Could Cheney Be Right? Say It Ain't So!

Former Veep and Eternal Prince of Darkness Dick Cheney was on CNN's "State of the Union" show yesterday. He rendered an animadversion.

Specifically he charged the Obama administration with "de-escalating" the American efforts at counter terrorism from the war status it had during the Bush years to one of "law enforcement" such as had obtained during the Clinton period. While the Dick-man was making a particular reference to the more-or-less cosmetic changes introduced by the Obama people such as dropping the term "enemy combatants," Cheney's stance opens the door on a larger issue.

That issue is rather the hippo in the bathroom. It is not simply a matter of definition. No. The issue is one of strategy, tactics, the organisation and deployment of resources. And, it represents how an administration either does or does not effectively develop and maintain political will within We the People.

Put simply the issue is this. When an act of terror occurs or is detected prior to occurrence what does the man in the Oval do? Call the cops? Or, say to cabinet, Congress and public, "You realise this means war."

To put the question a little differently (and more realistically,) what are the criteria for parsing between the two potential responses--call the cops vs send the Marines--when any specific act of actual or intended terror is detected?

There is an axiom implied in these questions. Terror is a tactic so multi-faceted, so open as to goals and methods, so widely available to individuals and entities both foreign and domestic that no one-size-fits-all response is possible. Neither is one desirable. Nor will any universal application response actually be effective.

Herein lies both the flaw and the challenge of Cheney's accusation that the "de-escalation" to "law enforcement" has made the American public more likely to experience another terror attack in the near future.

The reason for this assessment resides in the historical record. (Big surprise there, eh?)

The American experience with "modern" terrorism can be conveniently and accurately dated to the first attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993. The off-shore dimension of this attack was known even before plot turned to the reality of death and fear shortly after noon on 26 February.

The FBI had the services of an undercover operative who had penetrated the terrorist cell long before H-hour. But, in some sort of institutional snit the responsible manager forced the asset to quit his task.

When the Clinton administration took a look at the attack and what was known about the attackers, the Deep Thinkers of the day had sufficient information to justify either the call-the-cops option or the send-the-Marines alternative. It comes as no surprise that the lawyer President and the coterie of lawyers who surrounded him opted for calling the cops, or to err on the side of accuracy, relying upon the FBI and Justice Department to arrest and convict the criminals.

This decision could be and was justified on several grounds. First, the bombing of the WTC was a Federal crime. Second, the FBI had the investigatory background to move quickly and effectively to take down some of the lesser participants. Third, by trivialising the bombing as some sort of street crime, the Administration effectively limited the terror.

Finally there was an unstated justification. Treating the bombing as a criminal matter of concern only to domestic authorities meant there were no foreign policy complications. This was important given that the plot originated in Egypt.

There were some very real disadvantages to the course of action chosen by Clinton. By giving the FBI pride of place the opportunity to fully develop the off-shore links was attenuated to say the least. Also the choice undercut the chance for the US to gain a firmer understanding of the new terror oriented Islamist group, al-Qaeda which was emerging from the haze of the Gulf War. Finally, the decision by the Clinton administration gave up any realistic chance of early, low intensity diplomatic arm twisting on Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other governments having an involvement with the new threat.

These were not the worst consequences of the Clinton decision. The worst effects were those of precedent. The administration, public opinion molders and We the People alike were encouraged by the misleading success of arresting and convicting some of the participants in the bombing to believe that the law enforcement model was a sovereign remedy for terrorism in all its forms. Americans accepted wholeheartedly the idea that arrest-and-trial was infinitely preferable and more effective in countering terrorism than the alternative of waging war in the Israeli fashion against it.

This comforting notion was reinforced by the "successful" application of arrest-and-trial following the vehicle bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City twenty-six months later. The narrative as presented by the government was simple, straight forward and quite satisfying--as long as it wasn't examined closely.

The narrative? Two of life's total losers, a failed Special Forces wannabe and a equally failed farmer got together in a right wing nut conspiracy and fabricated a highly lethal vehicle bomb which caused some 165 fatalities. End of story.

Like Lee Harvey Oswald, the two OK City bombers were lone wolves without external support who acted out some sort of dark fantasy. That's all, folks, nothing to see. Move along.

To accept this narrative all that is necessary is to ignore a couple of very inconvenient facts. Example? Terry Nichols resembles the sketch of John Doe #2 about as well as Chuck Norris looks like Brittany Spears.

Want more? According to the government's star witness the only time McVeigh tried to make a bomb before 19 April 1995, it fizzled.

Not enough? According to both US and Philippine government records Terry Nichols was in Davao City on Mindinao at the same time as Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the WTC bomb as well as other heavies from al-Qaeda.

While there is no direct evidence of any connection between Nichols or McVeigh and Yousef in the open sources, the record shows reason for further investigation. Suffice it to say that criminal trials are well known to be less than satisfactory venues for uncovering truth--particularly those truths which are either inconvenient or add undesired complexity.

But, high profile trials are fine mechanisms for assuaging public fears and reinforcing the appearance of governmental efficiency. The trials of Ramzi Yousef and others fit the bill perfectly. Again with the caveat that one does not look too closely at the reality behind the arrest-and-trial scenario.

Ramzi Yousef was a brilliant bomb maker. He was equally skilled at operational conceptualization. It was Yousef who designed the bomb and timer combination which would have been employed to drop a dozen US airliners over the Pacific ocean had chance not intervened. It was Yousef's design which may very well have been responsible for the downing of TWA 800 on 17 July 1996. (Pace, NTSB, but there are more holes in your hypothesis of electrical sparks in the center fuel tank than there were in flight 800 after it hit the water.)

