Worldmaking (80 page)

The revolt on Flight 93 was an inspiring act of defiance on a dark day—2,977 people were murdered. As the World Trade Center—where the majority died following the fire-induced collapse of both towers—was an international place of business, some 12 percent of those killed were foreign nationals: 373 people in total. One single company, Cantor Fitzgerald, whose offices were based above the impact zone in the north tower, lost two-thirds of its entire workforce, or 658 people. The New York City Fire Department lost 343 men and women, “the largest loss of life of any emergency response agency in history.”
146
The scale and murderous intent of the attack took a long time to process; the harrowing images of that day, broadcast live on television, were searing. It was a traumatic event for the United States, the deadliest ever attack on its soil.

After the attack on the Pentagon, Wolfowitz had been separated from Rumsfeld, to ensure continuity at the Defense Department in the event of subsequent lethal attacks, and taken to a nuclear bunker for safekeeping outside the capital. In separate locations, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz arrived at similar conclusions. According to Lewis Solomon, “On the afternoon of 9/11, Rumsfeld mused about going after not only Osama bin Laden, but also Saddam Hussein. He asked one of his aides, a Pentagon attorney, to talk to Wolfowitz about Iraq's connections with bin Laden.”
147
Wolfowitz was thinking much the same thing:

I think what September 11th to me said was this is just the beginning of what these bastards can do if they start getting access to so-called modern weapons, and that it's not something you can live with any longer. So there needs to be a campaign, a strategy, a long-term effort, to root out these networks and to get governments out of the business of supporting them. But that wasn't something that was going to happen overnight.
148

Getting governments out of the business of supporting terrorism meant one thing: invading Iraq and deposing Saddam. Yet this reasoning was problematic, to put it mildly, given that no evidence existed connecting Iraq's emasculated, secular leader to the Islamist 9/11 attacks. And indeed, none would ever be found.

But the Bush administration pushed this line so insistently—Dick Cheney was a particularly effective salesman—that by the summer of 2003, seven out of ten Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was implicated in the 9/11 attacks.
149
Wolfowitz's post-9/11 push for regime change in Iraq was predicated on evidence that did not exist. But in those fearful circumstances, with the nation on a war footing and dissent steamrollered as unpatriotic, the public was willing to give him and the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt. Walter Lippmann and George Kennan's misanthropic views regarding the incompatibility of democracy with the making of a temperate foreign policy never looked more plausible than from 2001 to 2004. Let down by its politicians and print and television media—
The New York Times
later apologized for its supine coverage of the Bush administration's post-9/11 foreign policies—the U.S. public sphere became perilously misinformed.
150

*   *   *

On September 12, the debate began in earnest on how to respond to al-Qaeda's brutal attack. Over the course of a fractious NSC meeting, Donald Rumsfeld echoed Wolfowitz in recommending Iraq as the primary retaliatory target. Colin Powell queried this reasoning, observing that the American people would expect—indeed, demand—its military to attack the actual perpetrators al-Qaeda, not Iraq, whose leader, while noxious, was hostile to radical Islam. Richard Clarke was pleased to have the secretary of state's support, observing privately to Powell that “for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.” Powell replied, “It's not over yet,” and so it would prove. That evening, President Bush took Clarke aside for a quiet word. “Look,” Bush said, “I know you have a lot to do and all … but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way.” Clarke replied, “But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this.” Bush said, “I know, I know but … see if Saddam was involved. Just look.” Clarke tried (and failed) to be “more respectful, more responsive,” replying, “Absolutely, we will look … again. But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of Al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.” Bush cut him off, saying, “Look into Iraq, Saddam,” and walked away. Clarke recalled that one of his staff members, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, “stared after him with her mouth hanging open.” Paul Kurtz, a counterterrorism adviser, arrived at the scene, noticed the ashen faces, and asked, “Geez, what just happened here?” “Wolfowitz got to him,” replied Gordon-Hagerty.
151

The essentials of America's military response to the 9/11 attacks were thrashed out at Camp David on September 15. During a long day of meetings, it became clear that Bush's principal foreign-policy advisers held diverging views on how to respond. Colin Powell's preference was to attack al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan, which would likely necessitate a full-scale war against the Taliban regime that hosted them. The secretary of state believed that this course was just and proportionate. Wolfowitz argued that the Afghan option was perilous and uncertain. Fighting in mountainous terrain was challenging and the Taliban was firmly entrenched. He countered that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a much more inviting target and that there was at least a 50 percent possibility that Saddam was involved in the attacks.
152
During a coffee break, Wolfowitz lobbied President Bush directly on the merits of his plan, observing that it “would be very simple to enable the Iraqi opposition to take over the southern part of the country and protect it with American air power.” This area would include the bulk of Iraq's oil fields, which could eventually be used to finance the costs of the operation.
153

Secretary of State Powell and Vice President Cheney were not convinced by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's prioritization. Powell observed that the attacks had created a huge reservoir of international goodwill toward the United States—the headline in France's
Le Monde
on September 12 read “
Nous sommes tous Américains
” (We are all Americans), and NATO had invoked Article 5 of its treaty for the first time, committing its signatories to America's defense in this time of war. This reservoir would quickly dissipate, Powell reasoned, if the administration targeted Iraq ahead of al-Qaeda. Afghanistan first made sense on every conceivable level. “If we do that,” Powell observed with a nod to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, “we will have increased our ability to go after Iraq—if we can prove that Iraq had a role [in 9/11].”
154
Cheney agreed with Powell: “If we go after Saddam Hussein, we lose our rightful place as the good guy.”
155
The director of the CIA, George Tenet, agreed with Powell and Cheney: “Don't hit now. It would be a mistake. The first target needs to be al Qaeda.”
156
The vice president took Wolfowitz to one side and bluntly told him to “stop agitating for targeting Saddam.”
157

