“U.S. Aborted Raid on Qaeda Chiefs in Pakistan in ‘05.”
So blared the top headline of Sunday’s New York Times. Breathlessly, correspondent Mark Mazzetti reported that reliable intelligence had Ayman al-Zawahiri coming to a meeting in Pakistan’s tribal region. Special-ops forces got all geared up to take him out. Everything was in place to do just that. Then, at the eleventh hour, Donald Rumsfeld got cold feet.
Too risky, the Defense secretary is said to have decided. Too much potential for collateral damage, U.S. casualties, and a jolt to America’s complex relationship with the shaky Musharaff government. So, the
Times tut-tuts, the raid was aborted. And thanks to this monumental failure of nerve, the narrative concludes, al Qaeda is resurgent.
Now, hold on just a second. The Gray Lady’s leitmotif for six years running can be lost on none of us: Bush-administration officials are reckless cowboys, insufficiently attentive to the human costs of warfare and clueless about the nuances of diplomacy, right?
So what’s going on? Here we have Bush’s Defense secretary actually factoring in the
Times’s top war priorities: Don’t be rash, don’t kill anyone, don’t anger Muslims, don’t upset the international community, etc. Rummy, as if the
Times editorial board was calling the plays, decides discretion is the better part of valor and pulls the plug on a risky operation … yet the
Times ends up having a snit anyway?
What gives? Why shift gears and paint the administration as feckless and thus responsible for al Qaeda’s growing strength in the Afghan/Pakistan border region?
Gee, I don’t know, maybe because … the Dandy of Pinch-Land, President Bill Clinton, was, in fact, feckless and thus responsible for al Qaeda’s growing strength in the Afghan/Pakistan border region.
Yes, welcome back my friends to the show that never ends: The Bill & Hill Legacy Repair & Legacy-in-the Making Project, headquarters Eighth Avenue and West 40th Street, New York, New York. Today’s message (and
please,
let’s try to stay on-message): See? Bush isn’t any tougher on al Qaeda than Clinton was, and surely not as tough as a smart, bold President Hillary Clinton would be. For all their bravado, these Bushies had their shot at taking al Qaeda’s top leaders out, but they blinked — and all because they were fretting over collateral consequences. Just like they have the gall to criticize Bill Clinton for doing.
Thus is Sunday’s story brimming with pre-9/11 overtones: Frustrated special forces getting the rug pulled out from under them just as they’re about to go in for the kill; angry intel officials grousing about a perfect, blown opportunity; every grunt in the field furious that the bad guys roam free while the suits in Washington wet their pants over collateral damage and diplomatic fallout. And finally, just in case you hadn’t gotten the point yet, Mazzetti makes the obvious explicit:
[The] criticism [of timidity] has echoes of the risk aversion that the officials said pervaded efforts against Al Qaeda during the Clinton administration, when missions to use American troops to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan were never executed because they were considered too perilous, risked killing civilians or were based on inadequate intelligence. Rather than sending in ground troops, the Clinton White House instead chose to fire cruise missiles in what became failed attempts to kill Mr. bin Laden and his deputies — a tactic Mr. Bush criticized shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Sure. Don’t you see? This is exactly like what happened those times when Clinton had bin Laden right there for the taking, and choked. Bush is no different.
WHAT THE STORY ACTUALLY SAYS
Except … what happens if you read the facts reported in the story rather than being swept off your feet by the background music? Beneath the Times’s transparent labors to manufacture a Bush parallel to Clinton’s timidity, there is no parallel.
Let’s begin with a fairly blatant fact. Rumsfeld’s action, or as the Times would have it, inaction, takes place in the context of the United States prosecuting — drum roll — a war. If you’re keeping score, that would be the war Bush took up and Clinton didn’t.
Next: We’re talking here about Rumsfeld, not Bush. Mazzetti concedes that “[i]t is unclear whether President Bush was informed about the planned operation” that his defense secretary cancelled. There is no indication that Bush’s message to his team has been anything other than the one the Times so enjoys belittling: “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”
Now contrast President Clinton. The 9/11 Commission notes that Clinton, dragged kicking and screaming after sundry al Qaeda threats and attacks, finally authorized a covert operation to kill bin Laden if he could not be captured. After that plan came to naught, another golden opportunity arose. So what did Clinton do? He personally “crossed out the key [authorization to kill] language he had approved [earlier,] … and inserted more ambiguous language.” (9/11 Commission Final Report pp. 131-33) (emphasis added). Pressed to explain why on earth he would paralyze his subordinates with confusion about what they were and were not permitted to do, “President Clinton told the Commission that he had no recollection of why he rewrote the language.” (Id. at 133).
Yeah, y’know, that sounds a lot like Bush.
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