Against All Enemies (9 page)

The next week President Bush addressed a Joint Session of Congress in the most eloquent speech of his career. Gone was any tentativeness or awkwardness as a speaker. Karen Hughes had drafted the text personally on her old typewriter. It included my questions and some of my answers: who is the enemy, why do they hate us…

The weeks that followed were filled with meetings, back to back. A Campaign Coordination Committee, co-chaired by Franklin Miller and me, developed a game plan for attacking al Qaeda. A Domestic Preparedness Committee, chaired by Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, pooled the departments' efforts to identify and remedy vulnerabilities in the U.S. to further attack. The Cabinet and their deputies had their eyes opened. It was a time of jitters. There were clearly bogus reports of commando teams targeting the White House and nuclear bombs on Wall Street, but many of the people now reading such intelligence had never seen it before and could not tell the wheat from the chaff. Reagan National Airport remained closed, but because of concerns about aircraft possibly headed toward the White House, we were on constant alert.

Throughout it all, we thought of the dead, of the horror. Those of us who had stayed in the White House that day now knew why the United flight had crashed in Pennsylvania, that heroic passengers had fought and died, and probably saved our lives in the process. But we tried to stay unemotional, to stay focused on the work that had to be done, the work that kept us in the White House eighteen hours a day and more, every day since 9/11. We were told that parts of my FBI friend, John O'Neill, had been found in the rubble in New York and that there would be a memorial service in his hometown of Atlantic City. I told Condi Rice that we would be taking a half day off. Lisa, Roger, and Bev Roundtree joined me and we drove to New Jersey.

As the Mass ended and John's coffin rolled by, the bagpipes played, and, finally, I wept from my gut. There was so much to grieve about. How did this all happen? Why couldn't we stop it? How do we prevent it from happening again and rid the world of the horror? Someday I would find the time to think through it all and answer those questions.

Now is that time.

L
ITTLE NOTICED BY MOST
A
MERICANS,
including those in its government, a new international movement began growing during the last two decades. It does not just seek terror for its own sake; that international movement's goal is the creation of a network of governments, imposing on their citizens a minority interpretation of Islam. Some in the movement call for the scope of their campaign to be global domination. The “Caliphate” they seek to create would be a severe and repressive fourteenth-century literalist theocracy. They pursue its creation with gruesome violence and fear.

To understand why that movement has chosen America as its target and why America failed to see the effects of its own actions, we need to remind ourselves of some events of the last twenty-five years.

The story, the strands of history that brought us to September 11 and to today's war on terrorism and Iraq, does not start with Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. It goes back to their two predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

First, in this chapter, Ronald Reagan. He had been obsessed with aggressively confronting the Soviet Union, not just by outspending the Red Army, but by inserting U.S. military influence in new regions to put Moscow off balance. His efforts to push the Soviet Union to collapse worked, much to the surprise of most of official Washington. By confronting Moscow in Afghanistan, inserting the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf, and strengthening Israel as a base for a southern flank against the Soviets, Reagan created new equations. The moves were unquestionably correct strategically, but the details of how they were handled left problems and wrong impressions that grew with time. As a junior officer and then midlevel manager, I played a small role in each of these events, which shaped my perceptions of the U.S. role in the region.

The world that Ronald Reagan inherited as President was freshly reshaped by two crucial changes that happened in 1979, the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Both events rekindled the radical movement in Islam and both drew America further into the realm of Islam. Although a low-level official at the time, I had a ringside seat to these events. No one thought then that, as dramatic as the 1979 changes were, they were America's first steps into a new era when U.S. forces would fight multiple wars in the Middle East and confront Middle Eastern terrorism at home.

I had joined the State Department in 1979 to work on the issue of the Soviet Union's growing military power, particularly its nuclear weapons facing NATO. I had focused on these issues for half a decade at the Pentagon. As 1979 came to an end, however, the White House froze all nuclear arms control talks with Moscow and began to concentrate on the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and South Asia.

The 1974 Arab Oil Boycott of the United States had made clear to Washington the importance of Persian Gulf resources. In 1979 America's greatest ally in the Gulf was violently overthrown by a radical Islamic group. Then, on Christmas Day, the Soviet Red Army moved south in the direction of the Persian Gulf by invading and occupying Afghanistan.