During an NSC meeting on September 17, President Bush announced his decision: “I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now. I don't have the evidence at this point.”
158
The president's decision was a short-term disappointment to Wolfowitz, but there was little doubt that regime change in Iraq remained on the to-do list—and that his contribution to putting it there had been important. As Donald Rumsfeld wrote in his memoir, “Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz helped conceptualize the global war on terrorism as being broader than just Afghanistan. At that Camp David discussion Wolfowitz raised the question of Iraq, but Bush wanted to keep the focus on Afghanistan.”
159
While strictly true, President Bush himself made it clear that Afghanistan was only the first stage of what he christened the “global war on terror.” “This crusade, this war on terrorism,” Bush declared in a televised speech, “is going to take a while, and the American people must be patient.” The president subsequently retracted the clumsy reference to a crusade—which evoked civilizational, religious conflict between the West and Islam, of a type that Harvard's Samuel Huntington had prophesized in his book
The Clash of Civilizations
—but the speech honestly communicated the extent of his ambitions. On September 26, Wolfowitz spelled some of them out during a press conference in Brussels: “As the president has said over and over again, it's not about one man or one organization. It's about a network of terrorist organizations. It's about the support and sanctuary and harboring they receive from some states. And while we are going to try to find every snake in the swamp that we can, the essence of the strategy is to try to drain the swamp.”
160

Wolfowitz had in fact alluded to this broader strategy on September 13 during an interview on Fox News, when he talked of “ending states who sponsor terrorism.” When later asked if the state he had in mind was Iraq, Wolfowitz replied that Saddam Hussein “is one of the most active supporters of state terrorism.”
161
Wolfowitz was incisive and proactive in the week following the attacks, and his success in setting agendas would later become clear. His next task was to provide a coherent rationale for a second American war on Iraq, with all the complexities this posed in terms of locating a casus belli that didn't disintegrate upon first skeptical touch. This vexing task consumed Wolfowitz's intellectual energies through the fall of 2001, while the department he served prepared for war against another enemy in a different theater.

*   *   *

On October 7, 2001, less than a month after the attacks, the United States began the process of seeking justice and meting out retribution. As a consequence of the Taliban's refusal to meet President Bush's demand to hand over Osama bin Laden and dismantle al-Qaeda's training camps—to effectively stop serving as a haven for terrorists in learning mode—the United States, with strong support from the United Kingdom and other allies, began its war in Afghanistan. An ailing George Kennan registered strong disapproval in his diary: “Regarding the war in Afghanistan I find myself more of an isolationist than ever, reflecting that we, as soon as we can detach ourselves from that imbroglio, should concentrate our efforts on developing at home alternatives to the importation of Middle Eastern, and especially Saudi Arabian, oil—this, in place of further efforts to play a role in that particular region.”
162
As Kennan aged, his views became increasingly aligned with those of Charles Beard.

The first wave of attacks, a high-tech salvo of cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs, destroyed thirty-one military targets such as antiaircraft defenses and radar installations. A missile destroyed the Taliban Defense Ministry, in the center of Kabul, instantly killing twenty Afghans. The air war was necessarily brief. Sources in the military later said that it had taken only two nights to destroy every fixed Taliban target.
163
The basic strategy was to rely on the Northern Alliance, the Taliban's principal domestic foe, to fight the war on the ground, assisted by teams from the CIA's Special Activities Division and U.S. Army Special Forces, who could call in air strikes when necessary. In terms of ousting the Taliban, the strategy was successful. On November 9, the Taliban fled the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, and four days later Northern Alliance troops marched triumphantly into Kabul. On December 7, the Taliban fled the southern city of Kandahar, and its medieval rule over Afghanistan—given Cold War impetus by the Carter and Reagan administrations—finally ended.

In an interview with
The New York Times
, Wolfowitz recorded satisfaction that the Taliban had been removed without “creating an unnecessarily large footprint” and that “the benefits that come from these advanced capabilities and the ability to fuse them together in new ways I think has been very amply demonstrated in Afghanistan … [it was] almost a model demonstration.”
164
This assessment was accurate in regard to the war against the Taliban, but not so much when it came to al-Qaeda. In late November, it was estimated that as many as fifteen hundred Arab and Chechen fighters affiliated with al-Qaeda had taken shelter in the Tora Bora cave complex high in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan and close to the border with Pakistan. Most now believe that Osama bin Laden was among them. The U.S. Air Force ferociously bombarded Tora Bora, but the majority of al-Qaeda, including bin Laden, successfully evaded death or capture, navigating a complex path through the mountains to Pakistan.
165
The perils of relying on air strikes plus proxies were laid bare during the Battle of Tora Bora. America's inability to press home its advantage against a cornered enemy that was actually connected to the 9/11 attacks was negligent bordering on shameful. Writing in
The New Republic
in 2009
,
Peter Bergen observed, “I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history.”
166
He argued convincingly that this failure stemmed directly from the faint military footprint favored by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

The Bush administration deployed insufficient ground forces to Tora Bora when the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was there for the taking—a monumental failure. Thereafter, the conflict in Afghanistan gathered intensity as the Taliban launched an insurgency against the new government led by Hamid Karzai. It was a war that rumbled on through the Bush administration, consuming more and more American lives and treasure. But the insurgency became largely tangential to Bush and his advisers, who were refocusing attention on grander equations elsewhere. Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller) Dov Zakheim had responsibility for advising the Pentagon on budgetary matters. In his book
A Vulcan's Tale
, Zakheim laments the way Afghanistan became a back-burner issue: