We’re at war … somebody’s going to pay.
—GEORGE W. BUSH (ON CELL PHONE TO DICK CHENEY, 9:45 A.M., SEPTEMBER 11, 2001)
STANDING OUTSIDE A CLASSROOM AT the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, George Bush was told by his senior advisor, Karl Rove, that a small plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. The president averred that it must have been a case of pilot error. Just before entering the classroom, where he was scheduled to read to the children and talk about education, the president was informed by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (who was at the White House) that it was apparently a commercial jetliner, but this was all she knew at the moment.1
Having begun his presentation to the elementary school students, the president was interrupted at 9:05 by chief of staff Andrew Card, who whispered in his ear: “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” The president remained in the classroom for a few minutes as the children took up the reading. Bush later explained that his instinct was to project calm, not an excited reaction, at this moment of crisis. “The nation would be in shock; the president could not be. If I stormed out hastily, it would scare the children and send ripples of panic throughout the country.”2 Escorted to a nearby room, he was briefed by his staff, saw television coverage of the crashes into the Twin Towers, held phone conversations with the vice president, the director of the FBI and others, and consulted with his senior staff about what he should say to the nation. At 9:30 he announced over television that the country had suffered “an apparent terrorist attack,” that “terrorism against our nation will not stand,” and that the resources of the government were being fully deployed to find those responsible for the act.3
It was not until during his ride back to the airport between 9:35 and 9:45 that President Bush learned about the crash of a third airplane, this time into the Pentagon. He was rushed aboard Air Force One, which took off before 10:00 without any fixed destination, for there was fear that the three suicide attacks with hijacked airliners were part of a larger operation designed to paralyze or “decapitate” the United States. And if so, shouldn’t the topmost command authorities (at least the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense) be dispersed? The president wanted to return to Washington, but Vice President Cheney, now in the White House underground bunker, was strongly urging him not to.
Meanwhile, just after 10:00 A.M., reports from the Secret Service of yet another—presumably hijacked—airliner (United flight 93) heading toward the District of Columbia compelled some quick decisions. “We needed to clarify the rules of engagement,” recalls the president, “I told Dick [Cheney] that our pilots should contact suspicious planes and try to get them to land peacefully. If that failed, they had my authority to shoot them down. Hijacked planes were weapons of war. Despite the agonizing costs, taking them out could save countless lives on the ground. I had just made my first decision as a wartime commander in chief.”4 The vice president thereupon authorized the U.S. Air Force to “engage” or “take out” the incoming aircraft. As it turned out, the U.S. military never had to execute the awful order to shoot a civilian airliner out of the sky, for a heroic midflight assault by passengers against the hijackers of United flight 93 forced the plane to crash in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all those aboard. Still another report of a possibly hijacked aircraft heading toward the federal complex in DC activated another order from the vice president to shoot it down if necessary; but it proved to be only a nonthreatening medevac helicopter.5
Despite later assurances by both Bush and Cheney that the engage-or-take-out orders were authorized by the president before the vice president issued them, the documented logs of the timing of the phone conversations when such delegation of authority was supposed to have taken place do not fully validate the subsequent insistences of the two men.6 Yet the adamancy of their affirmations that the commander in chief’s role was not usurped was in itself testimony to the persistence of the tradition that it should not be and indicated a determination on Bush’s part to maintain his authority over such crucial matters.
Indeed, the president insisted on taking charge of both the immediate and larger strategic responses to the 9/11 attacks—and being seen as taking charge. Overruling his aides’ reluctance to have him return to Washington before the smoke and confusion of the day’s events had cleared, he ordered Air Force One to fly him back to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland from which he helicoptered over the destroyed section of the Pentagon in time to address the nation from the White House at 8:30 P.M. With uncharacteristically somber and stern demeanor, he stressed that the first priority was to help those injured and to protect the nation against any further attacks. The United States would respond, he promised; and laying the rationale for a military intervention of Afghanistan, his government would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”7 In this case, those deemed to be harboring the terrorists were the Taliban, then in power in Afghanistan.
DEFENDING THE HOMELAND
The highest priority objective of the U.S. military and all national security agencies and personnel is to protect the nation at home (that is, the people and assets of the country located within its borders) against attack and destruction. But for most of the country’s history, even when at war, this elemental imperative had not been given the immediate, intense, and systematic activation that the 9/11 attacks provoked.