The State Department, then and now, was mostly staffed by Foreign Service officers, professional international relations and regional affairs specialists who spend most of their careers overseas. In 1979, the Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs (State's “little Pentagon”) was not led by a Foreign Service officer, but by a former
New York Times
columnist, Leslie Gelb. To help him deal with the Pentagon's technical arguments on arms control, Gelb created a small office of young, civil service, military analysts. I was part of that team, along with junior staff who would have an increasing and persistent role in the next twenty years: Arnold Kanter, later the Special Assistant to the President for Defense Policy and Under Secretary of State in the George H. W. Bush administration; Randy Beers, who would go on to serve four presidents on the National Security Council staff; Franklin Miller, who would serve twenty years in senior Pentagon positions, then as Special Assistant to the President, in which capacity he would join me in the emptied White House on 9/11.

After the twin shocks of the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, our group of politico-military analysts was given a new focus: the Persian Gulf.

In the Persian Gulf, the Shah of Iran had served two useful purposes for Cold War America. First, he had guaranteed a source of oil unaffected by the Arab Oil Boycott. Second, he had offered to use Iran's newfound wealth to create a modern military “as strong as Germany's” on the Soviet Union's southern flank. Cold War America saw all foreign policy issues through the prism of the conflict between the two superpowers, much as we now see the world through the war on terrorism. The Cold War had parallels with the War on Terror. Both conflicts raged globally, with regional wars, secret sleeper cells, and competing ideologies. The two struggles also threatened the horrific destruction of our cities by weapons of mass destruction (although in the Cold War we knew the enemy actually had thousands of nuclear weapons). Our opponents in both vowed to seek the imposition of their form of government and way of life on all nations. In retrospect, some (particularly those born after 1970) believe America overreacted to the Cold War threat. At the time, however, it seemed an existential struggle, the depth of which is now difficult for many to recall or understand.

F
OLLOWING THE
S
OVIET INVASION OF
A
FGHANISTAN
, our little analytical team began fielding questions from the State Department leadership and from the White House. A Soviet strategic bomber base appeared to be under construction in Afghanistan. From it, we were asked, Could Soviet bombers attack U.S. naval forces in the Indian Ocean? Should the U.S. bomb the Afghan base before it became operational? We determined the construction was actually a Soviet agricultural aid development project.

If the Soviet Union poured troops into Iran, could they get to the Persian Gulf before U.S. forces could stage a D-Day–like landing? Yes, the Soviets could beat us there because we had no forces in the area and no realistic plan or capability to project forces to the Persian Gulf, but then neither did the Soviets. The first part of that answer resonated with both the Carter and Reagan administration leadership; the latter part was ignored. Prior to 1979, the United States had little military presence in the Indian Ocean or Persian Gulf. The exception was a small naval facility in Bahrain, which we had agreed to maintain when the British left.

Thus did the United States embark on a fevered campaign to develop the military capability to project force into the region and to create bases into which those forces could be sent. I was asked to meet with the U.S. military planners who were assigned to this task. Instead of finding them in the bowels of the Pentagon, I found them at the end of a noisy runway on a fighter base in Florida. They were in trailers surrounded by barbed wire and they were wearing field camouflage. Of course, I had to ask why.

“We're called the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, RDJTF,” General Robert Kingston explained. “So I want it to look like we can deploy rapidly to the region.”

“Can you?” I asked.

“No, but that's where you guys come in. You're gonna get us some bases.” Kingston smiled. Some of his military colleagues also thought it a little odd that he was behind barbed wire in trailers in Tampa, and began referring to General Kingston as “Barbed Wire Bob.” His enthusiasm and sense of urgency were, however, infectious.

My colleagues and I soon found ourselves negotiating in Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Unable to procure bases, we asked for “access” agreements and the right to enhance existing facilities. No nation wanted to offend the other superpower by overtly agreeing to facilitate the U.S. military. In most cases, however, we reached understandings that would allow us to improve air bases and pre-positioned war matériel secretly, without any guarantee that we would be able to use it in a crisis. The Saudis were different. They agreed to the creation of the facilities, but they would build them much larger than was necessary for their own small forces, a concept that became known as “Overbuilding, Overstocking.” Thousands of American civilian contractors moved into the Kingdom, causing resentment among some Muslims who read the Koran as banning the presence of infidels in the country that hosted the two holiest mosques of Islam.

