CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Print the Legend
In America, many forces battle to shape our collective narrative. Nowhere is this conflict addressed more elegantly than in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the epic Western movie directed in 1962 by the great John Ford. The story is told as a flashback, with the idealistic character played by Jimmy Stewart recounting to a newspaper reporter how he came to the small Western town of Shinbone many years earlier as a naive tenderfoot. Because he dared to challenge and duel a vicious bandit, Stewart has become mythologized as "the man who shot Liberty Valance." He has since gone on to become a U.S. senator and a national icon.
Jimmy Stewart's character, Ransom Stoddard, is unable to live with a lie, however, and he decides to tell the reporter the truth. The reporter, Maxwell Scott, listens intently as Stoddard demystifies himself with the startling revelation that he did not really shoot Liberty Valance. It was John Wayne, hiding in the shadows.
But as Stewart finishes, Scott dramatically rises to his feet and, with a flourish, starts tearing up his notes.
"You're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?" Stewart asks.
"No, sir," Scott says. "This is the West, sir. And when the legend becomes fact, print the legend." [1]
***
When it comes to 9/11, for the most part, America has printed the legend. Because Al Qaeda's attacks seemingly came out of the blue, a simplistic narrative has emerged: America good, terrorists bad. Stand behind the president. It is a story line that holds some unassailable truths. Heroic firemen, police officers, and others gave their lives so that their fellow citizens might live. But, as put forth by the Bush administration, the official narrative allows little room for complexity and none for doubt.
Yet the real story is full of startling paradoxes and subtle nuances and they have started to come into view. In the wake of the attacks, reports on the Saudi role in fostering terrorism have gradually made their way into the American press. Allegations that specific members of the royal family, or members of the Saudi merchant elite, had prior knowledge of 9/11 or knowingly financed Al Qaeda are grave charges indeed, and should not be made unless they can be backed up by strong evidence. Some of these questions may be answered in the $1-trillion civil suit brought by families of the victims of 9/11 against hundreds of individuals and entities, many of whom are prominent Saudis. The case had not yet come to trial as this book went to press.
As to exactly how guilty the Saudis have been in aiding terror, Richard Clarke sees a spectrum of complicity. "Some of them were clearly sympathetic to Al Qaeda," he says. "Some of them thought that if they allowed a certain degree of cooperation with Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda would leave them alone. And some of them were merely reacting in a knee-jerk, instinctive way to what they believed was interference in their internal affairs." [2]
But there is also the sin of omission -- the failure to crack down on terrorists -- and on that score there is no ambiguity about the role played by America's great ally in the Middle East. The evidence is overwhelming that the House of Saud did little to stem the rise of Islamist terror that started in the mid-nineties, that it continued to finance terrorists, inadvertently or otherwise, and that it refused to cooperate with the United States again and again -- even after the events of 9/11.
In his address to the nation just after the catastrophe, Bush promised, "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."
How does the president reconcile this solemn vow with his alliance with a state that bears more responsibility for 9/11 than does any other nation? He does not. The most cogent explanation for the Bush administration's soft line toward the Saudis is best expressed by Richard Clarke. "There's a realization that we have to work with the government we've got in Saudi Arabia," Clarke says. "The alternatives could be far worse. The most likely replacement to the House of Saud is likely to be more hostile -- in fact, extremely hostile to the U.S." [3]
Clarke is right, of course. Nevertheless, if the House of Saud were a genuine ally, the Bush administration could have pressured it about the Saudi role in terrorism, aggressively gone after Al Qaeda after the USS Cole bombing, and still maintained a productive alliance. But that didn't happen, and other explanations for Bush's pro-Saudi policies are less benign. "It's always been very clear that there are deep ties between the Bush family and the Saudis," says Charles Lewis, head of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C., foundation that examines issues of ethics in government. "It creates a credibility problem. When it comes to the war on terror, a lot of people have to be wondering why we are concerned about some countries and not others. Why does Saudi Arabia get a pass?" [4]
Is it a factor that more than $1.4 billion has made its way from the House of Saud to individuals and entities tied to the House of Bush? "You would be less inclined to do anything forceful or dynamic if you are tied in with them financially," says Lewis, addressing the particular issue of Bush-Saudi ties within the Carlyle Group. "That's common sense."
