The Bush regime is indifferent to terrorism:
Behind many of the recent books about the Bush administration, there is a surprising consensus: the cold war background of many of its key members made it uninterested in stateless terrorism. But that same cold war background may mean that the Iraq war will prove a temporary aberration.
Bob Woodward, the journalist of Watergate fame, has become America's court chronicler, with all the good and bad this term implies. The details of the Bush administration's planning for the Iraq war, which Woodward describes in his latest book, Plan of Attack, would have come into the open sooner or later, as the figures who talked to him talked to others and wrote their memoirs. Woodward has nonetheless performed a real service by speeding up the process.
As a court chronicler, Woodward is least valuable when the court is united around the monarch, as was the case in the months following 9/11. His book on that period, Bush at War, is a virtual hagiography of Bush, his team, and indeed of the US system of government. In his latest book, although he is more detached, Woodward still shows an instinctive deference to the president - strange indeed for the man who helped to bring down Richard Nixon.
When the court is divided, as was the case in the run-up to the Iraq war, Woodward becomes more interesting. Like any such chronicle, his account is partial. Those who refused to talk to him are punished by having responsibility for mistakes thrust on to them without the chance to respond - the biggest sufferers being George Tenet and the CIA. While Woodward presents what seems to be an accurate and detailed account of some of the debates which took place within the administration, he never addresses other central issues: most notably the role of Israel, Iraq's oil, and the failure to plan seriously for the postwar occupation.
We all knew of the bitter divisions between Colin Powell and the state department, and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others over whether and how to go to war, but Woodward provides detail, and a few genuine revelations, such as the extraordinary access of the Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar and his countrymen to the planning process. And the secret diversion of congressionally mandated funds for the Afghan operation to preparation for the war in Iraq, which Woodward exposes, would be grounds for impeachment in a properly functioning US system.
In a couple of respects, however, Woodward falls short of greatness even as a court chronicler - leaving aside his execrable prose style. First, what is a court chronicler without a vivid sense of what might be called higher political sex - the frenetic copulation of political ambition, greed, ideological belief and personal hatred which is the stuff of court life? Woodward's account is strangely aseptic. Differences are sharp, but they are sincere differences of opinion between responsible, patriotic American public servants. Their own views of themselves and their actions are presented straight, without any suggestion of potential falsity, hypocrisy or mendacity. Of course, there is truth in this. I have no doubt that the great majority of the figures involved were genuinely convinced that they were acting in the best interests of the US, or Israel, or both. One great merit of Woodward's book is that he brings out in the president's own words the extent to which Bush himself believes implicitly both in a personal myth of divinely appointed mission and in national myths of America's mission to the world. But as the role of Halliburton underscores, patriotism is not the only story here.
Woodward's other flaw is that he seems incapable of looking at the court from outside. He simply loves the US system too much to ask whether the non-planning of this war might have reflected not merely personal misjudgements and mistakes, but an increasing dysfunctionality of the system of government.
The nearest Woodward gets to this is an account of criticism by deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage of Condoleezza Rice's failure to play her role as a co-ordinator of different government departments. By way of contrast, the Duke of St Simon's memoir of Versailles under Louis XIV expresses throughout an awareness that there is something essentially false or weird about the whole spectacle, which in turn reflects an awareness that there might be a different and better way for a governing elite to live and conduct its affairs.
This sense Woodward seems to have lost, and lacking it, he cannot address the question about the Bush administration which historians are likely to ask for years to come, even if Iraq and the war on terror go unexpectedly well from now on. This is not the question of how, but why. What really motivated the leading sections of the Bush administration to divert their attention from the threat of Islamist terrorism to a target and a war which could only strengthen the terrorists, before Osama bin Laden and other leaders of al Qaeda had been captured, or Afghanistan stabilised?
A number of recent books have considered this question from different standpoints, and each is valuable in its own way. James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans is a collective biography of Bush's foreign and security policy team; the political memoirs of Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill are accounts of the Bush administration by dissident former senior officials (O'Neill was treasury secretary; Clarke was res-ponsible for co-ordinating counter-terrorism strategy before and after 9/11); and Imperial Hubris, by Anonymous, a senior analyst in the terrorism field at the CIA, is an impassioned polemic on the mixture of arrogance, incompetence, false priorities and false loyalties that, in the author's view, have dominated the American government's approach to the war on terrorism.
What all these books bring out is the amazing indifference of the US security establishment to terrorism, both before 9/11 and all too soon after it. Indeed, the length of time for which the Bush administration was truly focused on the terrorist threat can be stated precisely: 72 days. According to Woodward, it was on 21st November 2001, 72 days after 9/11, that Bush instructed an all too willing Donald Rumsfeld to begin plans for possible war with Iraq.
Much of the books by Clarke and Anonymous concern the failed attempts of anti-terrorism experts to get senior officials to concentrate on the nature and extent of the terrorism threat. Wolfowitz and Rice emerge from Clarke's account as especially negligent. But the question of responsibility goes beyond individuals to the system as a whole. Clarke, Anonymous and Woodward (in Bush at War) all record, with varying degrees of incredulity, that when 9/11 occurred the US military had no scenario and no plan for military inter-vention in Afghanistan - despite a series of deadly attacks by al Qaeda on US targets around the world in previous years.
Meanwhile, as Woodward pointed out in Bush at War, the US military had "contingency plans for the most inconceivable scenarios" in other areas. I can testify to the truth of this with regard to the former Soviet Union, and have no reason to doubt that it was true of China and other states as well. If, as Anonymous says, the security establishment scandalously allowed the US expertise on Afghan-istan, built up during the 1980s during the struggle against the Soviet occupation, to be squandered in the 1990s, one reason was that too many ambitious officers were learning Belarusian and Ukrainian as part of a campaign to "roll back" Russian influence in the former Soviet Union.
The answer to this riddle of indifference to terrorism is to be found in the effects of the cold war on the US system of government, and the related intellectual approaches to the outside world which reflect the ideology and interests of the American intellectual, administrative and military elites. The latter find it difficult to understand terrorist movements emanating not from states but from alien societies, cultures and ideologies. They are still calibrated to fight a superpower enemy, and reacted to 9/11 by falling back on old patterns of thought and behaviour.
The cold war shaped all the leading members of the Bush administration's foreign and security staff. Many had already been senior officials in Republican administrations of the 1970s. The cold war also produced the neoconservative academic and bureaucratic grouping, whose members between 2001 and 2003 critically influenced the Bush administration and acted as some of its leading propagandists.
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