Cheney Blasts Clinton's 'Totally Ineffective' Terror
War
Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that the
Clinton administration's strategy for dealing with the al-Qaida
threat under the stewardship of terrorism czar Richard Clarke was
"totally ineffective."
"The only thing I can say about Dick Clarke," Cheney
told radio host Rush Limbaugh, "is he was here throughout those
eight years going back to 1993, and the first attack on the World
Trade Center in '98 when the embassies were hit in east Africa,
in 2000 when the USS Cole was hit.
"And the question that ought to be asked is, what
were they doing in those days when he was in charge of counterterrorism
efforts?"
Cheney said that when President Bush took office,
he did not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1990s.
"The fact is what the president did not want to
do is to have an ineffective response with respect to al-Qaida,
and we felt up till that point much of what had been done vis-`-vis
al-Qaida had been totally ineffective."
The vice president complained that the Clinton administration's
August 1998 cruise missile attack on bin Laden's encampment in Khost,
Afghanistan, "basically didn't hit anything, and it made the U.S.
look weak and ineffective."
Bush, he said, "wanted a far more effective policy
for trying to deal with that, and that process was in motion throughout
the spring [of 2001]."
As for Clarke's motivations, Cheney said that his
attack on the White House was likely rooted in personal animosity
toward National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who had demoted
him to chief of cybersecurity.
"I suppose he may have a grudge to bear there since
he probably wanted a more prominent position than she was prepared
to give him," he told Limbaugh. (newsMAX.com)
The Clinton Mind-Set By Peter D. Feaver
Wednesday, March 24, 2004; Page A21 The Washington
Post Company
The commissioners on the Sept. 11 panel asked the
same question over and over: Why didn't the Clinton administration
take stronger military action against al Qaeda's Taliban refuge
in the 1990s, when the Sept. 11 plot was being hatched?
Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright's consistent
response was simple: "You have to go back to the pre-9/11 mindset."
By this she meant that before Sept. 11, stronger military action
was politically impossible; thus the blame for the Clinton administration's
failures to act preemptively against al Qaeda rests on everyone,
not specifically on the commander in chief.
Defenders of the Clinton administration have twinned
this claim -- "We can't be blamed, because no one wanted us to take
stronger military action" -- with its post-9/11 obverse assertion:
President Bush doesn't deserve any credit for toppling the Taliban
and ending al Qaeda's sanctuary, because after Sept. 11 anyone would
have done this. In the words of Bush's most recent and surprising
critic, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke: "Any leader
whom one can imagine as president on September 11 would have declared
a 'war on terrorism' and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary by
invading."
But the first claim is only partly true, and because
it is, the second claim is almost certainly false.
Albright is partly correct; there was a pre-9/11
mindset that shaped Clinton-era responses. The mind-set was "counterterrorism
as law-enforcement." The role of the military was at best a supporting
one. Moreover, because the uniformed military themselves opposed
a military role, the law enforcement mind-set was reinforced by
Clinton's pathological civil-military relations. Even if President
Clinton wanted to conduct military operations against al Qaeda,
he was simply too weak a commander in chief to prevail over a military
that wanted nothing to do with a war in Afghanistan.
The Clinton record on military operations was clear:
frequent resort to low-risk cruise-missile strikes and high-level
bombings, but shunning any form of decisive operations involving
ground troops in areas of high risk. The Clinton White House was
the most casualty phobic administration in modern times, and this
fear of body bags was not lost on Osama bin Laden. Indeed, al Qaeda
rhetoric regularly "proved" that the Americans were vulnerable to
terrorism by invoking the hasty cut-and-run after 18 Army soldiers
died in the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" events in Somalia -- a strategy
developed and implemented, ironically enough, by the same Richard
Clarke who torments the Bush team today.
So Albright is correct that Operation Enduring Freedom,
the campaign to topple the Taliban, was not possible with a commander
in chief who was afraid to lead the public to accept the human costs
of war.
This suggests, however, that the critical event
was not simply Sept. 11, 2001, which changed the public's perceptions,
but also the 2000 election, which changed the commander in chief.
President Bush came into office convinced that the casualty phobia
of his predecessor had made America a tempting target, a paper tiger.
When terrorists struck the twin towers and the Pentagon, Bush interpreted
it as proof that America looked weak.
While most of the recent media attention has focused
on early internal debates about Iraqi involvement, in fact the early
public debate about 9/11 was over whether Bush was rash in declaring
"war" on the terrorists. Most experts and pundits -- especially
among our allies -- still clung to the "counterterrorism as law
enforcement" mind-set. And viewed from that frame, it was foolhardy
to declare war.
For starters, declaring war seemed to elevate the
terrorists to co-combatants, rather than leaving them as criminals
to be dealt with by police dragnet. The decision to invade Afghanistan
was even more controversial. Suddenly armchair experts were quoting
Kipling and ruminating on how the Afghans had twice defeated reigning
military powers, first the British Empire and then the Soviet Empire.
The risky approach ordered by Bush and Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, which relied heavily on Special Forces
and air power, was especially subject to criticism. As late as Nov.
4, 2001, the dean of academic security studies experts, John Mearsheimer,
was warning in an opinion piece that "neither the current bombing
campaign nor the deployment of American ground forces to Afghanistan
offers good military options for dealing with the Taliban and al
Qaeda. A better approach would emphasize ground-level diplomacy,
with open wallets, among Pashtun leaders in central and southern
Afghanistan." Viewed in hindsight, the Bush-Rumsfeld military plan
looked brilliant, but at the time it was highly controversial and
decidedly risky.
Would a less stubborn commander in chief have pursued
the risky war plan that ultimately toppled the Taliban and put al
Qaeda on the run? The record of the '90s suggests otherwise. A White
House that cut and ran after the death of 18 soldiers probably would
not have had the stomach for the possible casualties. A White House
that could not prevail over military objections to using ground
troops in Kosovo would have had a hard time overcoming institutional
military objections. A White House that ordered retaliation in the
form of a night-time strike on an empty intelligence building would
not have backed Operation Enduring Freedom.
Before Sept. 11, Clinton defenders say, we did not
have irrefutable proof of the casus belli of al Qaeda-Taliban complicity,
there was no international consensus on the need to invade Afghanistan,
and it would have been politically risky for the United States to
act in the face of military objections. The same could be said about
the invasion of Iraq after Sept. 11. In other words, determined
commanders in chief have the mind-set and the resolve to act in
spite of the political climate and military resistance.
The writer is professor of political science and
public policy at Duke University, and is the author of "Armed Servants,"
a book detailing civil-military relations in the Clinton administration.
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