Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [187]
I also mulled the President’s words about attacking terrorists and the territory from which they planned and plotted attacks. Did that mean we should be planning to strike terrorist targets in nations with whom we had friendly relations? I suggested that we think about the problem more broadly. We needed to consider other nations, including Sudan, Libya, Iraq, and Iran, where terrorists had found safe haven over the years and where they might seek refuge if we were to attack al-Qaida’s hub in Afghanistan.
We had little specific intelligence to support targeting terrorist operatives themselves, I noted, so we should take action against those parts of the network that we could locate, such as the terrorists’ bank accounts and their state sponsors. If we put enough pressure on those states—and this didn’t necessarily mean military pressure—they might feel compelled to rein in the terrorist groups they supported. This might enable us to constrain groups that our intelligence agencies couldn’t locate.
Much has been written about the Bush administration’s focus on Iraq after 9/11. Commentators have suggested that it was strange or obsessive for the President and his advisers to have raised questions about whether Saddam Hussein was somehow behind the attack. I have never understood the controversy. Early on, I had no idea if Iraq was or was not involved, but it would have been irresponsible for any administration not to have asked the question.
The hopes I had when I was serving as President Reagan’s Middle East envoy for a more positive relationship between Iraq and the United States obviously had not been realized. It had been many years since I met with Saddam Hussein, and I knew he had not mellowed with age. America had gone to war against Iraq to liberate Kuwait from Saddam’s 1990 invasion. Iraqi forces fired at American and British pilots patrolling northern and southern UN no-fly zones almost daily. From 1990 on, Iraq had been on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. Since I had worked with Paul Wolfowitz in 1998 on the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission, I knew that he had been concerned about the relationships of terrorists with regimes hostile to the United States. His knowledge of the subject of Iraq was encyclopedic. He had pressed intelligence officials about possible links between the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and various state sponsors of terror, including the Iraqi government. Though American intelligence analysts in the 1990s generally said that the Islamic terrorists who committed the first World Trade Center bombing were probably working without state involvement, Wolfowitz was not convinced.
I remember one commission briefing in particular, when the name first came up that would become familiar to all Americans after 9/11: a Saudi millionaire named Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden had declared a holy war against the United States, listing what he characterized as a number of “crimes and sins” committed by the U.S. government against Muslims.
“The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military,” the fatwa stated, “is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” He had laid out al-Qaida’s intentions to undermine America’s financial and military power and to intimidate our friends and allies. These were not idle threats or the harmless rants of a madman. Al-Qaida had declared war. America had been on notice of that threat for at least three years.
During our work on the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission in the late 1990s, Wolfowitz and former Clinton CIA Director Jim Woolsey questioned CIA analysts about what the United States was doing about al-Qaida. They asked about bin Laden’s bank accounts and whether his funds had been confiscated after the East African embassy bombings. The officials gave the standard nonresponse: They would look into the matter.
As the events of the day—a day that seemed like the longest