The Clinton Mind-Set
By Peter D. Feaver
Washington Post
The writer is professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, and is the author of "Armed Servants," a book detailing civil-military relations in the Clinton administration.
<font size=4>
The commissioners on the Sept. 11 panel asked the same question over and over: Why didn't the Clinton administration take stronger military action against al Qaeda's Taliban refuge in the 1990s, when the Sept. 11 plot was being hatched?
Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright's consistent response was simple: "You have to go back to the pre-9/11 mindset." By this she meant that before Sept. 11, stronger military action was politically impossible; thus the blame for the Clinton administration's failures to act preemptively against al Qaeda rests on everyone, not specifically on the commander in chief.
Defenders of the Clinton administration have twinned this claim -- "We can't be blamed, because no one wanted us to take stronger military action" -- with its post-9/11 obverse assertion: President Bush doesn't deserve any credit for toppling the Taliban and ending al Qaeda's sanctuary, because after Sept. 11 anyone would have done this. In the words of Bush's most recent and surprising critic, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke: "Any leader whom one can imagine as president on September 11 would have declared a 'war on terrorism' and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary by invading."
<font size=5>
But the first claim is only partly true, and because it
is, the second claim is almost certainly false.
<font size=4>
Albright is partly correct; there was a pre-9/11 mindset that shaped Clinton-era responses. The mind-set was "counterterrorism as law-enforcement." The role of the military was at best a supporting one. Moreover, because the uniformed military themselves opposed a military role, the law enforcement mind-set was reinforced by Clinton's pathological civil-military relations. Even if President Clinton wanted to conduct military operations against al Qaeda, he was simply too weak a commander in chief to prevail over a military that wanted nothing to do with a war in Afghanistan.
The Clinton record on military operations was clear:
frequent resort to low-risk cruise-missile strikes and
high-level bombings, but shunning any form of decisive
operations involving ground troops in areas of high risk.
The Clinton White House was the most casualty phobic
administration in modern times, and this fear of body bags
was not lost on Osama bin Laden. Indeed, al Qaeda rhetoric
regularly "proved" that the Americans were vulnerable to
terrorism by invoking the hasty cut-and-run after 18 Army
soldiers died in the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" events in
Somalia -- a strategy developed and implemented,
ironically enough, by the same Richard Clarke who torments
the Bush team today.
So Albright is correct that Operation Enduring Freedom,
the campaign to topple the Taliban, was not possible with
a commander in chief who was afraid to lead the public to
accept the human costs of war.
This suggests, however, that the critical event was not
simply Sept. 11, 2001, which changed the public's
perceptions, but also the 2000 election, which changed the
commander in chief. President Bush came into office
convinced that the casualty phobia of his predecessor had
made America a tempting target, a paper tiger. When
terrorists struck the twin towers and the Pentagon, Bush
interpreted it as proof that America looked weak.
While most of the recent media attention has focused on
early internal debates about Iraqi involvement, in fact
the early public debate about 9/11 was over whether Bush
was rash in declaring "war" on the terrorists. Most
experts and pundits -- especially among our allies --
still clung to the "counterterrorism as law enforcement"
mind-set. And viewed from that frame, it was foolhardy to
declare war.
For starters, declaring war seemed to elevate the
terrorists to co-combatants, rather than leaving them as
criminals to be dealt with by police dragnet. The decision
to invade Afghanistan was even more controversial.
Suddenly armchair experts were quoting Kipling and
ruminating on how the Afghans had twice defeated reigning
military powers, first the British Empire and then the
Soviet Empire.
The risky approach ordered by Bush and Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, which relied heavily on Special
Forces and air power, was especially subject to criticism.
As late as Nov. 4, 2001, the dean of academic security
studies experts, John Mearsheimer, was warning in an
opinion piece that "neither the current bombing campaign
nor the deployment of American ground forces to
Afghanistan offers good military options for dealing with
the Taliban and al Qaeda. A better approach would
emphasize ground-level diplomacy, with open wallets, among
Pashtun leaders in central and southern Afghanistan."
Viewed in hindsight, the Bush-Rumsfeld military plan
looked brilliant, but at the time it was highly
controversial and decidedly risky.
Would a less stubborn commander in chief have pursued the risky war plan that ultimately toppled the Taliban and put al Qaeda on the run? The record of the '90s suggests otherwise. A White House that cut and ran after the death of 18 soldiers probably would not have had the stomach for the possible casualties. A White House that could not prevail over military objections to using ground troops in Kosovo would have had a hard time overcoming institutional military objections. A White House that ordered retaliation in the form of a night-time strike on an empty intelligence building would not have backed Operation Enduring Freedom.
Before Sept. 11, Clinton defenders say, we did not have irrefutable proof of the casus belli of al Qaeda-Taliban complicity, there was no international consensus on the need to invade Afghanistan, and it would have been politically risky for the United States to act in the face of military objections. The same could be said about the invasion of Iraq after Sept. 11. In other words, determined commanders in chief have the mind-set and the resolve to act in spite of the political climate and military resistance.
<font size=3>
© 2004 The Washington Post Company |
