Hitting First: Preventive Force in U.S. Security Policy
Ed. by William W. Keller and Gordon R. Mitchell
University of Pittsburg Press, September 2006, 368 pp., $27.95
Reviewed by Walter C. Uhler
As they did during the mid-term congressional election campaign of 2002 and the presidential election campaign of 2004, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld are once again attempting to scare Americans into voting for Republicans in November. They certainly should, because their very political lives depend upon November's outcome.
But, what's astounding -- given their massive campaign of deceit about Iraq - is the thought that they still possess even an ounce of residual credibility with either the news media or the electorate. After all, Mr. Bush trumpeted false claims about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda, in order to lead us into an unnecessary war we are now losing. Ironically, given his false claims about Iraq's ties to al Qaeda, in mid-2005 the CIA reported, "Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for the Islamic extremists than Afghanistan." Thus, instead of bringing democracy, our deceitful, bumbling President brought international terrorism to Iraq - as well as its proliferation around the world.
Mr. Rumsfeld has done no better. Not only did he falsely claim to possess "bulletproof" evidence linking Saddam to al Qaeda, he also claimed to know the precise location of Iraq's WMD (We now know that Iraq possessed no WMD). But even less forgivable was his decision, in the face of U.S. Army opposition, to deploy a military force in Iraq that was too small to secure the peace after toppling Saddam. Thus, the present quagmire of insurgency and civil war.
Unfortunately, neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Rumsfeld can top the real boss, Mr. Cheney (boss at least until America got bogged down in Iraq). It was Cheney, who boldly, but falsely, asserted that Iraq possessed WMD. It also was Cheney, who confidently, but erroneously, predicted that American soldiers would be greeted as liberators in Iraq.
Worse still, it was this man with five draft deferments - who probably was more responsible than any other Bush administration official for the negligence that greased the skids for al Qaeda's attacks on 9/11 - who had the gall to suggest that the election of Vietnam war hero, John Kerry, could lead to another attack on America. Cheney was referring to Kerry when he warned: "If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again." Unfortunately, too few Americans realized that the "wrong choice" was to return to office the very incompetents who already had permitted a terrorist attack during their watch.
In fact, when President Bush held his first meeting of the "principals" of the National Security Council (NSC) on January 30, 2001, he took his first steps toward two stupendous national security disasters -- 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. First, he ignored information provided by the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, warning him that the greatest threat to U.S. national security during his administration would come from Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorists. (National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice ignored a similar warning from counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke.)
Second, when Bush's NSC principals met on January 30, 2001, they not only ignored the threat posed by al Qaeda, they commenced their obsession with "regime change" in Iraq. That obsession goes far to explain the Bush administration's monumental failure to do all it could have done to prevent al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on 9/11.
According to former Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill (who sat in on those NSC meetings during 2001-2002): "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would change everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'" [Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, p. 86]
One of President Bush's most fervent supporters was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At the NSC meeting held on February 1, 2001, Rumsfeld disputed Secretary of State Colin Powell's advocacy of "targeted sanctions." "Sanctions are fine," Rumsfeld said. "But what we really want to think about is going after Saddam." [Ibid, p. 85]
According to The 9/11 Commission Report, the NSC principals held 32 meetings on such topics as "the Middle East peace process, Russia, and the Persian Gulf," before finally getting around to discussing al Qaeda on September 4, 2001 - just one week before it launched its horrific terrorist attacks. [The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 201]. When the 9/11 Commission asked Ms. Rice to explain why the NSC principals paid such little attention to al Qaeda, "Rice told us the Administration did not need a principals meeting on al Qaeda because it knew that al Qaeda was a major threat." [Ibid, Note 174, p. 509]
Now, to anyone familiar with the workings of the NSC, Rice's assertion appears to be a bald-faced lie. In fact, Ms. Rice was more forthright a few months later, when she told David Rothkopf that her most important responsibilities were "staffing the president and pushing his high-priority items" because "he has nobody else to do that but the NSC." [Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, p. 405]
True, there were "more than 40 intelligence articles" in the President's Daily Brief (PDB), from January 20, 2001 to September 10, 2001, "that related to Bin Laden." [The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 254] Moreover, in late May 2001, Ms Rice was involved in the drawing up of a new presidential directive initiating a long-term plan for eliminating al Qaeda. [Ibid. pp. 204-05]
Yet, Ms. Rice's excuse doesn't square with other evidence. For example, it doesn't square with Paul Wolfowitz's behavior in April 2001. For, when Wolfowitz met with other deputies in April 2001 to be briefed by Richard Clarke about "pending decisions needed to deal with al Qaeda," Wolfowitz scowled: "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden." {Clarke, Against All Enemies , p. 231]
Moreover, Rice's assertion doesn't square with Clarke's request for a transfer out of counterterrorism "because he was frustrated with his role and with an administration that he considered not 'serious about al Qaeda.'" [The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 205] Neither does it square with President Bush's indifference to the August 6, 2001 PDB titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US," which he claims he dismissed as "historical in nature." [Ibid, p.260]
Finally, Rice's assertion doesn't square with Bush's admission to journalist Bob Woodward. According to Woodward, Bush "acknowledged that bin Laden was not his focus or that of his national security team." Bush admitted: "there was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11�I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling." [Woodward, Bush at War, p. 39]
Why lie? Because nobody in the Bush administration dares to admit that its obsession with Iraq (and missile defense) undermined its due diligence against the threat posed by al Qaeda.
