Examines issues of the day against a triumvirate of core principles: liberty, responsibility and justice.
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This is where you stick random tidbits of information about yourself.
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Wednesday, June 23, 2004
The September 11 Commission's Monday morning quarterbacking regarding the terrorist attack of that day provides an excellent backdrop from which to assess the reasons for going to war in Iraq. Much data has been collected by the Commission and it has released several reports that begin to draw conclusions on how the attack was allowed to happen and what posture we must take to prevent another. When applying the lessons learned from September 11 attack to the fact pattern related to the decision to invade Iraq, a rational analysis leads to the commonsense decision that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair reached. Only the most zealously pacifist or ideologically paralyzed observer can conclude that there was no reason to attack Iraq. To claim that we should not have gone to war is to reveal either a stunning inability to employ logical reasoning or a total submission to an impenetrable partisan fog.
What the Commission has reported to the nation should not come as a shock to anybody. That the air traffic control system was not set up to handle a quadruple suicide hijacking is no surprise. Neither that the now-infamous "Wall" between intelligence and law enforcement (which was erected by Commissioner Jamie Gorelick who, incredibly, sits on the commission rendering judgment rather than before it rendering testimony) prevented the government from "connecting the dots" to foil the plot. That this wall was built higher and stronger than legally necessary by Gorelick for appearances' sake seemed not to have been newsworthy. But sitting comfortably in 2004, this commission issues statements and reports that, breathlessly repeated by the media, repeatedly criticize the government as blind and inept. According to them, President Bush should have taken action to prevent the attacks, but they do not explain how this was to happen.
Let us examine the argument of the Bush Administration's critics. Should the President have yanked the hijackers off the planes? They did not commit any major crimes until the very point of the hijacking (carrying a box cutter was not illegal), so exactly when did that threat reach the threshold of imminence? You can be sure that immigration advocates would have fought deportation of any hijacker who overstayed a visa. The ACLU would have protected their rights to privacy (as it was, investigators were not allowed access to Zacarias Moussaoui's computer until after 3,000 people were murdered). CAIR would have screamed bloody murder if federal agents suddenly detained 19 Muslims for no reason other than some attended flight school and they chose to travel together on the same plane. Even after the attack, civil rights activists are fighting attempts to take the investigative tools already being used against drug traffickers and sex offenders and extend them to terrorism. Furthermore, privacy advocates have stopped the government from using technology, rather than just people, to sift the vast amounts of data that the government already collects in search of patterns that might indicate a terrorist threat. Given this backdrop, it is preposterous to presume that aggressive intelligence and law enforcement action would have been permitted by government watchdogs.
Whether or not civil liberties made it difficult to capture terrorists already in America, should the President have attacked Afghanistan to destroy the Al Qaeda camps being protected by the Taliban regime? Surely, standing where we are today with the benefit of hindsight, we can all agree that taking them out before September 11 would have been a good idea. As isolated and hated as liberals delight in claiming America is now, imagine if Bush had attacked Afghanistan before the September 11 attack. With no evidence of an "imminent" danger, other than (a) Muslims were in flight schools; (b) there was an old story about a terrorist in the Philippines hoping to hijack planes out of the Far East to blow them up over the Pacific Ocean; and (c) there was a single memo on August 6, 2001 warning that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack the United States, which any person with access to the New York Times already knew, just how many allies would America have had to pre-empt the September 11 attacks? Certainly not the dozens we have now, including NATO.
But, suppose the President was so concerned by the evidence, which at the same time looks shaky on September 10 and convincing on September 12, and unleashed the military against Afghanistan before Mohammed Atta and his henchmen turned passenger jetliners into cruise missiles. And suppose that September 11 happened anyway, as was likely since the hijackers had already been dispatched. Bush would have been excoriated for provoking the attack on New York and Washington as retribution for America's attack on Afghanistan. With the blood of 3,000 victims on his hands, he would have faced unyielding criticism far beyond that which is hurled at him today and likely calls for resignation. On the flip side, suppose a pre-emptive attack on Afghanistan somehow foiled the September 11 plot. Now America would have been embroiled in a war in central Asia, with no allies providing troops, air rights, logistical support, etc., for no apparent reason. Bush would have claimed that he had all these "dots" connected: flying Muslims, a Presidential Daily Brief warning, etc. Would this have been enough to convince critics that we needed to go to war in Afghanistan to fend off an imminent threat that never materialized? Not likely. It was the carnage of that day that generated the political will for war.
Ostensibly, we now live in the post-September 11 world. We have supposedly have learned that we cannot wait until threats become imminent. We must act beforehand, to forestall, or pre-empt, threats to America and our interests. This is even more important because of the proliferation of catastrophically powerful destructive technologies. The availability of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, commonly referred to as weapons of mass destruction (WMD), significantly reduce our margin for error and force our government officials to act more aggressively with more of a hair-trigger. Waiting for conclusive proof of the existence of a threat could mean the vaporization of a major American metropolitan area.