We negotiated with the British over a long forgotten coaling station on a rock in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia. (In later years I and my British counterpart in London were designated “co-mayors” of that distant island neither of us had ever seen.) In 1980 we asked the British, “Could we please use Diego Garcia and maybe add to it a little?” Soon, it was capable of launching B-52s and about to sink from the weight of pre-positioned war matériel.

A year after the shocks of 1979, another unexpected event hit, dragging the United States a bit further into the politics of the region. A new president in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, launched a preemptive attack on Iran in an attempt to seize its oil fields. Saddam may also have been provoked by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, who appealed to the Shi'a majority in Iraq to rise up. At first, Washington maintained neutrality. The United States did not have good relations with Iraq, which had been close to the Soviet Union. Our relations with Iran, however, were terrible and getting worse.

The new Iranian government seized the U.S. embassy staff and held them for over a year. Iran then contributed to the turmoil in Lebanon, a nation that the United States had always considered a friendly and stable, pro-Western anchor at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. When the turmoil worsened in 1982, Ronald Reagan was in his second year as President. Seeing the events in Lebanon as linked to the anti-American regime in Iran and threatening to Israel, which Reagan had begun calling an ally, he ordered Marines into Beirut. By so doing, Reagan began what would become a misadventure that gave terrorists the impression they could attack the United States with relative impunity.

Reagan explained to a prime-time audience that we went into Lebanon in part “because of the oil.” Lebanon had no oil. The Iranian-supported Hezbollah faction in Lebanon responded to the new American military presence by staging devastating car bomb attacks on the U.S. Marines barracks and twice on our embassy. In the attack on the Marine barracks alone, 278 Americans died.

There would be no similar loss of American lives in terrorism until the Libyan attack on Pan Am 103 six years later during the first Bush's presidency. Those two acts stood as the most lethal acts of foreign terrorism against Americans until September 11. Nothing occurring during Clinton's tenure approached either attack in terms of the numbers of Americans killed by foreign terrorism. Neither Ronald Reagan nor George H. W. Bush retaliated for these devastating attacks on Americans.

After the Marine barracks was leveled in Beirut, Americans were faced for the first time with what Middle East terrorism could really do, and how a confused multifactional civil war could drag us in. At the State Department, our newly created Middle East politico-military team was pressed into supporting our besieged Beirut embassy. Although Reagan had decided not to attack Syria or Iran (both of which were implicated in the attacks on the Marines and the embassy), he was determined to keep a U.S. diplomatic presence. From the radio room in the Operations Center, we would check on the status of the American diplomats who had relocated to the Ambassador's Residence in the Beirut neighborhood of Yazde.

“Yazde, Yazde, this is State, over. What is your status?”

“State, State, Yazde here. We are taking artillery fire from a ridge across the way,” came the voice crackling across thousands of miles. “We could sure use some support from New Jersey.” That was not a request for letters from back home, but rather a call for suppressing fire from the U.S. battleship riding off the coast. The Reagan administration had decided to deter further attacks by showing U.S. military muscle. Minutes later, the long guns of a World War II throwback turned east and fired their famous “shells as big as Volkswagens.”

“Yazde, Yazde, are you still taking fire from that ridgeline, over.”

“State, Yazde: there is no ridgeline there anymore.”

Despite our military superiority, however, we were unable to counter the religious fervor of the Iranian-Syrian–supported faction. Lebanon seemed to be going down into a long, bloody death spiral of factional conflict that the United States was ill prepared to affect. After a series of bombings and shellings, Reagan ordered U.S. forces out of Lebanon. Throughout the Middle East, it was noted how easily the superpower could be driven off, how the U.S. was still “shell-shocked” from its defeat in Vietnam. Years later Usama bin Laden would refer to the success of terrorism in driving the United States out of Beirut, a city whose pleasures he had enjoyed before becoming a devout Muslim.