During the Cold War, as the Soviets developed intercontinental striking power with weapons of mass destruction, national security policy and planning did assume that the continental United States was vulnerable, as never before, to direct and devastating attack. Preventing any such attacks on the homeland, largely through deterrence by threats of devastating U.S. counterattacks, became the centerpiece of the country’s national security policy. Limiting the damage the nation would suffer in the event that deterrence failed—air defense, civil (population) defense, and plans for evacuation of targeted cities, pre- and post-attack—received more rhetorical than programmatic attention. The exceptions have been President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative to develop antiballistic missiles capable of destroying Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles headed for the United States and post–Cold War efforts to develop missile defenses against the more limited offensive missile capabilities of nuclear wannabe states like North Korea and Iran.
Terrorist attacks abroad over the past few decades, when directed against U.S. personnel, citizens, or assets, had periodically activated the highest levels of the U.S. government to dramatically punish the presumed perpetrators. But the responses—like Reagan’s raid on Gaddafi’s compound in Libya in retaliation for the terrorist attack on a discotheque in Germany frequented by U.S. troops and Clinton’s bombing of al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and Sudan in reprisal for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania—were characteristically ad hoc and seemingly designed mainly to give the policy makers and the public a one-time catharsis. Now, however, the shock of an unprovoked, highly coordinated terrorist attack using four commercial airliners hijacked almost simultaneously within the United States and incinerating more than 3,000 people, most of whom were just going about their daily jobs, elevated homeland defense to the highest national interest, to be given precedence over everything else—in fact, not just in planning documents.
The problem was that the capabilities that needed to be marshaled for beefing up and streamlining homeland defense (and recovery from attack) were scattered throughout the government—not only among the agencies responsible for military and policing operations and intelligence, but also in agencies responsible for managing transportation, commerce, telecommunications, border control, immigration, emergency medical services, and disaster relief; and not only at the national level, but also at the state and local levels.
Alarmed at the dispersion in Washington and throughout the federal system of the functions that needed to be performed in sync for effective homeland defense, Vice President Cheney just a few days into the crisis proposed the creation of a Homeland Security Council within the White House to coordinate all the necessary activities. The president agreed and announced in his September 20 speech before Congress that he had created such a council, called the Office of Homeland Security, and that the country’s first homeland security adviser would be Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania.
Vice President Cheney, while adamant about the need for tight interagency coordination, had been wary of creating an entirely new department, with all of the cumbersome and competitive interagency maneuverings that the bureaucratic reshuffling would involve. But the Congress was of a different mind and on November 25, 2002, voted the biggest reorganization of the U.S. government in American history, incorporating twenty-two agencies—ranging from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service to the Secret Service—with over 200,000 employees into the new Department of Homeland Security. In the words of the legislation establishing it,
The primary mission of the Department is to:
(A) prevent terrorist attacks within the United States;
(B) reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism; and
(C) minimize the damage, and assist in the recovery, from terrorist attacks that do occur within the United States.8
The reorganization was potentially problematic not only because of all the disparate agencies it consolidated into one mammoth department (third in size only to the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs) but also because of the agencies left out. To implement its primary counterterrorism mission, it absorbed the U.S. Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and various border control and transportation security agencies. Yet it kept hands off the FBI, the CIA, the intelligence agencies in the Department of Defense and the Department of State, and, of course, all operational military commands. Clearly, the president signed the Homeland Security Act not for its organizational logic but for its political realism of accommodation to entrenched bureaucratic interests. At least the initiative helped sustain the symbolism of doing something to reduce the vulnerability of the homeland to terrorism.
The most controversial of the homeland security measures instituted by the Bush administration were those designed to discover and apprehend individuals who, although ostensibly engaged in innocent pursuits, might, like the 9/11 hijackers, be plotting or preparing to carry out terrorist attacks against Americans. The protective measures included security screenings at flight check-in areas at airports and at public buildings that, even if bothersome, most people put up with without protest. But the heightened security initiatives also included enhanced surveillance powers for counterterrorism agencies; warrant-less arrests, detention, and incarceration of suspected terrorists; and aggressive interrogation of prisoners—much of this bypassing various standard due-process requirements, yet according to administration lawyers, fully consistent with both the Constitution and the letter and spirit of the Patriot Act of October 2001.