Ramzi Yousef finally found himself in US custody as a result of accident, the actions of one determined Filipino cop, the determination of one man at the State Department's Security Service, and the decision of one man to rat out Ramzi. Intrepid spooks and shrewd FBI detective work had nothing to do with it. It was not American law enforcement at its finest, but none of those unpleasant realities were allowed to confuse the government's narrative at the time of Yousef's trial and conviction.

In short, one after another, the failures of the arrest-and-trial model were swept aside, ignored and expunged from public consideration. Instead, all was portrayed as being well in the contest between American justice and foreign terrorists.

The weakness or irrelevancy of the call-the-cops approach was dramatically illustrated on 7 August 1998 when vehicle bombs exploded nearly simultaneously at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam killing 234 and injuring more than 5,000. An attack on an embassy is the legal equivalent of an attack on home soil.

Even if the Clinton administration could paint the earlier bombing of the Khobar Towers residential facility in Saudi Arabia as an isolated act by Saudis hostile to the continued American presence in the Land of the Two Mosques, it was much harder to pretend that the embassy attacks were other than an act of war. But old habits, a love of seemingly successful precedent, to say nothing of a visceral fear and loathing of matters involving the military and war, kept the Clintonites to the law enforcement model.

Considering that al-Qaeda operators were willing, even eager to embark on suicide operations, the potential of eventual arrest and trial were not at all inhibitory. The lack of fixed, high value physical facilities meant that the sporadic Clinton authorised pretense of a warlike response--a few Tomahawks blowing up mud huts or the odd unused factory in Sudan had neither deterrent nor punitive effect.

The final Clinton adventure in defending the nation through law enforcement came on 12 October 2000. Most people well oriented as to time and place would consider an attack upon a warship to be an act of war. (For the historically challenged, it might be remembered that the ambiguous sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor a little over a century earlier had ignited irrepressible war fever in We the People.)

The Clinton administration declined to send the Marines or even the 82nd Airborne. Instead the US dispatched a slew of Feebs under the command of the aggressive and abrasive John O'Neil. Even with this less than robust response to armed and lethal attack on a US Navy ship, the administration did not show internal coherence.

The US Ambassador, Barbara Bodine, (who had earlier opposed the reward program directed at the arrest of Ramzi Yousef) now opposed O'Neil and his Special Agents. Presumably with the knowledge and support of the SecState, Ms Bodine went so far as to deny O'Neil a visa for his return to Yemen following a briefing visit to Washington.

With the (quite reluctant and incomplete) cooperation of Yemeni authorities, several surviving members of the al-Qaeda cell were identified. But that was all. There were no immediate arrests and consequent show trials.

The new administration of Bush and Cheney were no more eager to mount out against al-Qaeda then were the lawyerly types of the Clinton years. The macho bunch surrounding the "Decider Guy" were far more pecker up over anti-ballistic missiles and "shock and awe" oriented improvements in the military than they were about a bunch of scruffy Islamist jihadists lurking in camps in Afghanistan.

With a tunnel vision equalling that of the US civilian and military high command back in the Fall of 1941, the Bush-Cheney administration assumed--that's right, assumed--al-Qaeda et al could and would attack only overseas. The intelligence catch necessary to get a firm grip on reality was all there. What was lacking in the summer of 2001 was what had been absent sixty years earlier. The historically based contextual understanding to realise that both intents and capacities were far more far reaching than was thought.

In 1941 commanders and decision makers alike failed to realise that historically Japan had opened war with a surprise attack on the enemy's center of naval power. In 2001 the commanders and decision makers failed to realise that al-Qaeda had made its intentions clear--an attack on the symbolic centers of American power.

In 1941 the commanders and decision makers had undervalued the Japanese capacities with carrier based aviation despite all available evidence. Sixty years later the people occupying the same seats of power undervalued the capacities of al-Qaeda, again despite all available evidence.

Arguably the overwhelming evidence was not marshaled in a compelling form because of the arrest-and-trial orientation which had prevailed over the previous decade. A law enforcement agency's use of intelligence catch is markedly different from the way in which the same catch is assessed and assembled by a war oriented department.

Bluntly, the law enforcement approach had failed. Failed spectacularly.

To that extent Cheney's characterization of any presumed Obama administration "de-escalation" to the methods of the Clinton years is accurate.

Arguably, the warfighting approach to terrorism undertaken by a non-state actor is correct. But, and this is the usual very big but, the way in which the Bush-Cheney administration elected to wage war was not only wrong, it was completely counterproductive.

"Shock and awe" in Afghanistan has been, as was predicted by specialists in interventionary operations, a text book case of how-not-to-win. It has even been a text for how-to-make-the-enemy-the-unintended-winner.

The war in Iraq regardless of whatever good may have accrued to the Iraqis was a diversion at best. An unnecessary diversion. At worst it served to improve the position of the Islamist jihadists generally.

To put the matter bluntly, warfighting in the wrong way or in the wrong place is even worse than calling the cops. Unless Cheney can bring himself to realise this ground truth, his criticism of the Obama "de-escalation" is fatuous.

Terrorism is both a law enforcement and a warfighting concern. Terrorism which is totally domestic in nature falls in the law enforcement sphere. Terrorism which has any foreign dimension belongs properly in the purview of the warfighters and their cohorts in the foreign intelligence services.

From the opening act in 1993 to the bitter final curtain of 9/11 the events of the first decade of direct US experience with Islamist jihadist terror constituted a period of undeclared, unrecognised war. Unlike earlier acts of terror whether committed by anarchists, white supremacists, or Puerto Rican separatists were domestic acts. They were subject to effective law enforcement.

Those of recent vintage including the Oklahoma City bombing and the questionable crash of TWA 800 were acts of war. We didn't call the cops following Pearl Harbor. We shouldn't have called them after any of the attacks of the Nineties.