Against All Enemies (38 page)

It was also plainly obvious after September 11 that al Qaeda's sanctuary in Taliban-run Afghanistan had to be occupied by U.S. forces and the al Qaeda leaders killed. Unfortunately, Bush's efforts were slow and small. He began by again offering the Taliban a chance to avoid U.S. occupation of their country and, when that failed, he initially sent in only a handful of Special Forces. When the Taliban and al Qaeda leaders escaped, he dispatched additional forces but less than one full division equivalent, fewer U.S. troops for all of Afghanistan than the number of NYPD assigned to Manhattan.

One would have thought that it was equally obvious after September 11 that high on the priority list would have been improving U.S. relations with the Islamic world, in order to dry up support for the deviant variant of Islam that is al Qaeda. After all, al Qaeda, the enemy that attacked us, was engaged in its own highly successful propaganda campaign to influence millions of Muslims to act against America, as a first step in a campaign to replace existing governments around the world with Taliban-like regimes. To defeat that enemy and prevent it from achieving its objectives, we needed to do more than just arrest and kill people. We and our values needed to be more appealing to Muslims than al Qaeda is. By all measures, however, al Qaeda and similar groups were increasing in support from Morocco to Indonesia. If that trend continues, the radical imams and their madrassas schools will (as Donald Rumsfeld finally understood in 2003, as reflected in his leaked internal memo that painted a far more bleak assessment of the war on terrorism than his public statements) produce more terrorists than we jail or shoot. Far from addressing the popular appeal of the enemy that attacked us, Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land.

Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country. Nothing else could have so well negated all our other positive acts and so closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region. It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting “invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.”

*Cressey and I did spend over a year working on the cyber security problem, producing Bush's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, and then quit the Administration altogether.

I
T DID NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.
We did not have to go after Iraq after September 11. Imagine an alternative scenario in which a President mobilized the country to deal with the fundamental problems revealed by the terrorist attacks. What would a successful and comprehensive counterterrorism effort have looked like after September 11?

It would have consisted of three key agenda items. First, the President would have engaged in a massive effort to eliminate our vulnerabilities to terrorism at home and strengthen homeland security. Second, he would have launched a concerted effort globally to counter the ideology of al Qaeda and the larger radical Islamic terrorist movement with a partnership to promote the real Islam, to win support for common American and Islamic values, and to shape an alternative to the popular fundamentalist approach. Third, he would have been active with key countries not just to round up terrorists, end the sanctuaries, dry up the money, but also to strengthen open governments and make it possible politically, economically, and socially for them to go after the roots of al Qaeda–like terrorism. (The priority countries are Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.) Nowhere on the list of things that should have been done after September 11 is invading Iraq. The things that we had to do would have required enormous attention and resources. They were not available because they were devoted to Iraq. Let's look at what was done and what should have been done on these major agenda items.

P
RIORITY NUMBER ONE
would have been eliminating vulnerabilities to terrorism at home and strengthening homeland security. In the days after the September 11 attack the White House realized that the President needed to make a more comprehensive statement to the American people about what had happened and what we were going to do about it. Something easily understandable had to be said about preventing attacks in the U.S. The President chose in his speech before a joint session of Congress to announce a person, the Governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge. Sitting in the balcony of the House in which he once also served, Ridge looked like he was from central casting. Tall, square-jawed, a wounded Vietnam veteran, Ridge had been a successful governor of a big state. Bush had asked Ridge to come to the White House to “run homeland security.” There were no more details in the offer, but in the days after September 11 one did not say no to the President.

A few days later I drove to the Governor's Mansion in Harrisburg, along with General Wayne Downing. We found Ridge packing, since he had just resigned to go to Washington. When we briefed him on the homeland protection activities that had been under way for five years, he seemed somewhat relieved. “This is great. I thought I was going to have to start from scratch.”

