29 April 2007
Center of the Storm
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I am in Chicago , on the 35 th floor of a proud tower on East Wacker Drive. The nice fellow at the desk gave me a complementary upgrade to a view of the Chicago River . To my right are the two circular towers that are familiar. Hollywood frequently uses the one adjacent to the bridge to drive cars from the mid-section, since they float in a graceful arc down to the brownish green river far below.
I am here to attend a conference that has grown wildly over the years. It used to be held in the Washington area, and I was once honored to speak as part of a panel session to the group. Now it is more like an Elk's convention, and the government folks who manage it are rock stars.
Directly across from me are the two circular towers I am going to make some assertions this morning, and leave them at that. I was not at the center of the storm, like Mr. Tenet was, and the only time I had the chance to talk to the Secretary of State, she was walking away from the hearing room in the House Rayburn Office Building and her security detail was in the way.
She was the National Security Advisor back when something might have been done about 9/11, and the new security team did not have the sense of urgency that Richard Clarke about the al Qaida network. They had kept him on the team, but demoted him from being the counter-terror chief and made him the cyber-czar. That was the position in which my little team from the Community Management Staff had interactions with the NSC.
George Tenet did. He had “declared war” on the group years before, since the string of bombings that had culminated in the attack on the USS Cole were clearly headed somewhere awful.
Now George is launching his book tour to save his reputation, since the Administration has decided to treat him as the fall guy for the failure of their aggressive policies in Iraq.
The Secretary made some pre-emptive strikes against the book, and the former Director of Central Intelligence personally, since the only way for them to explain away the decision to go to war is that George misled them on the nature of the Iraqi threat, and how it came to usurp the fight against those who murdered so many in September of 2001.
The Secretary says that George's vague warnings about terror were not actionable. She took them seriously as the National Security Advisor. There just was nothing she could do about it.
I have talked to George several times over the years and like him immensely. He was on “60 Minutes” last night to say that he had briefed Dr. Rice in July of 2001 that there were likely to be “multiple, spectacular attacks against the United States.”
I could show you in my notes that he was not alone. It was a lovely summer, sultry and bright. My notes show disquiet, and the sense that we were all drifting toward a cataclysm. In that month, one passage leaps out from the minutia of a meeting on the Quadrennial Intelligence Review: “What is it going to take for us to wake up? A nuke in New York ?”
I felt strongly enough that I went to see the official who was running the Review. The official agreed with me. Something awful was coming, but there was no sense of urgency on the part of the Administration, and no flood of resources was going to appear to deal with what seemed inevitable.
So, I know that George was not alone in his assessment. He was not in a strong position, as a carry-over from the Clinton Administration, which had its own credibility problems in dealing with the terrorists. He was useful, though, as a way to make the decision to go to war with Iraq a bi-partisan one.
That may be unkind, but I heard some of the things that were said. The military enforcement of UN sanctions was expensive.
Northern and Southern Watch required continual presence of US forces, and it was expensive, and a drag on the force.
Periodically, incursions like Operation DESERT FOX in 1998 required ramp-ups of force. The policy people in the new administration were clearly of a mind to settle the Saddam problem, and they seemed to be convinced that there would be savings as well.
I can't tell for sure, since I was not at the center of the storm like George. But I was close enough to feel the wind from it.
We may have drifted into the attacks of September, but I do not think that we drifted into war in Iraq. I would have to go back to my notes. This morning I cannot produce a slam-dunk quote that proves that policy that drove the intelligence. I do recall the frustration that we all felt that there was no real evidence on the current existence of chemical and biological weapons in Saddam's arsenal.
I'm with George, right down the line. We knew Saddam had chemical weapons before, because he had used them. I helped to execute the bombing campaign on biological weapons targets at Salman Pak in the first Gulf War.
The State Department is not going to issue a three page rebuttle on what I remember, but I don't have a major book deal. leave it at this: I think the whole weapons issue was just the most convenient hook on which to hang a decision that had already been made.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com