REVIEW & OUTLOOK
A President's Job
The 9/11 hearings: We're all Bush Doctrine believers now.
Give President Bush's critics credit for versatility. Having spent months assailing him for doing too much after 9/11--Iraq, the Patriot Act, the "pre-emption" doctrine--they have now turned on a dime to allege that he did too little before it. This contradiction is Mr. Bush's opportunity to rise above the ankle biting and explain to the American public what a President is elected to do.
Any President's most difficult decision is how and when to defend the American people. As the 9/11 hearings reveal, there are always a thousand reasons for a President not to act. The intelligence might be uncertain, civilians might be killed, U.S. soldiers could die, and the "international community" might object. There are risks in any decision. But when Presidents fail to act at all, or act with too little conviction, we get a September 11.
This is the real lesson emerging from the 9/11 Commission hearings if you listen above the partisan din. In their eagerness to insist that Mr. Bush should have acted more pre-emptively before 9/11, the critics are rebutting their own case against the President's aggressive antiterror policy ever since. The implication of their critique is that Mr. Bush didn't repudiate the failed strategy of the Clinton years fast enough.
The bias in these columns has long been to support forceful Presidential leadership on national security. Even when skeptical about a military intervention, as we were about Haiti in 1994, we saluted once Bill Clinton sent in the troops. We supported Mr. Clinton in Bosnia and Kosovo, and we were among the few who didn't pile on Jimmy Carter after the hostage-rescue fiasco in Iran.
We likewise support Mr. Bush's antiterror leadership, despite the inevitable missteps of planning or WMD intelligence. Whatever lapses may have occurred in the eight months of his Presidency before 9/11, since that day Mr. Bush has had the courage to act, and forcefully. He has turned 20 years of antiterror policy on its head, going on offense by taking the war to the terrorists, toppling state sponsors in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now attempting to "transform" the Middle East through a democratic beachhead in Iraq. This is leadership.
Democrats now claim that any President would have responded this way, save for invading the "distraction" of Iraq. But would they really? Their strategy in power was to play defense and prosecute terrorists after they'd struck. Even Richard Clarke admits this. Madeleine Albright attributes that failure to a general "mindset" that prevailed everywhere before September 11, and she has a point.
But in her 9/11 testimony this week, Ms. Albright blamed the Bush Administration detentions at Guantanamo for creating more terrorists. "It is possible and perhaps probable that anger over these detentions has helped bin Laden succeed in recruiting more new operatives," she said. So the detention of Taliban fighters caught while fighting Americans and harboring terrorists will only help the terrorists? This is the same "mindset" that blocked strong U.S. action against al Qaeda for half a decade.
Or consider this episode from the 9/11 Commission's staff report on the U.S. response to news that terrorists linked to Iran had killed 19 Americans at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996:
"Albright emphasized to us, for example, that even if some individual Iranian officials were involved, this was not the same as proving that the Iranian government as a whole should be held responsible for the bombing. National Security Adviser Berger held a similar view. He stressed the need for a definitive intelligence judgment. The evidence might be challenged by foreign governments. The evidence might form a basis for going to war."
Yes, it might. But the failure to act without "definitive" evidence and "foreign" agreement might also encourage the terrorists to think that they can get away with it and so hit us again.
The idea that every President would have toppled the Taliban after 9/11 is also wishful thinking. The press at the time was full of hand-wringing about the dangers. The establishment consensus, even so soon after 9/11, was that the U.S. could end up bogged down in Kabul like the British and Soviets. President Bush is the one who took the risk of using force to rout the Taliban and the al Qaeda camps they were protecting.
All of this is what we ought to be debating this election year, not how selective Dick Clarke's memory is. Even if everything Mr. Clarke says is true--and he's already contradicted himself numerous times--it is beside the point. What matters is which strategy against terrorism the U.S. should pursue now and for the next four years.
This is also the case that Mr. Bush needs to make, rising above the Lilliputians who want to fight over intelligence and yellowcake uranium in Niger. Mr. Bush should tell Americans that he too is disappointed that U.S. intelligence in Iraq wasn't as good as it might have been, though even Bill Clinton was convinced Saddam Hussein had WMD.
But this election is about leadership. And a President who takes the oath to protect America has to make difficult, often life-or-death, decisions based on imperfect information. In a world of terrorism and (still unsolved) anthrax attacks on the U.S. Capitol, a President doesn't have the luxury of waiting for French approval or proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In Iraq, the burden was on Saddam--a proven supporter of terrorists, user of WMD and enemy of America--to show he had destroyed the weapons we know he once had. He didn't, and so Mr. Bush acted to protect America and prevent another September 11.
