When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was told on the morning of Sept. 11 that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center, he paused, then continued his morning intelligence briefing, according to the 9/11 Commission.
It wasn't until a third plane slammed into the Pentagon that Rumsfeld jumped into action, even assisting with rescue efforts. A few hours later, he wondered aloud to his staff whether the attack would allow the United States to strike at Saddam Hussein, not just Osama bin Laden.
In some ways, Rumsfeld's response tells us all we need to know about what went wrong with our government's policies in 2001. We were unprepared for the threats we faced, were slow to comprehend the meaning of the attack, and in planning our counterattack, almost immediately began focusing again on the wrong threat.
Why was this so? The 9/11 Commission concludes that it was a "failure of imagination" that prevented government leaders from understanding the gravity of the threat they faced.
The commissioners produced an excellent report, but this conclusion is a political cop-out. The commission focused too narrowly on intelligence policy, management and capabilities. The larger picture before Sept. 11 was one of strategic failure caused in great part by partisan political fights that distorted U.S. intelligence and defense assessments, fundamentally misleading and misdirecting national security resources.
Policy Failure
Rumsfeld himself played a key role in these brawls. In 1998, his Report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States warned of an urgent threat of attack by ballistic missiles that could be fielded by a hostile state "with little or no warning." In January 2001, his Report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization warned just as ominously that the United States risked a Pearl Harbor in space unless it quickly deployed new generations of satellites and weapons in outer space.
Both panels were chaired by Rumsfeld and directed by Stephen Cambone, whom Rumsfeld appointed to the new post of undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
Also, in January 1999, a select congressional committee chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Newport Beach, issued a three-volume report warning that Chinese spies had stolen the designs for the United States' most advanced nuclear weapons. It also predicted that China would soon tip the strategic balance against the United States by beginning "serial production of such weapons during the next decade," atop a new generation of long-range missiles.
The committee hearings made headlines and dominated national security debate for months. The hearings and report were directed by Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Together, these reports fortified the hard-line national security vision of the rising neoconservative wing of the Republican Party. The threats were China, ballistic missiles and rogue states. The solutions were huge increases in military spending, new weapon systems, and an aggressive pre-emptive policy to overthrow enemy regimes.
These views -- particularly with a Republican-dominated Congress at war with the incumbent Democratic president -- heavily influenced political debates, threat assessments and budgetary priorities. There was no comparable set of hearings on terrorism.
None of the reports' predictions was accurate. Iran and North Korea did not build within five years nuclear-armed missiles that could hit the continental United States, as Rumsfeld predicted six years ago. China did not start mass-producing new missiles and apparently did not steal our nuclear crown jewels after all. The surprise attack did not occur in space, but in our cities. It was not imagination but an ideology that failed.
Slow Learning Curve
This discussion of the mistakes of Bush officials is not to excuse the mistakes of the Clinton administration, which were numerous. But as the 9/11 Commission report makes clear, Clinton officials were moving rapidly up the learning curve. They had successfully organized all the resources of the government to thwart Al Qaeda's millennium attacks at the end of 1999 - the only time that "the government as a whole seemed to be acting in concert to deal with terrorism," the commission notes.
During the transition to the Bush administration, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger told his successor, Condoleezza Rice, that she "would spend more time on terrorism in general and al Qaeda in particular than on anything else."
But the new administration had other priorities. The distorted threat assessments had done their damage. Terrorists were just a distraction from the real dangers.
Until Sept. 11, the top public security priority of the Bush administration had been to deploy a vast system of missile interceptors and sensor satellites. Senior officials and members of the cabinet made it their top agenda item in meetings with NATO allies, Russia and China in 2001.
In the months before Sept. 11, five Cabinet-level officials, including Rice, traveled to Moscow solely for the purpose of persuading the Russian leadership to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith was there on Sept. 10, pressing the urgency of deploying new weapon systems. Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times Sept. 5, "Why can George W. Bush think of nothing but a missile shield? Our president is caught in the grip of an obsession worthy of literature."
If government officials had devoted more attention, more focus and more resources to the terrorist threat, the events of Sept. 11 might have been prevented. Experts had warned of the dangers for years. As one chapter of the commission's report is titled, "The system was blinking red."
Advanced Warnings
The Commission on National Security/21st Century, chaired by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, warned in February 2001 that "the United States will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on the American homeland, and U.S. military superiority will not entirely protect us." Similarly, in December 2000, the terrorism commission chaired by Virginia Gov. James Gilmore warned, "a terrorist attack on some level inside our borders is inevitable, and the United States must be ready."
In February 2001, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Adm. Thomas Wilson, told Congress of his top 10 threats. No. 1: "a major terrorist attack against United States interests, either here or abroad, perhaps with a weapon designed to produce mass casualties" during the next 12 to 24 months.
Some elected officials got the message. Sen. Carl Levin told Rumsfeld at a June 2001 hearing that we were lavishing money on missile defense and not "putting enough emphasis on countering the most likely threats to our national security ... like terrorist attacks."
The day before the attacks, while Feith was pushing missiles in Moscow, Sen. Joseph Biden prophetically warned of terrorist attacks at home. If we spend billions on missile defense, he said, "we will have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat, while the real threats come into this country in the hold of ship, or the belly of a plane."
Wrong Target
Caught by surprise on Sept. 11, President Bush quickly rallied, uniting the nation three years ago to wage a successful war in Afghanistan. But then the same officials who had produced the erroneous threat assessments before Sept. 11 turned their talents toward a campaign to persuade the United States to attack Iraq.
Using the same methods of selective facts, false information and exaggerated threats, they systematically misled the nation and our allies, rushed to war without serious allied support, and badly underestimated both the cost of rebuilding Iraq and the severity of the resistance to the occupation of an Arab nation.
While most Americans vacationed in August, 17 Americans a week died in Iraq. We will soon record the 1,000th U.S. soldier killed in the war, with 4, 000 other soldiers maimed and tens of thousands of Iraqis killed. Yet the nation is less safe today than before Sept. 11. We have made gains destroying al Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan and by focusing serious national security resources on terrorism. But these have been outweighed by the failure to pursue and capture Osama bin Laden, by expanding the war, not into the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the deserts and cities of Iraq.
Now Iraq is a free-fire zone for terrorists, insurgents control major Iraqi cities, and the Taliban still strike at us in Afghanistan. The al Qaeda ideology is spreading through a Muslim and Arab world seething with hatred because of the Iraq war.
Nuclear Nightmare
With thousands of new al Qaeda recruits, new fields of operation, a destabilized Middle East and weakened alliances, the danger that a terrorist group could get a nuclear weapon from one of the poorly guarded warehouses in Russia or from a sympathetic military commander in Pakistan has never been greater. While we are trying to crush the terrorist cells, we must also drain the nuclear swamp.
We must do whatever it takes to secure and eliminate these nuclear materials before terrorists can get them. This is the No. 1 threat facing the United States, and we still are not focused on it.
Since the invasion of Iraq, we have spent $200 billion dollars on the war but only $2 billion on securing the nuclear bomb materials we know al Qaeda has sought and may still seek. In the two years after Sept. 11, we secured less material than we did in the two years before Sept. 11.
Harvard's Graham Allison says, "If we just keep doing what we are doing, a nuclear terrorist attack is inevitable." This is a warning we dare not ignore.
Joseph Cirincione is the Director for Non-Proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment. This article originally appeared as an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, Insight Section, Sunday September 5, 2004.
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