But, simply recall that, "barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon" -- even after evidence connecting al Qaeda to the terrorist attacks had become known -- Rumsfeld demanded the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough to hit S.H." [Saddam Hussein]. Unfortunately, Rumsfeld's demand for the "best info" was not limited to accurate info. For he also asserted: "Go massive�Sweep it all up. Things related and not." ["Plans For Iraq Attack Began on 9/11," CBS News, Sept. 4, 2002]
The Bush administration's subsequent abuse of "things related and not" goes far to explain the extreme measures it employed to persuade Americans to support an illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq. These extreme measures are the subject of a new book, Hitting First: Preventive Force in U.S. Security Strategy.
As is now well known, many members of the Bush administration, most notably Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Rice, used the first few days after al Qaeda's attacks to urge the president to attack Iraq. Counterterrorism czar Clarke was revolted by the knowledge that "Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq." [Clarke, p. 30.]
And take advantage they did! On September 21, 2001, they received an official intelligence report that advised Bush and his principals that the "U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks [on 9/11] and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties to al Qaeda." [Murray Waas, "Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel, National Journal.com, Nov. 22, 2005]
In response, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz deployed a Zionist zealot, Douglas Feith, to establish the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCEG) to "fix" [Hitting First p. 81] the intelligence, in order to create ties between Saddam and al Qaeda, where none existed. Thus, notwithstanding the fact that the official intelligence community (IC) issued five reports that found no evidence of significant ties between Saddam and al Qaeda, in September 2002 both Vice President Cheney and President Bush relied on Feith's "fixed" intelligence to falsely link the two.
Cheney falsely asserted, on Meet the Press, that evidence demonstrating that 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, was in Prague "with a senior Iraqi intelligence official" was deemed "credible" by the CIA. It was not. Moreover, on September 27, 2002, Bush asserted: "The danger is, is that al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness�[Y]ou can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. [Hitting First, p. 117] Indeed, the official intelligence community already had.
According to Gordon R. Mitchell and Robert P. Newman, Feith's PCEG engineered a "stealth coup" [Ibid, p. 82] against the established intelligence community, not only by feeding the Bush administration's ideologues with the bits of raw intelligence that buttressed their erroneous preconceptions, but also by "funneling the data directly to policy-makers, skirting peer review institutionalized by the formal processes of the official IC." [Ibid, p. 84]
Consequently, Rodger A. Payne correctly indicts virtually all of the "principals" in the Bush administration when he concludes: "By selectively releasing and mischaracterizing intelligence information that supported an Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration while continuing to keep information classified and out of the public realm that did not, the Administration distorted intelligence to persuade Americans into believing the actions of al Qaeda and Iraq were indistinguishable." [Ibid, p 134]
Unfortunately, as the contributors to Hitting First persuasively demonstrate, the Bush administration's decision to dupe Americans with "things related and not" proved useful beyond falsely linking Saddam to al Qaeda. Perhaps the two most egregiously dishonest uses of "things related and not" concern the deliberate conflation of "preemptive" war with "preventive" war and the equally deliberate absence of precision when discussing WMD - weapons of mass destruction.
