In the two months before September 11, five cabinet members, including National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, traveled to Moscow. They were not there to coordinate counter-terrorism operations or share threat assessments. They were fixated on one mission: convince the Russian leadership to scuttle the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Until September 11, the top national security priority of the Bush administration had been the development and deployment of a national missile defense system. Budgeted at over $10 billion per year, missile defense is still by far the country's single most expensive weapons program. Senior officials and members of the cabinet made it their top agenda item in countless meetings with NATO allies Russia and China. As Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times on September 5, 2001, "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."
According to reports, Ms. Rice did not even mention terrorism in a speech on national security priorities planned for September 11. She focused instead on missile defense, a subject now rarely mentioned. Most experts consider missile defense irrelevant to the threats facing the United States. But for years one of the major reasons why the United States was so unprepared for terrorist attacks is that the threat assessments favored by conservatives and neo-conservatives pointed policymakers in the wrong direction. Partisan politics over the past decade distorted U.S. intelligence estimates, fundamentally misleading and misdirecting national security resources.
Wrong Direction
The two best known threat assessments compiled before September 11 are those prepared by the two commissions chaired by now-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In 1998, the Report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States warned that the United States faced an urgent threat of attack by a hostile state "with little or no warning." In January 2001, the 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 immediately launched an expansive and expensive effort to deploy new generations of sensors, satellites, and weapons in space. Together, the reports fortified the conservative national security vision and heavily influenced political debate, threat assessments, and budgetary priorities over the past three years.
It is fair to ask whether the September attacks could have been prevented if senior officials and summit meetings had addressed cooperative efforts to defend against terrorism rather than missiles. While reports on missile defense and space received overwhelming officials and media attention, similar reports and warnings about asymmetrical threats and domestic terrorism were largely ignored.
We Were Warned
Experts had warned of the dangers, particularly after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, which came close to collapsing the building with conventional truck bombs. The Commission on National Security 21st Century, chaired by former senators 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." The commission members became a hot item, but at the time they struggled for attention.
Similarly, in December 2001, the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction released its second report. The findings warned, "a terrorist attack on some level inside our borders is inevitable and the United States must be ready." The commission specifically found an urgent need to "craft a truly 'national' strategy to address the threat of domestic terrorism-conventional, cyber, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear-from the perspective to deterrence, prevention, preparedness and response.
Over the past ten years, numerous expert reports have warned that a terrorist group might try to buy or steal nuclear materials-warnings now echoed in reports that al Qaeda operatives have tried to acquire uranium. In January 2001, a special commission chaired by former senator Howard Baker and former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler urged the administration to triple the money spent on securing and eliminating Russia's nuclear weapons and materials. At a meeting at the Carnegie Endowment on the report, Cutler emphasized that, "Our principal conclusions are that the most urgent unmet national security threat for the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable materials in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorist or hostile nation-states, and used against American troops abroad, or citizens at home."
These concerns were noted in some official threat assessments. In February 2001, Admiral Thomas Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress that he feared "a major terrorist attack against United States interests, either here or abroad, perhaps with a weapon designed to produce mass casualties" over the next twelve to twenty-four months. But the prediction was lost in a long list of other concerns.
Congress Tried to Change Administration's Priorities
These clashing threat assessments often provoked debate between Democrats in Congress and the Republican administration. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stated in one such exchange:
"I'm also concerned that we may not be putting enough emphasis on countering the most likely threats to our national security and to the security of our forces deployed around the world, those asymmetric threats, like terrorist attacks on the USS Cole, on our barracks and our embassies around the world, on the World trade Center, including possible attacks with weapons of mass destruction and cyberthreats to our national security establishment and even to our economic infrastructure."
Administration officials defended their assessments and budget priorities by arguing that the government was appropriately addressing all threats. But it was clear where the priority lay. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued.
"But when I think about it, what is different about the two [terrorism and missile defense] is, number one, we have some capability against the terrorist threat today…We have no ability to protect ourselves against ballistic missiles. And secondly, and this is the reason we have no ability to protect against ballistic missiles, we have a treaty prohibiting us from doing so."
The day before the attacks, Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, prophetically warned of an exclusive focus on missile defenses in a speech at the National Press Club. He cited the Joint Chiefs' support of his view that a strategic nuclear attack "is less likely than regional conflicts, or major theater wars or terrorist attacks at home and abroad." If we spend billions on missile defense, he feared, "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 or are smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack."
The administration did not listen. Officials stayed with their missile defense game plan.
They were dead wrong.
