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I'm pawing my way through Richard Clarke's new book, trying to get in some of the most salient points on a certain individual for an article.
It totally captures the petrified circa 1992 Cold War mentality of the Bush II administration's national security staff, and its members' utter lack of capacity to think and see and grapple with and get the realities of the post-Cold War world. And how the national security people around Bush and particularly Cheney and the Pentagon kept reinforcing each other's total myopia in this area.
[How fast can we return Paul Wolfowitz to academia? This guy is just beyond the bend. These are just not the people any American should want running the US government any time after 1992, where their thinking has sort of petrified, like sheetrock.]
All of that is highlighted in this long passage. I highly recommend getting your own copy. This is from pp. 230-232:
“I realized that Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, were still operating with the old Cold War paradigm from when they had worked on the NSC [in the first Bush administration]…. Steve Hadley had also been an NSC staffer assigned to do arms control issues with the Soviet Union. He had then been an Assistant Secretary in the Pentagon, also concerned with Soviet arms control. It struck me that neither of them had worked on the new post-Cold War security issues.
I tried to explain, ‘This office is new, you’re right. It’s post-Cold War security, not focused just on nation-state threats. The boundaries between domestic and foreign have blurred. Threats to the US now are not Soviet ballistic missiles carrying bombs, they’re terrorists carrying bombs. Besides, the law that established the NSC in 1947 said it should concern itself with domestic security threats too.’ I did not succeed entirely in making the case. Over the next several months, they suggested, I should figure out how to move some of these issues to some other organization.
Rice decided that the position of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism would also be downgraded. No longer would the Coordinator be a member of the principals committee. No longer would the CSG report to the Principals, but instead to a committee of Deputy Secretaries or have the budget review mechanism with the Associate Director of OMB. She did, however, ask me to stay on and to keep my entire staff in place. Rice and Hadley did not seem to know anyone else whose expertise covered they regarded as my strange portfolio…
Within a week of the Inauguration I wrote to Rice and Hadley asking “urgently” for a Principals, or Cabinet-level, meeting to review the imminent Al Qaeda threat. Rice told me that the Principals Committee…would not address the issue until it had been framed by the Deputies….The first meeting… did not go well.
…Steve Hadley…ask[ed] me to brief the group. I turned immediately to the pending decisions needed to deal with Al Qaeda. ‘We need to put pressure on both the Taliban and al Qaeda by arming the Northern Alliance and other groups in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, we need to target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the Predator.’
Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy at defense, fidgeted and scowled. Hadley asked him if he was all right. ‘Well, I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden,’ Wolfowitz responded.
I answered as clearly and forcefully as I could. ‘We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States.’
‘Well, there are others that do as well, at least as much. Iraqi terrorism for example,’ Wolfowitz replied, looking not at me but at Hadley.
‘I am unaware of any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed at the United States, Paul, since 1993, and I think FBI and CIA concur in that judgment, right, John?’ I pointed at CIA deputy dirctor John McLaughlin, who was obviously not eager to get in the middle of a debate between the White House and the Pentagon but nonetheless replied, ‘Yes, that is right, Dick. We have no evidence of any active Iraqi terrorist threat against the US.’
Finally, Wolfowitz turned to me. ‘You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1`993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because the FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.’ I could hardly believe it but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.
It was getting a little too heated for the kind of meeting Steve Hadley liked to chair, but I think it was important to get the extent of the disagreement out on the table: ‘Al Qaeda plans major acts of terrorism against the US. It plans to overthrow Islamic governments and set up radical multination Caliphate, and then go to war with non-Muslim states.’
Then I said something I regretted as soon as I said it. ‘They have published all of this and sometimes, as with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe that these people will actually do what they say they will do.’
Immediately Wolfowitz seized on the Hitler reference. ‘I resent any comparison between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan.’
‘I wasn’t comparing the Holocaust to anything.’ I spoke slowly. ‘I was saying that like Hitler, bin Laden has told us in advance what he plans to do and we would make a big mistake to ignore it.’
To my surprise, Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage came to my rescue. ‘We agree with Dick. We see al Qaeda as a major threat and countering it as an urgent priority.’ The briefings of Colin Powell had worked.
Hadley suggested a compromise. We would begin by focusing on al Qaeda and then later look at other terrorism, including any Iraqi terrorism. Because dealing with Al Qaeda involved its Afghan sanctuary, however, Hadley suggested that we needed policy on Afghanistan in general and on the related issue of US-Pakistani relations, including the return of democracy in that country and arms control with India. All of these issues were a ‘cluster’ that had to be decided together. Hadley proposed that several more papers be written and several more meetings be scheduled over the next few months.
--Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, Free Press, 2004, pp. 230-232.