes that the NSA was responsible for “maintaining capability against older [communications] systems, such as high-frequency radios and ultra-high and very-high frequency (line-of-sight systems) that work like old-style television antennas.” The commissioners, needless to say, do not reveal that the NSA failed utterly—indeed, refused to try—to fulfill this responsibility in 1996–99 regarding bin Laden–related communications in Afghanistan. See Kean et al.,
9/11 Commission Report,
93.