Kerry's timing is superb. WSJ.com
AT WAR
The Search for Answers
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Richard Clarke is wrong about Iraq.<font size=3>
BY BOB KERREY
Thursday, April 8, 2004 12:01 a.m.
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The 9/11 Commission's objective is to answer the following question: How--at the end of a summer of high terrorist threat--did 19 men with a few hundred thousand dollars manage to utterly defeat every single defensive mechanism we had in place that September morning and murder 3,000 innocents on American soil?
The search for this answer is especially painful because these 19 men were part of al Qaeda, a radical Islamic army called to war against the United States by Osama bin Laden in August 1996 and again in February 1998--and because Sept. 11, 2001, was not their first success.
On Aug. 7, 1998, six months after Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against Americans world-wide, al Qaeda terrorists attacked our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with truck bombs, killing more than 250 Kenyans, Tanzanians and Americans and wounding thousands more. Attempts to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, a hotel in Amman, Jordan, and the USS The Sullivans in Yemen were prevented by a combination of skilled spycraft and good luck.
But our luck did not hold.
On Oct. 12, 2000, a bomb ripped through the USS Cole in Yemen killing 17 American sailors. And less than a year later, Mohamed Atta and his suicidal crew crashed civilian aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pa.
I believe Chairman Tom Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton will lead our commission to write a bipartisan report that will provide Americans with the clearest picture yet of how this happened. I believe they will lead the commission to produce a report that will contain specific recommendations of what we need to do to make certain that nothing like the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, ever happens again.
As a member of the commission, authorized under federal law as a consequence of the persistence and perseverance of the families of the victims of that terrible day, I sincerely hope our efforts will meet their highest expectations.
Today's appearance of National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice will test the commission's resilience to
the partisan pressures which threaten to collapse the
goodwill needed to achieve consensus. Among the most
dangerous forces is the tendency in politics to become
personal and question motives instead of confronting the
substance of the argument made by any individual. If we
yield to this tendency, all hope for an honest and
constructive report is lost. We will most certainly fail.
The best example of this came two weeks ago, when all the
key national security officials of both the Clinton and
Bush administrations, except Ms. Rice, testified under
oath before the commission. This testimony came
immediately after Richard Clarke, the former
counterterrorism director under both presidents, spoke.
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Mr. Clarke's most startling statement was that there have
been more terrorist attacks against the United States in
the 30 months since 9/11 than in the 30 months prior to
the attack. You could almost hear a clap of thunder when
he went on to say that this happened because we
substantially reduced our efforts in Afghanistan and went
to war in Iraq, causing a loss of momentum in the war
against al Qaeda.
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That's his argument. I think he's wrong, but I don't think
he is being duplicitous. He is wrong because most if not
all of the terrorism since 9/11 has occurred because al
Qaeda and other radical Islamists have an even dimmer view
of a free and independent Iraq than they do a free and
independent United States. A democracy in Iraq that
embraces modernism, pluralism, tolerance and the
plebiscite is a greater sacrilege than anything we are
doing here at home.
Mr. Clarke's views on Iraq notwithstanding, after 9/11 we could not afford either to run the risk that Saddam Hussein would be deterred by our military efforts to contain him or that these military deployments would become attractive targets for further acts of terrorism. I supported President Bush's efforts to persuade the United Nations Security Council to change a 10-year-old resolution that authorized force to contain Saddam Hussein to one that authorized force to replace his dictatorship. And I believe the president did the right thing to press ahead even without the Security Council's support. Remember, the June 25, 1996, attack on Khobar Towers that left 19 American airmen dead happened because of our containment efforts. Sailors had also died enforcing the Security Council's embargo and our pilots were risking their lives every day flying missions over northern and southern Iraq to protect Iraqi Kurds and Shiites.
It is my view that a political victory for terrorism in
Iraq is a much greater danger to us than whether or not we
succeed in capturing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Victory in Iraq will embolden radical Islamists as much as
our failure to recognize the original danger of their
declaration of war against us.
This debate becomes all the more important since the work of this commission--to examine an attack against the U.S. that occurred nearly three years ago--has been overshadowed by the events taking place in Iraq. The war there is not over. Twelve marines were killed in Ramadi Tuesday night in what has become a dramatic escalation of violence against coalition forces. I believe this escalation is taking place precisely because the country is about to be handed over to the Iraqi people to run themselves.
More importantly, I believe this commission must try to provide a foundation for bipartisan agreement on what should be done in Iraq and the broader war against radical Islamists who use terror as a tactic to destroy our will.
Whether you disagree with me or with Mr. Clarke, the only
way for the 9/11 Commission to succeed is to confront
every fact and every argument on its merits. If we do, the
world will be safer. If we don't, we will have exercised
our freedoms poorly.
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Mr. Kerrey, president of New School University in New York and a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, is a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the "9/11" Commission).
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