Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (3 page)

In two earlier books I tried to lay out for Americans what I saw as the dangers we faced from Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization, as well as from the growing Sunni Islamist militant movement they led and inspired.
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My method in both was as simple and straightforward as my prose style allowed: I let bin Laden and his lieutenants speak for themselves. I then took those words and tried to do two things with them. First, I sought to place their words in the context of fourteen-plus centuries of Islamic history, and second, I attempted to assess how these men matched their words to their deeds. My bottom line in both books was that in their public remarks bin Laden and the other Islamist leaders had been extraordinarily precise in stating the motivations that drove them to war; that bin Laden was a master of Islamic history and had structured his narrative for war against the United States in a manner that was fully consistent with the causes for defensive jihads throughout Islamic history, thus resonating positively with Muslims worldwide; and that the correlation between the words and deeds of bin Laden, his lieutenants, and their allies was close to perfect—if they said they were going to do something, they were much more than likely to try to do it. Their record in this regard puts Western leaders to shame.

Based on these findings, I argued in both books that there was no inherent reason why U.S. presidents and others in the American governing elite could honestly misunderstand the motivation of our Islamist enemies and the centrality of U.S. foreign policy to that motivation and to mobilizing support for the Islamists in the Muslim world. I was wrong about their ability to misunderstand, but I still do not believe that they can do so honestly. With President Washington, I believe that they see the Islamist problem but do not act wisely. So instead of trying to explain once more what is plainly obvious to me—and I suspect it is being sensed by growing numbers of Americans, given Washington’s recent overseas setbacks—I thought a better tack was to try to understand what makes U.S. leaders resist following Sun Tzu’s commonsense advice to “know your enemy” when it comes to the war against al-Qaeda.

I am the first to admit that this book is eclectic, impressionistic, and at times idiosyncratic. In examining the stubborn wrongheadedness of U.S. leaders, for example, I found that part of the answer lies in decisions taken twenty years before almost any American ever heard the name Osama bin Laden. Washington’s decisions to keep America dependent on foreign energy suppliers, and its unquestioning, joined-at-the-hip policy of supporting Israel and Saudi Arabia, are the two most obvious 1970s-vintage policies that would turn out to be sources of strength for militant Islam. The U.S. governing elite’s failure to change any significant part of its Cold War–era view of the world and how it works also has contributed greatly to America’s so-far-losing performance against the Islamists. This inability to change with the times is apparent in the failure of U.S. leaders to recognize the abrogation of the Cold War’s implicit limits on how much military violence could be applied in a given situation to ensure the nuclear threshold would not be crossed. America now faces an enemy who recognizes no such limits, cannot be deterred, and since 1992 has been seeking a nuclear device to use in the continental United States. Nonetheless, U.S. and Western leaders generally behave as if Cold War rules are still functioning and as if shock-and-awe attacks that smash concrete but kill few will cow our enemies.

My research also found a basis for our current predicament vis-à-vis Islam in the at-best-mediocre presidential leadership Americans have been afforded since the Cold War’s end. On the whole, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush did virtually nothing to educate Americans about a world that is increasingly threatening to America and at the same time is less predictable, controllable from Washington, and tolerant of U.S. orders, advice, direction, or—most of all—intervention. The first Mr. Bush’s twaddle about a New World Order led and managed by the United States still dominates the thinking of the federal government’s executive and legislative branches. It also blinds many in and out of government to the fact that the United States can no longer dictate much of anything in the world. The most recent example of this blindness is clearly evident in
The Iraq Study Group Report.
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In an era that is fraught with war, strident nationalisms, ethnic chauvinism, and intensifying religious militancy, the commission chaired by James Baker III and Lee Hamilton issued a report that is written by and for U.S. leaders who still operate as if none of this is true, as if they are still the Cold War masters of the ballet of international politics, and as if unfolding or unexpected international events can be managed according to U.S. preferences and timetables.
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The second Mr. Bush’s obsession with building debilitating coalitions and alliances to respond to attacks solely directed at America is another good example of an unhelpful modus operandi left over from the U.S.-Soviet confrontation. The time consumed by Mr. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell in building the coalition for Afghanistan would have been far better spent killing Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters before they were fully dispersed. In many ways both Mr. Bushes, although they greatly differ in the tone and wording of their rhetoric, are still Cold War–style leaders who are unable to recognize that neither time, tide, nor those who threaten us will wait for Washington to dot each “i” and cross each “t” before it acts.

And Mr. Clinton, of course, was and is the personification of all that was worst in Cold War America, a man embarrassed by the unsophisticated nature of American life and so armed with a passionate thirst to be loved and applauded by European and Hollywood elites; holding deep-seated animosity toward the U.S. military and intelligence services; and displaying a willingness to sacrifice American lives and interests to protect his standing as “the world’s president” and keep earning the applause of the young, callow, inexperienced, and anti-American. No single individual could have done more than Mr. Clinton to neutralize much of the Islamist threat that today threatens America’s survival. No other individual could have conceivably achieved less in that regard.
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Beyond looking at the legacy of foreign policy and leadership that brought America to 9/11, the Iraq war, and the abyss toward which it is now slipping, my other intention in writing this book is to try to undo some of the disservice rendered to Americans by the eleven-member 9/11 Commission, cochaired by former New Jersey Republican governor Thomas H. Kean and former Indiana Democratic congressman Lee H. Hamilton. That set of commissioners had a signal opportunity to examine, identify, and begin to fix all the problems with worldview, policy, and leadership listed above. Yet they not only failed, they knowingly shirked their responsibility to do so. By failing to find an individual culpable for anything that occurred on or before September 11, 2001 (in their words, “our aim has not been to assign individual blame”
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) the commissioners uncovered a first in human history: a first-order military disaster that was caused by an inanimate organizational structure, that of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), and not by the failures of the men and women who were charged with running the organization. By refusing to point fingers, the commissioners did not tell Americans the truth that two presidents, the National Security Council, and senior IC leaders were not passive, helpless observers of an organizational structure run amok but negligent individuals who preferred not to rock the bureaucratic boat or offend the U.S. media and international opinion and so provided Osama bin Laden a much smoother and safer road to 9/11 than he had any right to expect.