In one way, however, Ridge did have to start from scratch. The decision had been made and handed to Ridge that he would head up an organization parallel to the National Security Council, i.e., a White House Homeland Security staff of about fifty professionals to lead, coordinate, and perform oversight on the many federal programs relevant to domestic security and disaster prevention, mitigation, and recovery. It had taken the NSC decades to become effective and its efficacy was still largely dependent upon its leadership and key staff appointments. Ridge, who had never served in the Executive Branch in Washington, had to fashion a new entity quickly.

Tom Ridge had bought a pig in a poke when he agreed to come to Washington to help on homeland security. He assumed that he would have real authority as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security, but he soon found that he could do nothing without first clearing it with White House Chief of Staff Andy Card. Although Ridge opposed the idea of creating a new department and loathed the idea of becoming its Secretary, he was forced to do so by Bush and Card. Being Governor of Pennsylvania was not like actually running a nationwide department with almost 200,000 employees doing sensitive and critical security functions. Ridge was, at root, a politician, not a manager nor a security expert.

After the Clinton administration had made terrorism and homeland protection a growing budgetary priority, a series of panels and commissions had come into existence to offer their views on the problems. Many had sought what I called a “wiring diagram” fix, the movement and consolidation of agencies and departments. Many in the Congress and the panels were unable to reconcile themselves to the fact that a lot of federal agencies could contribute to addressing a problem as big as domestic security and preparedness; it was not neat. I believed that adept White House coordination and leadership could get the many agencies all working on components of a consistent overall program. As a career civil servant with almost thirty years' experience in Washington headquarters, I believed that the alternative method, rewiring the organizational boxes, would make us less able to deal with domestic security and preparedness for years to come. The smaller mergers that created the Energy Department and the Transportation Department had taken years to jell. Ridge agreed and told me, “The last thing we need to do now is reorganize and create a new department.”

Congress thought otherwise. Senator Joe Lieberman, who wanted to do more to improve domestic security, had taken the recommendation of an outside panel led by Warren Rudman and Gary Hart and turned it into draft legislation. It would create a new department. The agencies that would be merged had, among other roles, responsibility for fisheries, river floods, computer crime, citizenship training, tariffs on imports, drug smuggling, and reliability of telephone networks. They also had more obviously security-related functions. The President opposed the bill and pointed to Tom Ridge's new office. Many Members of Congress, of both parties, thought Ridge's office was not enough. Their confidence in the office was weakened early on when anthrax began appearing in the U.S. mail and the Bush administration's response seemed confused.

It was confused. Ridge and Attorney General John Ashcroft competed over who should coordinate the response, while Health Secretary Tommy Thompson's television appearances left many Americans less reassured and more alarmed. Fortunately, there was the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile created in 1998, so the needed drugs were available and procedures were in place for getting more fast. State public health labs had also been brought back from near morbidity by federal funds in 1999 and could respond to the thousands of anthrax sightings, many of which turned out to be instances of Cremora.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress objected to the White House's unwillingness to let Ridge appear before congressional committees because “White House staff do not do that.” Some in Congress noted that as National Coordinator, I had appeared before nine congressional committees to brief them on counterterrorism and domestic preparedness.

The White House legislative affairs office began to take a head count on Capitol Hill. The Lieberman Bill would pass both houses, creating two disasters for President Bush: first, an unmanageable new department created just at the time its agencies and staff needed to be working on increasing domestic security, and second, the major new piece of legislation in response to September 11 would be named after the man whom the majority of voters had wanted to be Vice President just twenty months earlier. For the political analysts in the Bush White House, it was better to have one of those two outcomes than both. Thus, President Bush completely changed his position and announced the urgent need for the Lieberman Bill, except he did not call it that. He called it the Homeland Security Act.

The Bush proposal actually added more agencies into the brew than Lieberman's legislation had, including Secret Service. The White House then launched a nationwide road show to whip up support for the new Department of Homeland Security. Those who opposed the legislation, the Administration's supporters implied, were unpatriotic (few raised the question of whether the White House had been unpatriotic when it had opposed the same bill a few weeks earlier). Although delayed by the Administration's insistence that civil servants' job rights be limited, the Homeland Security Act passed and the Department was created.