The constitutionality of the Patriot Act and official actions taken pursuant to it were challenged in lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and various human rights organizations. However (as detailed in chap. 35), throughout the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, administration officials in various agencies—the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency—and various influential members of Congress from both parties continued to defend the abridgment of some of the citizen liberties embedded in the Bill of Rights and in international human rights covenants to which the United States was party on grounds of the security emergency the country was facing from international terrorism.
The president himself never publicly countenanced violating the Bill of Rights. He did, however, accept the counsel of Vice President Cheney and attorneys in the Department of Justice and in the White House that the derogation of certain rights for reasons of national security was his prerogative to order as commander in chief (under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution), even in the face of congressional and judicial objections.
GOING AFTER THE TERRORISTS
In the flurry of National Security Council meetings and special war councils in the few days following the 9/11 attacks, the administration hammered out its basic global “war on terror” response, consistent with the premise articulated by the president in his September 11 address that the United States would punish both the perpetrators of the suicide hijackers’ attacks and those who harbored them. Crediting FBI and intelligence agency reports that the attack had been masterminded and directed by the top echelon of al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, who was now holed up in Afghanistan, the State and Defense Departments were tasked to implement a political-military game plan to deal with the implications.
Meanwhile, the government had to be readied to act in a unified way. With Vice President Cheney quarterbacking the effort, Congress was pressed into giving the president an emergency grant of special powers. The resulting joint resolution of September 14, approved by a vote of 98 to 0 in the House and 420 to 1 in the Senate, stated that
the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.9
A companion document was issued by the White House for mobilizing the executive departments. National Security Presidential Directive 9, “Defeating the Terrorist Threat to the United States,” mandated all agencies to give highest priority to the global war on terrorism, reiterating the president’s formulation that the enemy was not just the terrorist operatives themselves but also those who harbored them (code words for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan) and authorizing the employment of all instruments necessary, including major military force, to rout them out and defeat them.10
More as a means of garnering domestic and international support for the military operations being planned than out of any expectation that it would be complied with, the Bush administration issued an ultimatum to the Taliban, insisting that that the regime hand over bin Laden and his al-Qaeda cohorts for prosecution or else the United States would directly attack the al-Qaeda enclaves and Taliban forces who might be protecting them.
Within the administration there was pressure to include Iraq among the enemies against whom major military force would now be warranted. Richard Haass, then director of the policy planning staff in the Department of State, reports that “the first instinct of the president was to push the bureaucracy to find a connection between Saddam and the attacks.”11 The 9/11 Commission in its interviews of high officials involved in the immediate post-9/11 deliberations found the president to be very interested in determining whether there was such collusion. As yet, however, given the flimsy evidence, neither he nor Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were ready to endorse Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz’s recommendations for seizing the moment to strike at Iraq.12 Bush did tell national security adviser Rice, though, that he wanted plans for action against Iraq drawn up in case it was determined that Saddam’s regime had in fact been involved in the 9/11 attacks; and he ordered the Defense Department to be ready with military action, including possibly to occupy Iraqi oil fields, if Baghdad acted against U.S. interests.13
However, within ten days of the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, President Bush decided: The first target country in the war on terrorism would be Afghanistan on the grounds that it was the primary base from which the terrorists were operating (see chap. 34 for how this campaign would be conducted). The argument for a major military operation against Iraq, only temporarily deferred, would soon be revived by Wolfowitz and others and embraced by the president in the form of a new strategic doctrine.
THE NEW STRATEGIC DOCTRINE
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, provided powerful support for champions of the view that in this still largely anarchic world, force had to be a readily available instrument of statecraft. Those who would have the United States threaten or engage in war for reasons other than immediate self-defense or to repel an attack against an ally still bore the heaviest burden of justification in the counsels of decision. But military operations to oust hostile governments and install friendly ones—regime change, by preventive war if necessary—though not totally absent in the post–World War II foreign policy of the United States, did not attain the pride of place they achieved under George W. Bush.
