At her testimony before the 9-11 commission Thursday, Condoleezza Rice gave the same impression that has, in the past, suited her so well, and made her the subject of an endless series of fawning profiles: that of a highly competent, self-satisfied bureaucrat with an orderly, methodical cast of mind, which she uses to pursue big thoughts and her sweeping vision of long-term institutional and geopolitical changes.
And this, it struck me as I sat in the hearing room during her testimony, may have been precisely the Bush administration's problem in the months before 9-11. Taken together with Richard Clarke's testimony, what Rice revealed is that she seems to have self-confidently pursued her highly ambitious, big-picture, intellectual strategy for chasing al-Qaeda in the long-term while at the same time creating, in the short-term, an ineffective, excessively hierarchical management structure that delegated virtually all responsibility for fighting terrorism to a single individual, Clarke, and his counter-terrorism strategy group.
This is a problem characteristic of the entire Bush administration: It has consistently pursued big-think solutions to ongoing problems, and done so with pride. And yet Rice's testimony, considered along with Clarke's, revealed the myriad ways in which smaller, ad-hoc, and imperfect actions that might have had a major impact on national security were not pursued -- or even considered relevant -- because of the administration's preference for a more perfect plan.
Because of this, history may well record the Bush administration's response to al-Qaeda before 9-11 as a classic instance of the perfect being the enemy of the good. Certainly, there was, as Rice said, "no silver bullet" that could have prevented 9-11. But just as certainly, more could have been done with the garlic chains and crosses available.
Many reporters and advocates are busily identifying the inconsistencies and contradictions in Rice's testimony. However, taken on its own terms, the portrait she paints of the Bush administration and her own role in the fight against terror is nearly as damning.
Here's what I concluded from her testimony:
Terrorism is best addressed within a totalizing, big-think framework that obscures specific differences between different international actors and re-orders relations between states.
“What the war on terrorism has done is it's given us an organizing principle that allows us to think about terrorism, to think about weapons of mass destruction, to think about the links between them, and to form a united front across the world to try and win this war,” said Rice.
“After the September 11th attacks, our nation faced hard choices: We could fight a narrow war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, or we could fight a broad war against a global menace. We could seek a narrow victory, or we could work for a lasting peace and a better world.”
Now, I happen to think most Americans would be happy with a simple defeat of al-Qaeda's terrorist network at this point, which is something the Bush administration has yet to accomplish after two-and-a-half years of sweeping institutional changes. Meanwhile, Bush moved ahead with his ambitious plans for transforming the geopolitical order by toppling Saddam Hussein; this seems to be leading us, day by day, into a new conflict with Iraqi Shia, while also increasing anti-American sentiment around the world -- not to mention, according to most experts on terrorism, increasing the likelihood of future attempted terrorist attacks against the United States and its allies. “President Bush has chosen the bolder course,” said Rice. “He recognizes that the war on terror is a broad war.”
The war on terror, as understood by the Bush administration, is not only a war against al-Qaeda, but a war to remake the world. “And as we attack the threat at its source, we are also addressing its roots,” said Rice in her opening remarks. “We are confronting the nexus between terror and weapons of mass destruction. Because we acted in Iraq, Saddam Hussein will never again use weapons of mass destruction against his people or his neighbors.”
That's why: Gathering threats from historic enemies must be preemptively pursued, but acts of war by emerging threats need not always be responded to.
“If we learned anything from September 11th, it is that we cannot wait while dangers gather,” said Rice in her opening testimony. But, “[w]e really thought that the Cole incident was passed, that you didn't want to respond tit-for-tat,” she added later, when queried about the administration's lack of response to the bombing of the USS Cole. “Look, it can be debated as to whether or not one should have responded to the Cole. I think that we really believed that an inadequate response was simply going to embolden them.”
So the administration's energy went into coming up with something bigger. “[S]ome of us felt that the focus, so much focus, on what you did with bin Laden, not what you did with the network, not what you did with the regional circumstances, might, in fact, have been misplaced,” said Rice.
And the only way to really fight terrorism was to reorder the regional circumstances -- i.e., the entire Middle East and South Asia.
Here's the money quote: “Today, along with many allies, we are helping the people of Iraq and Afghanistan to build free societies. The defeat of terror and the success of freedom in those nations will serve the interests of our nation and inspire hope and encourage reform throughout the greater Middle East…. And over the long run, we will change -- I believe we will change the nature of the Middle East, particularly if there are examples that this can work in the Middle East. And this is why Iraq is so important.” (all emphases added)
The way the Bush administration conflates the fight against al-Qaeda and the war in Iraq is seen, by some administration critics, as a tactical move to provide the administration with cover for pursuing an independent and long-held agenda to depose Hussein. But perhaps this is too clever by half. What Rice's testimony clearly shows is an administration that truly believed going into Iraq and transforming the Middle East was a big-picture, long-term strategic move against future terrorists, even though there was never any evidence that Iraq had anything to do with the 9-11 attack.
Meanwhile, the dirty work of fighting terrorism in the here and now before 9-11 was delegated to Richard Clarke. The National Security Advisor and other senior officials focused on developing a big-picture, long-term plan for the transformation of the geopolitical order and the entire federal government.
“[W]hat I wanted Dick Clarke to do was to manage the crisis for us and help us develop a new strategy,” said Rice. “And I can guarantee you, when we had that new strategy in place, the president -- who was asking for it and wondering what was happening to it -- was going to be in a position to engage it fully.”
Meanwhile, Rice and other higher-ups were focusing on “strategic” planning. And that strategy had a lot to do with states. “But we did want to take the time to get in place a policy that was more strategic toward al-Qaeda, more robust. It takes some time to think about how to reorient your policy toward Pakistan. It takes some time to think about how to have a more effective policy toward Afghanistan. It particularly takes some time when you don't get your people on board for several months.”
While that planning was going on, al-Qaeda policy was going to be somewhat up in the air. “The problem wasn't that you didn't have a good counter-terrorism person,” explained Rice. “The problem was you didn't have an approach against al-Qaeda because you didn't have an approach against Afghanistan. And you didn't have an approach against Afghanistan because you didn't have an approach against Pakistan. And until we could get that right, we didn't have a policy.”
It's no wonder Rice has repeatedly denied having been handed a plan by the Clinton administration. In her big-picture world, the smaller, more ad-hoc steps the government had been using to fight al-Qaeda without necessarily transforming regional relationships were not considered a real plan at all.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor. Her column appears each week in the online edition.