The outcome, as the
Washington Post
revealed in a major review in September 2003, has been a disappointing and disorganized mess. Much of the leadership was chosen for political loyalties, not Executive Branch experience. There were inadequate resources to effect a smooth merger. The White House–led Transition Planning Office produced few useful plans. Many key career staff left in disgust. Those who stayed often complain that they are actually less able to work on the substantive programs to increase security because the new department is poorly run, there are so few institutional support mechanisms to help them, and they need to spend so much time on the administrative challenges of reorganization.

For those who have not worked in the federal government but are familiar with the business world, the best way to understand what has happened to key security organizations is to think of the Time Warner–AOL merger and then multiply it by several orders of magnitude. Twenty-two agencies were simultaneously merged into the new Department, into an organization that itself did not exist prior to the merger.

The first few initiatives of the new Department, rather than make us feel more secure, became material for late night comics. The Color Code System initially caused state and local authorities to spend millions of dollars that they did not have to respond to changes in the color, changes that were unaccompanied by any detailed threat information shared with local authorities. States and cities began to announce that they would no longer respond to changes in the color code. Then came the announcement that all American homes should have duct tape, which quickly caused fearful Americans to clean out their hardware stores of a variety of types of 3M tapes.

The good career staff who remain in some agencies have tried relatively successfully to insulate themselves from their own Department, notably Secret Service, Coast Guard, and Transportation Security. Even Secret Service, however, has been damaged by the new Department's agreeing (without consulting with Secret Service) that the service's experienced experts in financial crimes should be subordinated on terrorist financing to FBI. The FBI is not in the new domestic security department. Transportation Security Administration has also been underfunded to the point where the Department proposed that it would have to reduce the number of Federal Air Marshals on aircraft, only to withdraw the proposal just days later because of public criticism.

The Congress changed the Administration's proposed legislation creating the Department, adding detail and specificity about roles and missions. One mission about which the Congress was very clear was the need for a new center in the Department to see and analyze all information available to the government on terrorist threats and be a “second opinion.” FBI and CIA both saw this congressional mandate as a challenge to their authority. Although often at odds and unwilling to share information about terrorism, CIA and FBI can make common cause when faced with the same bureaucratic enemy. Thus, they proposed the creation of a CIA-FBI entity to analyze terrorist information. President Bush proposed this new entity in his 2003 State of the Union message and it soon thereafter had offices, people, and computers. The congressionally mandated “second opinion” consists largely of unfilled federal jobs in the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition to making the Department of Homeland Security capable of giving a “second opinion” on intelligence issues related to domestic security, it is increasingly clear that we need to improve the accuracy of the “first opinion” on all intelligence issues, the analysis offered by CIA. The list of important analytical failures by CIA is now too long for us to conclude that the current system is acceptable. It is time now to do what so many veteran observers of the intelligence community have recommended: remove the intelligence analysis function from CIA and establish a small, independent bureau with a staff of career professionals and outside experts. This new Intelligence and Research Bureau should have a status somewhat like the Federal Reserve Board, with a respected chairman who has a limited term appointment, other respected Board members, and an elite staff. Their analysis should be subjected to regular independent audits for accuracy.

As to the behemoth Department of Homeland Security, it is too late now to do a phased-in implementation of the Department, as should have been done, but not too late to make the Department work. The Homeland Security mission is too important to wait the decade or two that it has typically taken new federal departments to become effective. Turning DHS from an object of ridicule within the Washington Beltway to being an organization that epitomizes smart government will require creating a management cadre throughout the Department from the best in the civil service, former military, and the private sector. It must become the place where senior managers want to work, the GE of the government. To bring about this metamorphosis, senior personnel and facilities may have to be moved from other, more established departments. Hiring bonuses may be needed. Creating a “halo effect” costs money. Regrettably, the Administration sought to do homeland security on the cheap, telling Ridge that creating the new department had to be “revenue neutral,” jargon for no new money to implement the largest government reorganization in history.