National Review Online May 29, 2002, 8:45 a.m. 

Letting Saddam Be 

(A pre-and post-September 11 danger)

By Laurie Mylroie

More American civilians died on September 11 than on any other single day in this nation's history. Such a huge disaster is, almost necessarily, the result of major, multiple errors. The current spasm of finger-pointing and memo-leaking is bringing some mistakes to light, but they are all tactical, i.e. whether 9/11 could have been averted by vigorously pursuing suspicions of the FBI field offices. Even in the best of circumstances, U.S. authorities cannot catch every major terrorist attack in the making. When those attacks are on the scale of 9/11 even one failure is unacceptable. Notably absent in the present debate is consideration of the strategic blunder underlying 9/11.

It is inconceivable that al Qaeda alone could have pulled off the most lethal terrorist attack in human history. Indeed, U.S. forces have found virtually no documents in Afghanistan related to 9/11 - or to any other terrorist strike on America. Israel's brief foray into a handful of Palestinian towns produced a trove of documents linking Yasser Arafat and Saudi Arabia to the terrorism it experienced. But the U.S. came up empty-handed in Afghanistan. That suggests the terrorist attacks were planned elsewhere. Al Qaeda has a senior partner..

A decade ago major terrorist strikes on U.S. targets were considered to be state-sponsored. For all practical purposes, that meant Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Yet that is supposed to have changed with the first attack on the World Trade Center, in February 1993, one month into Bill Clinton's first term in office. The Clinton administration claimed that the bombing represented a new kind of terrorism that did not involve states..

The New York FBI office, however, strongly believed Iraq was behind the 1993 Trade Center attack. The Clinton White House did not want to hear that and FBI Headquarters accommodated the president - echo of the charge made by Coleen Rowley, Minneapolis FBI counsel and agent, of rampant careerism there. And thus was born the notion that major terrorist strikes against the U.S. were carried out by individuals, or "networks," without the support of states. The predictable happened. Terrorism continued. In fact, it grew far worse because the state sponsor of the terrorism was never properly identified and punished..

Like the FBI, the CIA accommodated Clinton's aversion to hearing that Iraq was attacking the U.S. and is now committed to its past. Shortly after 9/11, a European diplomat complained to this author that the Agency did not want to hear about leads pointing to Iraq and that had a dampening effect on his own country's investigation. Most recently, CIA Director George Tenet helped spread the story that Czech authorities no longer claimed that Mohammed Atta, leader of the hijackers in America, met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague a few months before the attacks. The Czechs responded by reaffirming that he had..

Senior U.S. officials are now involved in what William Safire politely terms "covering their posteriors." That exercise is so irresponsible as to defy belief. People will put consideration of their careers above the national-security interests of this country, including the lives and well-being of American citizens..

Washington's experts on Iraq - in and out of government - also accommodated Clinton's desire not to hear Saddam Hussein was a serious problem. They downplayed the danger posed by Iraq's unconventional weapons and denigrated the strategy promoted by the U.S. Congress for removing Saddam: Arm and train the opposition Iraqi National Congress. In their overwhelming majority, the Iraq experts maintained there was no pressing danger, and even if Saddam's ouster was desirable, little could be done, as the INC was not competent. (Three such experts wrote a screed to that effect in Foreign Affairs, entitled "The Rollback Fantasy." The senior author was rewarded with an appointment to the Clinton White House)..

In late 1998, this author pressed a colleague as to where responsibility would lie if Saddam did something terrible, because he had been left in power. What if Saddam developed a nuclear weapon and used it? What if he carried out a biological terror attack and many people died? This expert, from a prestigious Middle East institute, responded, "The times are very cynical and everyone must do what he must do for his career.".

George Bush evidently seeks to finesse the problem of the bureaucracies' commitment to their Clinton-era positions by ousting Saddam on the basis of Iraq's flagrant and undeniable breach of the U.N. sponsored cease-fire: Its retention of proscribed weapons of mass destruction. That may work, if we're lucky. But it also leaves the country vulnerable to more terrorism. Saddam may calculate that another major attack will divert the U.S. back to hunting out al Qaeda "cells" and postpone his own day of reckoning. It is also deeply disturbing to give a pass to those who acted - and continue to act - so irresponsibly. The American people deserve better..

- Laurie Mylroie is an adjunct scholar at The American Enterprise Institute and author of Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack & Saddam Hussein's War against America.