Against All Enemies (40 page)

The federal government was providing first responder assistance to states based upon a formula that resulted in eight times more funds per capita for Wyoming than for California. Because of the economic downturn and its effects on state and city tax revenues, cities and states were actually dismissing fire and police personnel in 2003. Federal funds for community police under the COPS program were cut by the Bush administration. A year after September 11, the New York City Police had been cut by four thousand officers from the number on the rolls on the day of the attack.

We traveled to cities across the country and heard from every local official we talked to (mayors, police chiefs, fire chiefs, emergency services directors) that they were not receiving the funds they needed for secure and reliable communications, breathing apparatus, heavy search-and-rescue teams, personnel, or planning to deal with a major terrorist attack involving chemical, biological, or radiological weapons. Journalists loved to ask me when I was in the White House, “What keeps you up at night? What are the worst things that could happen to us?” The worst are, thankfully, not the most likely. Nonetheless, the two worst things that could happen are, first, the outbreak of a highly contagious epidemic as a result of a biological weapon, and, second, a nuclear weapon going off in an American city. Yet what Warren Rudman and I confirmed is that no city has the plan, trained staff, equipment, or facilities to handle a major, contagious biological attack requiring isolation hospitals. None was remotely prepared to deal with an incident in which a radiological or nuclear device was utilized.

When our report, “Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared,” was released, an Administration spokesman dismissed it as probably calling for “gold-plated telephones.” The signatories to the report included former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Crowe and General John Vessey, Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, and former CIA and FBI Director William Webster. Warren Rudman responded to the criticism by telling a House committee, “We don't want gold-plated telephones, we just want reliable communications devices so that we never again lose hundreds of firefighters because they couldn't hear the evacuation order, as happened in the World Trade Center.”

We called for $98 billion over five years, plus an unquantified amount for assisting local police, over and above the Administration's requests. More important, however, we called for a requirements process that specifies what level of capability enhancements we are trying to achieve. As Warren Rudman put it to me, “We need a transparent process that says you can get this much done for this much money over these many years. If you think more metropolitan areas need more capability sooner, fine, this is how much it will cost. Without that, these guys in the White House are just pulling the homeland security budget level out of their ass.”

The simple truth is that the Administration does not have any idea how much money is needed for first responders and related state and local homeland security capability, because it has never tried to find out. It has never engaged in a requirements process. It fears that a requirements process will show how it has shortchanged those defending us. Rather than being derived from needs, the Administration's funding proposal was backed into by figuring out how much the overall federal budget would be and how much would be given to everything else within that budget.

Equipped or not, when the call comes our first responders around the country will answer it. They are our first line of defense against terrorists. The Bush administration contends that the additional resources we sought for aiding our first responders “simply do not exist.” Yet, in the “war on terrorism” we are spending in Iraq in the first year of war and occupation six times what the Rudman study called for as an annual supplement to equip our defenders here at home. The resources for Iraq did not exist either. The Administration chose to run up the national debt to pay for Iraq, but not to pay for what our police and fire personnel need to defend us here at home.

Despite the Administration's rhetoric, the resources needed to secure the homeland have been denied and no system has been put in place to determine the real funding requirements. Regulations to deal with securing chemical plants and other critical assets have been slow-rolled. Many proposals have been made to employ new technology in homeland defense, but few systems have been deployed at airports, harbors, border crossings, or on our telecommunications and data networks. The public's faith and trust in the sensitivity to civil liberties by federal officials engaged in domestic security has been eroded by several dubious decisions.

Ideologically, the Bush administration is opposed to increasing domestic spending (although it has no problem with immense DOD budgets), hiring more civil servants, or regulating the private sector. While in the abstract all of those may seem things to be avoided, it is impossible to increase homeland security without doing more on every one of those three measures than the Administration has been willing to do.

America usually waits for a disaster before it responds to a threat. We have had that disaster. There is no longer any excuse for the failure of the Administration, Congress, and local governments to improve our domestic security and preparedness. Dealing with domestic protection, or homeland security, means identifying and reducing major vulnerabilities to attack. And it means coming up with a set of national requirements for response capabilities and then funding them systematically over several years. We have not done either, nor have we done well on organization, technology, resources, or sensitivity to protection of civil liberties. Defending America against terrorism at home must depend as much on reducing vulnerabilities as it does on catching “the evil-doers,” for we will never catch them all and this year's crop of America's enemies will be replaced by tomorrow's. As long as we have major vulnerabilities, someone someday will utilize one of those vulnerabilities against us. Every day that we continue to have porous borders or unprotected chemical plants is another day that we are at risk. Prioritizing the vulnerabilities to be reduced and figuring out a way of paying for the effort would be a major national challenge on a par with the Space Race or the rearming for the Cold War. It should have been the focus of a great national debate and mobilization. It wasn't. And despite the “Global War on Terrorism” and despite (or because of) the “War on Iraq” we are also still highly vulnerable to terrorism.