Even if the president were somehow immune to the fact that in large measure he owed both his personal and political fortunes to the Saudis, it would be astonishing if he did not fall prey to a kind of groupthink as to who they really were. How could George W. Bush possibly perceive that policies hailed as great successes in the short run were actually so deeply flawed that in the long run they could lead to a catastrophe such as 9/11? To do so would require breaking a taboo. After all, the men he had grown up with -- his father, James Baker -- were giants. They were not only his elders, they were the most powerful men on earth. Surely, it was not possible for him to imagine that Prince Bandar and Princess Haifa, such longtime friends of the family, could have been connected to the disaster. After Newsweek reported that Princess Haifa's donations had ended up in the bank account of a Saudi who helped two of the 9/11 hijackers, the Bush family reaction was revealing. Not only did the White House fail to call for an investigation, but the Bushes rallied to her side. First Lady Laura Bush called Princess Haifa to express her sympathies. Bush senior and his wife, Barbara, did so as well. "I felt horribly about the attacks on her," the elder Bush told the New Yorker. [5]
Nor did the news hurt Prince Bandar's relationship with the president himself. When Bandar arrived at the West Wing of the White House on December 3, 2002, just after the revelations, to meet with Condoleezza Rice, President Bush dropped by and insisted that Bandar join the family for dinner. [6]
***
In one respect, however, President Bush has not followed so resolutely in the footsteps of his father. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bush temporarily resisted the urge to attack Saddam Hussein. But by early 2002, the White House had begun rattling sabers at Iraq. To the hard-line, militaristic, neocon faction in the administration, 9/11 presented an opening to execute their grandiose plan for overhauling the entire Middle East. The ascendancy of the neocons also meant that for the first time a militantly anti-Saudi bloc had a voice in the Bush administration -- a stance that would have appalled Bush senior and James Baker. On July 10, 2002, an incendiary Pentagon briefing, by Rand Corporation analyst Laurent Murawiec, even characterized Saudi Arabia as "a kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" of the United States.
Murawiec, who was invited to give the briefing to the Defense Policy Board by Richard Perle, asserted that "The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader. ... Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies." [7]
Much of this was old news to Saudi critics. But then Murawiec went too far. One of the last slides of his presentation argued for a takeover of Saudi Arabia's most precious resources: "What the House of Saud holds dear can be targeted: Oil: the oil fields are defended by U.S. forces, and located in a mostly Shiite area." [8]
In the widely reported furor that followed, the White House frantically assured the Saudis that the briefing in no way represented administration policy and was not to be taken seriously.
While the rogue briefing created friction, the Bush-Saudi relationship was under greater strain for another reason. Bush's campaign against Iraq was in full swing. On August 26, 2002, Dick Cheney addressed the issue at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention. "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," he said. [9] An American invasion, however, would create real problems for the Saudis. How could the House of Saud support "infidel" U.S. troops in a neighboring Arab country?
Yet two weeks later, on September 12, President Bush himself took the issue to the United Nations. "Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons," he declared in a speech before the General Assembly. [10]
As 2002 drew to an end, the noose drew tighter around Iraq. "If he declares he has [no weapons of mass destruction], then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world," said presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer at a December 2 press briefing. [11]
That same day, the administration announced the appointment of Elliott Abrams as special assistant to the president and senior director for Near East and North African affairs, with responsibilities in the National Security Council that included overseeing Arab-Israeli relations. A controversial figure in the Reagan Bush era who pleaded guilty in 1987 to withholding information from Congress during the Iran-contra hearings, Abrams was later pardoned by George H. W. Bush in 1992. His appointment was widely seen as a victory for the hard-line neocon camp that was opposed to pursuing the "road map" to peace in the Middle East -- the same road map that President Bush had agreed to follow after his rapprochement with the Saudis mere days before 9/11.
In February 2003, as American troops massed in Qatar for an Iraqi invasion, Abrams cleaned house at the NSC. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terror and Unconventional Warfare, Abrams called over Ben Miller, a highly regarded analyst who had the Iraqi file at the NSC, and "led Miller to an open window and told him to jump."
"That's his [Abrams's] management style," Bodansky told UPI. [12] Miller, of course, did not jump. But he was fired by Abrams, and two other officials, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann, were fired at about the same time. Miller's departure was especially significant in that he was sympathetic to CIA analysts who were less intent on war with Iraq. According to Tony Cordesman, Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Miller, Mann, and Leverett "were among the saner minds discussing the Arab-Israeli issue."