Also left unexamined and unchallenged by the commissioners were the U.S. foreign policies that are at the core of America’s growing confrontation with the Muslim world. While some would argue that the 9/11 commissioners had no writ to comment on U.S. foreign policy, I believe that to carry out their task of revitalizing the IC, the commissioners at a minimum had to voice this reality and note that no matter how much the IC’s organization was improved, the pending war with Islam would continue to increase in the threat that it posed to America as long as the foreign-policy status quo remained. The commissioners and their staffers certainly recognized that the traditional role of the IC to support and implement U.S. foreign policy faced a unique problem: the more the IC succeeded in its traditional role, the stronger America’s Islamist enemies became. For example, the more the IC effectively supported Israel against the Palestinians and the Saudis against domestic Islamist insurgents, the more leaders like bin Laden could persuade the Muslim world that Washington allowed Israel to kill Muslims at will and that the al-Saud regime was simply America’s agent for destroying the mujahedin. Between finding no individual culpable and refusing to comment on the biggest problem facing the U.S. intelligence community—the impact of U.S. foreign policy—the Kean-Hamilton commissioners seem certain to go down in history as men and women who made a long war and a worse-than-9/11 attack inside America all but inevitable.

This point leads me to make a few comments on the source materials used in this book. The bulk of those materials are the works of Western, Muslim, and Islamist journalists, scholars, and strategists, and they are listed in the book’s endnotes and bibliography. As in my earlier work, I have tried to use easily accessible source materials in an effort to demonstrate that Americans can learn and then think about this threat for themselves and do not need to depend solely on their leaders’ views. In Chapter 7 I have also drawn on readily available materials to show how easily bin Laden and other Islamist leaders can exploit America’s open society to learn about, understand, and find the vulnerabilities of their U.S. enemy. In this regard, of course, the battlefield is sharply titled in favor of the Islamists, who would have even less excuse than ourselves for not knowing their enemy.

In this book, however, much of the text also is informed by my experiences and observations over the course of a career at the CIA that ran from September 19, 1982, until November 12, 2004. For the final nineteen of those twenty-two-plus years I served in the Directorate of Operations and managed covert-action operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. In December 1995 I formed the CIA’s bin Laden unit and ran it until June 1999. I finished my career as the special adviser to the chief of a much bigger, post-9/11 bin Laden department. Even with my professional curriculum vitae in mind, the correct question for any diligent reader to ask is: “Why should I believe what a former federal bureaucrat has to say, especially if it runs counter to claims made and explanations provided in books authored by presidents, generals, secretaries of state, DCIs, and ambassadors?” That is an excellent, pertinent question and one that I certainly cannot answer to the satisfaction of all. I faced it before while a serving member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, however, and it may help the current reader if I explain how I then tried to be credible to my audience using much of the same material that informs this book.

On the day of the 9/11 attacks it was clear that the CIA and the other IC components would be investigated for their “failures.” As it turned out, I and my CIA colleagues participated in three such investigations: one by the CIA’s inspector general; another by a joint congressional panel cochaired by then-senator Bob Graham (D-Florida) and then-congressman Porter Goss (R-Florida); and the independent investigatory commission headed by Governor Kean and Congressman Hamilton. Faced with these investigations, the veteran CIA officers who were most closely involved in tracking bin Laden and providing the White House with opportunities to capture or kill him, decided that their testimony—whether under oath or not—would be useless if they could not provide documents to back up what was told to the commissioners and their staffers.
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Cognizant of our imperfect memories, and well aware of the always-overriding desire of such postdisaster investigatory commissions to flay the lowest-ranking civil servants,
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those of us at the center of operations against bin Laden and al-Qaeda collectively decided to provide official documents to support testimony whenever possible. We naïvely believed that if the commissioners had been sent to protect the leaders of both parties and their lieutenants in the bureaucracy, they could ignore what we said—chalking it up to hearsay—but that they would be hard pressed, in the context of three thousand dead Americans, to ignore what was contained in official documents. We were wrong.

Let me here part company with my former CIA colleagues and say that henceforth I am speaking only for myself. Most of my colleagues are still working at the CIA and are therefore forbidden from speaking publicly about the issues raised in this book. If they did so, they would be subject to disciplinary action or dismissal. I also must add that nothing I have written in this book is based on any conversation with any officer still employed by the CIA or other IC component that occurred after the effective date of my resignation, November 12, 2004. Let me say it clearly: I alone am responsible for
all
of the contents of this book and it contains
no
information from any still-serving U.S. intelligence officer.
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As I was preparing to brief, answer questions, or give testimony to the trio of 9/11 investigatory panels, I wanted to be able to tell the truth as I knew it and as the documents showed it. To that end, I prepared a compilation of between 480 and 500 pages of official documents to take along with me whenever I was appearing before either commissioners or staffers. The documents included cables to and from CIA facilities overseas, internal CIA memoranda, e-mail messages between and among CIA officers, after-action reports, and a smattering of official documents from other government agencies.
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