The contributors to Hitting First have criticized the Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS 2002), because it deliberately confuses "preemptive" war, initiated in the face of an imminent threat and thus considered legal under international law, with "preventive" war, which, under international law, is indistinguishable from naked aggression. As Tom Rockmore notes: "It follows that defensive, or preemptive, war, which is intended to respond to a clear and present danger, including an ongoing or clearly looming attack, is moral, hence licit or justified. But what the Bush administration calls "preemptive" war, which is widely regarded as preventive, or offensive, war, designed for a situation when an attack is not clearly in the offing, when it may not ever take place, is immoral, hence illicit or unjustified." [Ibid, p. 146]
According to Mr. Rockmore, in NSS 2002, "the term 'preemptive' is being used, perhaps deliberately, in a nonstandard way that extends and broadens the justification for the United States to wage war against real or imagined adversaries. The consequence is to turn on its head the very idea that military action should be defensive only." [Ibid, p. 140] Although many Americans might remain confused by such slight of hand, the rest of the world has seen through the ruse.
Admittedly, to many Americans such serious distinctions might appear to be mere picking at nits, especially after the President, Vice President and National Security Advisor already have frightened them out of their wits with warnings about the threat posed by Iraq's nuclear weapons. But as the contributors to Hitting First demonstrate, the Bush administration not only exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq's nuclear program (which we now know was nonexistent), but also conflated that dire, but improbable, threat with the more probable, but less dire, threats posed by chemical or biological weapons.
Thus, as William Keller and Gordon Mitchell put it, "The rhetorical flexibility afforded by the omnibus category "weapons of mass destruction" enabled Bush administration officials to support claims of an Iraqi 'WMD' threat (replete with ominous 'mushroom cloud' imagery) by pointing to evidence of possible Iraqi chemical weapons development." [Ibid, p. 9]
Although such notorious examples of deceit by the Bush administration might seem more than enough, the contributors to Hitting First also address the psychological operations that were contemplated or actually initiated to shape public opinion in America. As the contributors note, such psychological operations continue in the tradition of "Operation Northwoods," a crackpot scheme proposed by General Lyman Lemnitzer (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Eisenhower and Kennedy) to turn American public opinion against Fidel Castro.
Among his proposals were: (1) to have Americans blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba, or (2) initiate a terror campaign in Miami and blame Cuban communists, or (3) "demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a charter civil airliner." [Ibid, p. 77] Unfortunately, President Bush appears to have adopted Lemnitzer's thinking when he proposed to Tony Blair, on 31 January 2003, that they fly "U2 reconnaissance with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colors�If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of U.N. resolutions]," which would be just cause for war. [Ibid, p. 247]
Remember the unforgettable scene, where a multitude of Iraqis spontaneously gathered at Baghdad's Firdos Square to pull down the statue of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein? Remember the comparisons with the Berlin Wall? Remember Katie Couric's observation? "I think it's safe to say we may be witnessing the lasting symbol of Operation Iraqi Freedom right now."
Well, think again. Not only did the crowd appear unduly large due to the close up camera angle employed, in that sparse crowd was an American M88 recovery vehicle, which actually pulled the statue down. Finally, an internal army study revealed that "the U.S. 305th Psychological Operations Company played a significant role in the event."
Thus the question: "Exactly when can Americans believe the Bush administration's war party about anything?"
That's an important question. Not because Dan Reiter, writing in Hitting First, demonstrates that "the historical record of preventive attacks against NBC [nuclear, biological and chemical] programs is not very encouraging. [p. 41] And not because William Hartung demonstrates that "nonmilitary measures of prevention based on diplomacy, treaties, rigorous inspections, intelligence, law enforcement, and economic leverage" would be a more effective alternative to NSS 2002. [p. 25]
No, the reason why every American should doubt every word uttered by members of the Bush administration's war party is because, as the editors of Hitting First warn, their technological utopians now believe that the Pentagon's new "'global strike' capability afforded by 'bunker-buster' nuclear bombs and space assets will improve preventive warfare's prospects for operational success." [Ibid, p. 243] Renewed confidence in operational success might just inspire another round of deception - "things related and not" - aimed at duping Americans to support illegal preventive war against Iran.