Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [184]
I also advised the President in the days following that I believed our nation’s response should not primarily be about punishment, retribution, or retaliation. Punishing our enemies didn’t describe the range of actions we would need to take if we were to succeed in protecting the United States. The struggle that had been brought to our shores went beyond law enforcement and criminal justice. Our responsibility was to deter and dissuade others from thinking that terrorism against the United States could advance their cause. In my view, our principal motivation was self-defense, not vengeance, retaliation, or punishment. The only effective defense would be to go after the terrorists with a strong offense.
In our initial discussions with the President that day, Myers and I recommended that he order a partial call-up of the Air Force reserves to ease the strain on our pilots, since round-the-clock patrols in the skies above our country would be needed. Bush agreed and asked me to convey his thanks to the Pentagon employees who were still at their posts. He made clear that he would like to act quickly against the perpetrators of the attacks. I said we would get to work on how best to do that. “The ball will soon be in your court,” he added.
As I got off the phone, I thought again of the Beirut bombing. Ever since then, a small circle of national security experts, including George Shultz, had worried that it was only a matter of time before Muslim extremists found their way to our shores. “Terrorism is a form of warfare, and must be treated as such,” I had said back in 1984, in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal. “As with other forms of conflict, weakness invites aggression. Simply standing in a defensive position, absorbing blows, is not enough. Terrorism must be deterred.”28 We could not stop all acts of terrorism or eliminate all casualties. But we could send a message to terrorists and to regimes that sponsored and harbored terrorists that if they continued to do so it would be at a price.
I remember observing to those with me early that afternoon that America’s prior history in responding to terrorism had not been effective. I considered our responses to provocations and attacks by our adversaries over the last decade hesitant and, in some cases, feckless, including: letting Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi off for his role in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103; the first World Trade Center attack of 1993; the plotted assassination of George H. W. Bush by Iraqi agents the same year; America’s retreat under fire in Mogadishu in 1993; the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the East African embassies bombings in 1998; and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Actions and inactions by previous administrations had left the impression that the United States was leaning back, not forward.29
“We can’t bluster,” I said to my staff. “If you cock your fist, you’d better be ready to throw it.”30
Time also was important. I remembered that after the terrorist massacre of Marines in Beirut, American support for the Lebanese government and for action against the terrorists waned quickly.
“One week from now,” I remarked to Myers, “the willingness to act will be half of what it is now.”
Myers thought differently. “I think the country’s attention span will last longer this time,” he said. If we didn’t take the right steps to engage the American people and prepare them for the length of the war ahead, I wasn’t so sure.31
At 3:30 p.m., President Bush convened his first National Security