True, the “rollback” of Communism, not just its containment, had been a major theme in the Republican 1952 election campaign, but once in office the Eisenhower administration dropped it as much too expensive and risky. And yes, some regime-change operations to shrink the sphere of control of the communist powers were attempted during the Cold War, and some succeeded. The unsuccessful attempts were the effort to liberate North Korea in 1950 after repelling its invasion of South Korea, the proxy operations of the Bay of Pigs assault on Cuba in 1961, and the support of the Contras against the Marxist Nicaraguan government in 1985. The successes were the CIA-engineered coup in 1953 against the pro-Soviet Mossadegh regime in Iran in order to reinstall the shah, the clandestine direction and support of the military ouster of the Soviet-supported government in Guatemala in 1954, the Nixon administration’s covert backing of General Pinochet’s coup against the elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende in 1977, and the invasion of Panama in 1989 to oust the drug-trafficking dictator Manuel Noriega. There was also the Clinton administration’s threat and readiness to invade Haiti in 1994 to compel the dictator, General Raoul Cédras to leave the country and cede control of the government and give way to a UN-supervised election to restore civilian rule.
Despite these exceptions, the basic grand strategy remained that of containment: not allowing the further expansion of the Soviet and Chinese spheres of influence. Such containment would be sustained largely through the deterrent threat of U.S. military action should the communist powers actually engage in expansionary aggression, a threat to inflict costs on the aggressors far outweighing any benefits they could hope to achieve. The two major military campaigns the United States engaged in during the Cold War—in Korea and Vietnam—were largely consistent with this grand strategy, although the aggressors in both cases were proxies of the Soviet Union and China, and the two Communist giants were spared being direct targets of the U.S. military response. And the objective of the Gulf War’s Operation Desert Storm was to expel Saddam Hussein’s invasion forces from Kuwait; once this “containment” objective had been achieved, those pushing for an expanded regime-change operation (including British prime minister Margaret Thatcher) to throw Saddam out of power could not convince the elder President Bush of its necessity or wisdom.
The core of the a new strategic doctrine was given early articulation by President George W. Bush in his June 1, 2002, address to the graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “For much of the last century,” said the president, giving the cadets a preview of the basic national security document still being drafted, “America’s defense relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment.” In some cases these strategies still applied, he granted.
But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence—the promise of massive retaliation against nations—means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.
Homeland defense and missile defense are part of stronger security. … Yet the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.
Our security will require transforming the military you will lead—a military that must be ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.14
The president used the term preemptive to describe actions the country had to be ready to take; but in the context of his remarks on confronting threats “before they emerge,” the new strategy could be interpreted as a justification for preventive war. And indeed it was—as revealed doctrinally in the September 20, 2002, publication of the National Security Strategy of the United States and confirmed in practice the following April by the regime-change invasion of Iraq.
Now openly embracing the concept of preventive action, but still conflating it with preemption, the national security strategy document announced that “the United States can no longer rely solely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. … We cannot let our enemies strike first.” Moreover, the new doctrine went beyond the traditional justification for preemption of an enemy first strike—namely the existence of imminent aggression—such as an enemy’s visible mobilization of its armed forces in an obvious preparation to attack:
For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. …
We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists … rely on weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning. …
The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary act preemptively.15
The president returned to this theme in his January 2002 State of the Union address, in which he branded Iran, North Korea, and Iraq as members of an “axis of evil” and promised to prevent such regimes from threatening America and its allies with weapons of mass destruction. “I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer,” he warned.16
By the summer of 2002, under the assumption that Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban was already a success—which turned out to be a premature judgment—and with the president now a full convert to the new strategic doctrine, the primary focus of the administration shifted to Iraq. But whereas there had been almost automatic public approval and broad international backing for the forcible regime-change operation in Afghanistan, the Taliban being seen as allies of, if not co-conspirators with, those responsible for 9/11, it would be a harder sell to garner domestic and foreign support for military action to topple Hussein’s regime. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, regarding the academic “preemption” versus “prevention” debate over the controversial strike-first doctrine as fatuous, preferred to call the policy “anticipatory self-defense.”17
The three-front war initiated early in the administration of George W. Bush in response to 9/11—against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan; against Saddam Hussein in Iraq; and against terrorists and their suspected supporters within the United States itself—persisted all through his tenure in the White House and defined his presidency. It was a face of U.S. power that majorities of people in most countries around the world did not find attractive. He knew that; yet as will be detailed in the subsequent chapters, he remained convinced he was doing the right thing for the country.