T
HE SECOND AGENDA ITEM
post–September 11 should have been the creation of a counterweight ideology to the al Qaeda, fundamentalist, radical version of Islam because much of the threat we face is ideological, a perversion of a religion. Bombs and bullets, handcuffs and jail bars will not address the source of that ideological challenge. We must work with our Islamic friends to craft an ideological and cultural response over many years, just as we fought Communism for almost half a century, in scores of countries, not just with wars and weapons, but with a more powerful and more attractive ideology. Unfortunately, there is often silence or at best a weak and incoherent voice countering the apparently attractive appeals of the radical mullahs.

The new leader of Central Command understands. General John Abizaid told the
New York Times
that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are “involved in a fight against extremists that is crucial to their ability to maintain control…It's a battle of ideas as much as it is a military battle…not the type of fight that you're going to send the 82nd Airborne” in to handle. Yet Abizaid's bosses in the Pentagon and the White House do not seem to understand how to fight the battle of ideas or the limits on the ability of our shooters to defeat the al Qaeda ideology.

It will be difficult for the U.S. government to participate in formulating a subtle and successful message about religion, but we have been here before. When America realized that Communism was having an appeal, we faced the new issue of how to sell America, democracy, and capitalism. The United States found ways of assisting Christian Democratic parties in Europe and Latin America and, ironically, Islamic movements in places like Afghanistan. We found or created spokesmen, leaders, heroes, schools, books, films, development programs. That effort did as much to win the Cold War as did the U.S. Army tanks in West Germany.

When colleagues in the White House asked me what to read to understand the problem after September 11, I urged them instead to get an old black and white French film,
The Battle of Algiers.
In it, French counterterrorism authorities round up all the “known terrorist managers” and leaders (sound familiar?) but lose the war with the terrorists because they did not address the ideological underpinnings. After the known terrorist leaders were arrested, time passed, and new, unknown terrorists emerged. We are likely to face the same situation with al Qaeda. The only way to stop it is to work with leaders of Islamic nations to insure that tolerance of other religions is taught again, that their people believe they have fair opportunities to participate in government and the economy, that the social and cultural conditions that breed hatred are bred out.

Rather than seeking to work with the majority in the Islamic world to mold Muslim opinion against the radicals' values, we did exactly what al Qaeda said we would do. We invaded and occupied an oil-rich Arab country that posed no threat to us, while paying scant time and attention to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. We delivered to al Qaeda the greatest recruitment propaganda imaginable and made it difficult for friendly Islamic governments to be seen working closely with us.

I was no fan of Saddam Hussein; indeed, I had urged limiting his access to weapons of mass destruction technology as early as 1989, had been one of the first advocating confronting Iraq militarily in 1990, conceived of the U.N. program to eliminate his weapons of mass destruction in 1991, tried to reinitiate hostilities after the First Gulf War, advocated a large bombing campaign of Iraq in 1993. I know that in one sense the world is better off without him in power, but not the way it was done, not at the cost we have paid and will pay for it; not by diverting us from eliminating al Qaeda and its clones; not by using the funds we needed to eliminate our vulnerabilities to terrorism at home; not at the incredibly high price of increasing Muslim hatred of America and strengthening al Qaeda.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has written that the Administration planned early on to eliminate Saddam Hussein. From everything I saw and heard, he is right. The Bush administration reply to O'Neill was something like: Of course we were. Clinton signed a law making regime change in Iraq the American policy. That's true too, but neither the Congress nor Clinton had in mind regime change at the point of an American gun, a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The administration of the second George Bush did begin with Iraq on its agenda. So many of those who had made the decisions in the first Iraq War were back: Cheney, Powell, Wolfowitz. Some of them had made clear in writings and speeches while out of office that they believed the United States should unseat Saddam, finish what they failed to do the first time. In the new administration's discussions of terrorism, Paul Wolfowitz had urged a focus on Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the U.S. even though there was no such thing. In 2001 more and more the talk was of Iraq, of CENTCOM being asked to plan to invade. It disturbed me greatly.

President Bush has said that September 11 was a turning point in his thinking about Iraq. There was also a supposed decision point when the President decided to go to the U.N. and another when he decided not to wait further for the U.N., but all along it seemed inevitable that we would invade. Iraq was portrayed as the most dangerous thing in national security. It was an idée fixe, a rigid belief, received wisdom, a decision already made and one that no fact or event could derail.

There is seldom in history a single reason why two nations go to war against each other. The reasons given by the Bush administration for its war with Iraq have shifted from terrorism to weapons of mass destruction to the suffering of the Iraqi people. In addition to those publicly articulated rationales, there were others reportedly discussed in Washington's bureaucracy.

Five rationales are attributed to three senior advisors (Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz) and to President Bush:

• To clean up the mess left by the first Bush administration when, in 1991, it let Saddam Hussein consolidate power and slaughter opponents after the first U.S.-Iraq war;
  
• To improve Israel's strategic position by eliminating a large, hostile military;
  
• To create an Arab democracy that could serve as a model to other friendly Arab states now threatened with internal dissent, notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia;
  
• To permit the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia (after twelve years), where they were stationed to counter the Iraqi military and were a source of anti-Americanism threatening to the regime;
  
• To create another friendly source of oil for the U.S. market and reduce dependency upon oil from Saudi Arabia, which might suffer overthrow someday.