Even before Abrams installed hard-liners at the NSC, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had set up a new agency called the Office of Special Plans to make sure intelligence that supported the imminent invasion of Iraq made its way to the highest levels of the administration. What was taking place was the creation of what the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh dubbed "the stovepipe" -- an institutionalized means for funneling upward selectively chosen intelligence to serve ideological ends. According to Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council specialist on Iraq, who supported military action to oust Saddam, Bush officials dismantled "the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policy makers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them. [13]
"They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information," Pollack continued. "They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn't have the time or the energy to go after the bad information."
As all these events were taking place, the man who was best qualified to lead a real war on terror decided he had had enough. On February 21, 2003, Richard Clarke resigned from the Bush administration. Three weeks later, he was asked how he was adjusting to leaving government. "I already don't miss it," he said. Then he elaborated. "You know that great feeling you get when you stop banging your head against a wall?" [14]
Having excluded from the decision-making process the government officials who knew the most about Iraq -- certain CIA analysts and State Department officials who had studied it for years -- the United States went to war against Iraq on March 19, 2003, based on a wide variety of startlingly false assumptions. Allegations that Iraq's nuclear weapons program was alive and well turned out to be based on forged documents from Niger. Charges about Iraq's role in 9/11 or its links to Al Qaeda turned out to be wildly exaggerated or baseless. The premise for the preemptive strike -- that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction posed an immediate threat to the United States -- appears to have been completely false.
The policy makers in the Bush administration also grandly assumed and asserted that U.S. soldiers would be greeted by the Iraqi masses with flowers as conquering heroes; that after a short, low-intensity occupation of three months or so, democracy would flourish; that the deep-seated historical antagonisms among Shiites, Baathists, and Kurds would not create postwar conflict; that Iraqi oil production could be dramatically boosted from 3 million barrels a day to 6 million; that the invasion would create a reverse domino effect in which one autocratic regime after another in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Iran would fall, paving the way for a new democratic Middle East.
Even though fighting continued after the U.S. military victory, many Americans, temporarily at least, saw the war as a qualified success. When the war on terror began, President Bush had framed the hunt for bin Laden in the terms of the old American West: Bin Laden, Wanted Dead or Alive. Now, by constantly harping on Saddam's links to terrorism, the Bush administration had succeeded in switching villains to the extent that 70 percent of Americans ultimately believed Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11.
At the same time that the White House put forth this misleading impression, it made sure that other pieces of the terrorism puzzle were suppressed. In July 2003, Congress released a nine-hundred-page report on 9/11. But the Bush administration refused to declassify important passages, including a twenty-eight-page section dealing with the Saudis, and as a result those pages were deleted. According to Senator Bob Graham, the reason was simple. "They are protecting a foreign government," he said. Time reported that blacked-out pages produced "the smell of a cover-up of complicity in the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history." [15]
Soon, however, the White House regained control of the narrative, thanks to another spectacle, the capture of Saddam on December 13, 2003, which appeared to have satisfied America's desire for revenge. Yet as 2003 drew to a close, American soldiers continued to die -- in bombings, shootings, and missile attacks on helicopters. Far from coming to fruition, the neocons' rosy scenario of a newly democratic Iraq had inarguably devolved into a bloody, ongoing, and costly adventure that widened the potential for historically disastrous American involvement in the region. After the capture of Saddam Hussein, violence in Iraq continued. Thousands of Islamist militants kept flooding through Iraq's porous borders. "Iranians have some fifteen thousand, perhaps twenty thousand armed, trained, and intelligence-equipped Hezbollah-style [militants] inside Iraq," says Youssef Ibrahim, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the managing director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group. "They are successfully infiltrating the Iraqi intelligence and the U.S. intelligence system, gathering information and preparing." [16]
Few in the United States liked to admit it, but by switching the venue of America's response to 9/11 to Iraq, the United States may have inadvertently played directly into Al Qaeda's and Osama bin Laden's hands. More than twenty years earlier, bin Laden had gone to Afghanistan to lure another superpower into a land war inside a Muslim country. America's Cold Warriors had cackled with glee when the Soviets took the bait, and the long and brutal war that ensued helped lead to the demise of the Soviet empire. In the mountains of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden had learned that he and his band of impassioned warriors could defeat a superpower in a guerilla war. And for George H. W. Bush, it had been his finest hour.
