Living History .. with the New York Times

“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.

But wait, we’re just getting warmed up. Sunday’s Times story is pitched as an aborted raid on al Qaeda “Chiefs” — plural. Well, guess what? It turns out that there was no indication whatsoever that al Qaeda’s chief chief, Osama bin Laden, was supposed to be anywhere near the targeted 2005 meeting. Mazzetti inserts Bin Laden’s name in conjunction with Zawahiri’s; if you read carefully, however, you find it is only to describe Zawahiri as bin Laden’s deputy, not to say al Qaeda’s top dog was actually going to be at this Qaeda confab. He wasn’t.

But it gets better. It turns out Zawahiri may not have been there either.

Of course, you’d have to wade ten paragraphs into the story to find that out. At that point, after you've read all that stuff about how the Qaeda “Chiefs” lived to fight another day because wimpy Rumsfeld couldn’t find it in himself to pull the trigger, Mazzetti drops this doozy: “[Intelligence] officials acknowledge that they are not certain that Mr. Zawahri attended the 2005 meeting in North Waziristan[.]”

That’s right: At this secret rendezvous where the Times intimates the Bush administration could have decapitated al Qaeda once and for all, the truth is: We can’t even say, two years later, despite the supposedly great intelligence we had, whether any of al Qaeda’s top leadership was actually there.

So, let’s see if we have this straight: Under circumstances where the intelligence community couldn’t say for certain — and still can’t say today — that we’d actually have taken out anyone of consequence, Don Rumsfeld called off an operation to which the brass had assigned so many troops it would surely have looked to the Pakistanis like we were invading their country.

Yes, you can easily see why that’s Page One material.

But wait: The Times adds that even though our intel officials weren’t positive Zawahiri would be at the meeting, there were “communications intercepts that tipped them off to the meeting, [so] that intelligence officials had unusually high confidence that Mr. Zawahri was there.”

Ah yes, another one of those intel “slam dunks” the Times is always so understanding about when they don’t quite pan out.

Except: On this point, Mazzetti is forced to acknowledge another occasion, in January 2006, when our spooks also had one of those unusually high degrees of confidence that they had placed Zawahiri at a meeting.

So, what happened then? Oops. It turns out that (a) the same supposedly gun-shy Pentagon did order a strike on the location where our intel guys were so sure they had Zawahiri cornered, and (b) our intel guys, hard as this may be to believe, were wrong — the attack missed Zawahiri by at least a couple of hours. We killed lots of people, including some terrorists, but not him.

That got me to wondering: What was the Times’s reaction back when that failed raid happened? Did the Gray Lady say, “To hell with diplomacy! To hell with collateral damage! Hats off to Rummy — at least he gave it the old college try. At least he wasn’t hand-wringing over civilian casualties and tender Pakistani sensibilities! And even if we missed Zawahiri, at least we put some jihadis on the Virgin Express!”

Um…Not exactly.

The Times instead sounded…well, like the Times. This is from its January 15, 2006, dispatch (behind the Times-Select curtain):

Pakistan’s government … condemned a deadly American airstrike on a village in the northwestern tribal region, and a senior Pakistani security official said he was confident that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No. 2 leader of Al Qaeda and the target of the strike, had not been in the village when it was hit. … [T]he Foreign Ministry condemned the loss of civilian lives and said it had delivered an official protest to the American ambassador in Islamabad…. Local officials in the Bajaur district, where the airstrike happened, said 18 civilians had been killed in the attack, including six children.

WHAT THE HISTORY ACTUALLY SAYS
Now, is Sunday’s Times story infuriating, disingenuous, sleight of hand, etc.? Sure it is. But forget about that. This is good! If this is where the Democrats and their house organ want to take the 2008 election, by all means let’s go. And not a moment too soon. There is, after all, a history here. All the spin in the world can’t alter it.

Pretending that Bush hasn’t really fought this war any differently than Clinton did is about as convincing as pretending that the why-aren’t-we-being-aggressive-enough tone of Sunday’s Times story is representative of the Times coverage over the last six years.

Has President Bush has made a truckload of mistakes? Yup, as has every wartime president in American history. I don’t think he’s been wrong as often as the Times has, and I confess to being dissatisfied with the administration’s basic conception of the war. But the president has fought the war and wants to keep fighting it. To the contrary, President Clinton never fought the war, and Democrats — including Senator Clinton — now want us to walk away from Iraq while the same al Qaeda the Times suddenly thinks Bush hasn’t fought hard enough is still on the battlefield.

Why, you ask, have we not suffered a domestic terror attack in the last six years? Perhaps it’s because dead and imprisoned jihadists don’t blow things up.

These are the facts and they will not change: There have, since 2001, been single days in Afghanistan and Iraq when our armed forces, sent into battle by President Bush, have killed and captured more terrorists than the United States government managed to neutralize during the entire Clinton presidency. Just to recap, those eight years under Commander-in-Chief Clinton saw:

• The bombing of the World Trade Center, killing six people, in 1993;

   

• A plot to bomb the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the U.N. complex, and the FBI’s headquarters in New York City in 1993;

   

• The Battle of Mogadishu (“Black Hawk Down”), in which 19 American servicemen were killed, in 1993;

   

• A plot to bomb American airliners over the Pacific, killing one Japanese tourist in a dry run, in 1994;

   

• The bombing of a U.S. military training center in Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans, in 1995;

   

• The bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 members of the United States Air Force, in 1996;

   

• The bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya, killing 213 people and wounding approximately 4,000, in 1998;

   

• The bombing of the U.S. embassy in Tanzania, killing at least twelve people and wounding approximately 85, in 1998;

   

• A plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in 1999;

   

• A plot to bomb the U.S.S. The Sullivans in Yemen in 2000; and
• The bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, killing 17 members of the United States Navy, in 2000.

  Bush was in the big chair for 9/11, and his response was to attack — not with indictments and empty threats, but with the greatest fighting force in the history of the world. He hasn’t gotten bin Laden and Zawahiri, but he’s wiped out much of al Qaeda’s senior leadership and continues to use the military to hunt down the rest. It’s not all good: He hasn’t been tough enough with Iran, he is unwilling to confront the role of Islamic ideology, and he has failed to rally the country by forcefully, convincingly and constantly explaining the stakes. But he has fought bravely and has not calibrated his approach in accordance with opinion polls.

  Clinton, by contrast, indicted bin Laden in June 1998 and did pretty much nothing to actually apprehend or kill him thereafter … while U.S. embassies and a naval destroyer were savaged, and the enemy plotted 9/11 — exploiting the wall barring information-sharing between intelligence agents and criminal investigators that the Clinton Justice Department heightened in 1995.

  Bush has instituted a policy of not countenancing terrorists. He has too often failed to hew to it, but that undoes neither the good he has done killing and capturing jihadists, nor the antiterror tone he has set. Speaking of tone, Clinton, to the contrary, complemented his failure to confront jihadists by using his pardon power to spring FALN and Weather Underground terrorists from long federal prison sentences. And as Clinton’s then-adviser Dick Morris has observed, the 16 FALN terrorists were pardoned for no better reason than to help Senate candidate Hillary Clinton with the Puerto Rican vote in New York.

  Other than those few minor details, though, the Times has it absolutely right: There isn’t a hair’s worth of difference between the two administrations when it comes to fighting radical Islam. Go Hillary!

  — Andrew C. McCarthy directs the Center for Law & Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.