Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace writing post-invasion about Rumsfeld's "Policy Failure": Looking for Threats in All the Wrong Places
By Joseph Cirincione
Proliferation Brief, Volume 7, Number 13
When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was told on the morning of Sept. 11 that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center, he paused, then continued his morning intelligence briefing, according to the 9/11 Commission.
It wasn't until a third plane slammed into the Pentagon that Rumsfeld jumped into action, even assisting with rescue efforts. A few hours later, he wondered aloud to his staff whether the attack would allow the United States to strike at Saddam Hussein, not just Osama bin Laden.
In some ways, Rumsfeld's response tells us all we need to know about what went wrong with our government's policies in 2001. We were unprepared for the threats we faced, were slow to comprehend the meaning of the attack, and in planning our counterattack, almost immediately began focusing again on the wrong threat.
Why was this so? The 9/11 Commission concludes that it was a "failure of imagination" that prevented government leaders from understanding the gravity of the threat they faced.
The commissioners produced an excellent report, but this conclusion is a political cop-out. The commission focused too narrowly on intelligence policy, management and capabilities. The larger picture before Sept. 11 was one of strategic failure caused in great part by partisan political fights that distorted U.S. intelligence and defense assessments, fundamentally misleading and misdirecting national security resources.
Policy Failure
Rumsfeld himself played a key role in these brawls. In 1998, his Report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States warned of an urgent threat of attack by ballistic missiles that could be fielded by a hostile state "with little or no warning." In January 2001, his Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization warned just as ominously that the United States risked a Pearl Harbor in space unless it quickly deployed new generations of satellites and weapons in outer space.
Both panels were chaired by Rumsfeld and directed by Stephen Cambone, whom Rumsfeld appointed to the new post of undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
Also, in January 1999, a select congressional committee chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Newport Beach, issued a three-volume report warning that Chinese spies had stolen the designs for the United States' most advanced nuclear weapons. It also predicted that China would soon tip the strategic balance against the United States by beginning "serial production of such weapons during the next decade," atop a new generation of long-range missiles.
The committee hearings made headlines and dominated national security debate for months. The hearings and report were directed by Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
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