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Hot
War
By Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist
for the Washington Times. |
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This is a sentence from the Senate testimony of Professor Richard E. Neustadt, March 25, 1963, our leading expert on the presidency, delivered six months after the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world its first nuclear confrontation. Then it was the Soviet Union and the Comintern. Today it is Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein, Iran, Syria, whoever, who run an organization I've chosen to call the Bombintern. What 9-11 has demonstrated is that a president is crippled unless his judgment, his decision-making is supported by useful intelligence about what the enemy is up to. If President Bush is "the only man in the system capable of exercising judgment under the extraordinary limits now imposed by secrecy, complexity and time," he has been poorly served by the federal bureaucracy; specifically, the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies and the FAA. For how can he exercise judgment when he knows no more about the activities of the Bombintern than the man in the street? And why was this president ignorant about these activities? Because eight years of the Clinton administration apparently produced nothing of value to an incoming chief executive who has been in office less than 240 days. What reason could there have been for an absence of knowledge when the Bombintern's first aggression against the World Trade Center February 26, 1993 — six dead, 1,000 injured — had led to arrests and convictions? A good beginning, perhaps, but no follow-up. In the seven years that remained of the Clinton administration our intelligence agencies should have been at work and the incumbent president or his staff should have demanded continuing reports and action against the Bombintern. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center should have been regarded as a warning that there was more to come. Was the warning taken seriously enough so that an incoming president would know what needed to be done? Did anybody in the Clinton administration take the first World Trade Center bombing seriously enough to warrant a full-scale task force dedicated to defanging the Bombintern? The buildup of Osama bin Laden as the villain leaves me cold. Supposing we get handed on a silver Pakistani platter the man himself, what then? A trial? Long, frothy "it's-not-my-fault" defense speeches, another U.N. World Congress Against Racism in an American courtroom? Are the American people now being told that if we get bin Laden, that's it? I hope not. Without the Bombintern alliance — Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and their assorted fronts — bin Laden would be nothing. And as for the Clinton administration, it ignored Islamic fundamentalism which came to life when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini took power 23 years ago. While the State Department repeatedly listed Iran as the leading state sponsor of terrorism, the Clinton administration played an appeasement game even though Iran was behind the June 1996 Khobar Tower bombing (19 U.S. Air Force personnel killed), the Jewish Community Center in Argentina (86 killed, 200 injured) and the assassinations of translators of Salman Rushdie's novel. The Clinton administration kept looking for Iranian moderates, forgetting Henry Kissinger's definition: "An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition." The Clinton administration had at least seven years to do something about the Bombintern. The WTC wreckage tells us that Clinton & Co. did nothing. Yes, nothing that could have helped avert a national tragedy and a triumph for Islamic fundamentalism. "No other person in our system," said Professor Neustadt describing the presidential role, "has so massive a responsibility for national security." It took the Western democracies 45 years and the leadership of seven presidents to win the Cold War. How many presidents will it take to win the Hot War against Islamic fundamentalism? |
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when it comes to action risking war, technology has modified the
Constitution: the President, perforce, becomes the only man in the
system capable of exercising judgment under the extraordinary limits
now imposed by secrecy, complexity and time."