As a result, Iraq is now evaluated in this new context. In this environment, the Bush Administration weighs the following: (a) UN weapons inspectors were ejected from Iraq by Saddam Hussein and could not account for the massive quantities of chemical and biological weapons that they already determined Iraq had produced (recall that the inspectors' job was not to prove the non-existence of WMD, since proving a negative is impossible, but to prove the destruction of the WMD that they had catalogued in their prior work); (b) British intelligence reported contacts between Iraq and African interests related to the procurement of nuclear materials, which contacts have been corroborated by documents seized since the invasion and which British intelligence continues to maintain; (c) Czech intelligence reported contacts in Prague between an Iraqi spy and lead hijacker Mohammed Atta; (d) Saddam's proven ties to terrorism included safe haven provided to Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal, the latter of whom was mysteriously found dead in Baghdad just before the invasion in one of the few known incidences of suicide by multiple gunshot wounds, and financial support for Hamas; (e) Iraq operated a known terrorist training facility at Salman Pak, which included an actual airline fuselage; and (f) Russian intelligence reported Saddam was planning to use terrorist proxies to attack America.
The President could have waited until he had absolute, concrete proof of a plan to attack America, hoping that such proof could be collected before it was too late and then presented to the UN for action. He could have taken Saddam at his word, and assumed that, after enduring sanctions and evading inspections throughout the 1990's, Saddam not only unilaterally disposed of his WMD and shut down his WMD programs after the inspectors were ejected, but also insisted on hiding evidence of it even though that would have caused sanctions to be lifted and international relations to begin to become normalized. Further, Bush could have hoped that, although Saddam and his operatives consorted with known terrorists, Saddam would not have supported attacks on America despite warnings from Russia to the contrary. Based on the lessons of September 11, would it have been prudent for the President to stay his hand? Would it have been responsible for the President to stand still until there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Iraq-backed terrorists were on the verge of a WMD attack on America? If a WMD attack had been unleashed, and another 9/11-style commission had been constituted to investigate the incident, imagine the justifiable outcry that would have followed the revelation of all the bits of information listed above. Citizens would have demanded to know how, especially after September 11, 2001, we could not have "connected" those Iraqi "dots." Until such an attack, it would have been preferable to the President's critics to have swept the Iraqi problem under the rug, as was done with the Al Qaeda problem, until the threat was so imminent that thousands lay dead.
Furthermore, we also now know that Saddam had purchased, with UN Oil-for-Food money, several UN Security Council votes, including at least one veto from a permanent member. As former top Baath official Tariq Aziz claimed after his capture, the Iraqi leadership never believed that the American-led coalition would attack. What could have given them such confidence that the American-backed UN threat was impotent? It could only have been the assurance of the UN's cover, because he had them in his back pocket, that gave Saddam the comfort he needed to defy demands for total compliance and cooperation. The coalition was thus left with 2 options in the face of Saddam's defiance: back down and de-mobilize, which would have been a disastrous example seen by Moammar Khadafi, Kim Jong-Il and others as a sign of Western weakness; or call Saddam's bluff and enforce the multitude of UN resolutions through armed action, as those very UN resolutions called for. Any semblance of a credible military threat to compel compliance was rendered moot by bribery of the UN and some of its constituent nations. Consequently, Bush and Blair had no choice, for to stand down rather than stand firm would have been a devastating precedent.
In the end, the entire debate on these immensely important issues, which should be taking place in a sober and substantive way, has degenerated into simplistic partisan sniping. And the vitriol and hatred has reached such a fevered pitch that it appears that the President's critics, both at home and abroad, would prefer that America fail in Iraq if it means Bush's defeat. America's failures are covered so completely and magnified so greatly that such reporting is done as catharsis with a tinge of rejoicing at the repudiation of American policy it implies. Meanwhile, those few successes that do generate media attention uniformly come with caveats. This is sad and dangerous. The loyal opposition has a responsibility to debate this issue seriously, and, rather than merely try to score cheap political points, communicate a realistic alternative policy that recognizes the threats faced and the intelligence available. It is necessary and important to have healthy political debate and a free market of ideas, but blind partisanship can only make us less safe by weakening our resolve and encouraging our enemies. For resolve is the most important weapon we have in this war. America urgently needs Democrats to stand up and explain how, in the post-9/11 world of hazy intelligence where non-state actors conspire with rogue regimes, they would protect us from the great peril that confronts us while not delegating our security to the UN or waiting until too late to thwart our avowed enemies.
6/23/2004 06:32:00 PM
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