Is it possible that the United States has stepped into the same trap, that this time around we are the Soviets? Is it possible that in terms of the geopolitical chessboard, putting 135,000 American troops in a land war in a Muslim country was not a smart move? According to Ibrahim, far from being in control of Iraq, the American troops may actually be closer to being hostages. "The Iranians think they've got American forces 'surrounded' inside Iraq -- not the other way around," he says. [17]
In fact, more than two years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden has fared far better than the Bush administration likes to admit. Bin Laden's jihad against the United States includes two specific two goals: the complete removal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia and the overthrow of the House of Saud. In May 2003, after the Iraq War started, Osama's first wish came true, as the small number of U.S. soldiers left the Arabian peninsula, in part to ease pressure on the Saudi regime from militants. On December 17, the State Department warned American families to leave Saudi Arabia because it was no longer safe for them to live there. Then, two weeks later, Osama bin Laden issued an audiotape, broadcast on Aljazeera TV, referring to the recent capture of Saddam Hussein and calling on Muslims to "continue the jihad to check the conspiracies that are hatched against the Islamic nation."
As for bin Laden's second wish, for decades, observers have prematurely predicted the demise of the House of Saud. At this writing, the House of Saud may or may not be experiencing its last days, but at the very least, the kingdom has entered a historic new era. In the past, Al Qaeda's attacks in Saudi Arabia have been aimed at foreigners rather than the House of Saud itself. But beginning with a bombing in Riyadh on May 12, 2003, a low-intensity civil war had begun. "There is now an openly declared war by Al Qaeda within the kingdom," says Ibrahim, who was the Middle East correspondent for the New York Times for many years. "Stability and security have gone by the wayside. You have a regime that is manifestly unable to deliver on its promises, and even unable to defend the expatriates living there."
And with the advent of Aljazeera's Qatar-based satellite TV news, non-state-controlled, non-Saudi voices are fanning the flames. Caught between its exposure to the West and the puritanical strain of Islam that controls its most powerful political institutions, a division embodied by Crown Prince Abdullah, who still believes the country has to crack down on terrorists and accommodate the West, and Interior Minister Prince Nayef, who leans toward the militant clerics, the House of Saud is in a state of paralysis. Initiating timid reforms while fearful of plunging the country into strife, the kingdom has no clear path to follow. As 2004 began, Saudi Arabia was being torn apart from the inside. "Not to be too melodramatic about it, but it is High Noon," says Ibrahim.
And for the moment, if the House of Saud were to be toppled, there is no alternative political force except militant clerics who are sympathetic to Osama bin Laden -- not exactly a pleasant prospect.
In American policy circles, wild scenarios abound for dealing with such a crisis, including the seizure of Saudi oil fields by the American military. Perhaps not coincidentally, a 1973 U.S. plan to do exactly that surfaced on January 1, 2004. It should be noted, however, that such a course of action is far easier to talk about than to execute. "You cannot take over oil fields," explains Ibrahim, noting continuing attacks on the fields in Iraq during the current American occupation. "They are too vast and too vulnerable, both under the ground and over the ground. All it takes is a match."
If the past is any guide, if a militant Islamic fundamentalist regime were to take over Saudi Arabia, the prognosis is not pretty. In 1979, in Iran, when fundamentalists overturned the pro Western shah and ended up with control of the oil fields, the price of oil skyrocketed. The same outcome could occur again, and this time the whole picture would be complicated by the fact that the Saudis control one-fourth of the known oil reserves in the world. In addition, rapidly escalating oil consumption in China and the rest of Asia will only increase competition among America's rivals for those resources. Thus, the relationship between the House of Bush and the House of Saud appears to be coming to a difficult end -- at a time when the steady supply of oil for America is more vulnerable than ever to the highly volatile forces of Islamic fundamentalism.
How the United States will deal with these twin threats -- Islamist terror and the potential loss of its most important source of energy -- is one of the great issues the country will confront in the immediate future. As for terrorism, it may be that even if President Bush had implemented Richard Clarke's proposals to take on Al Qaeda, such measures would not have stopped 9/11. We will never know. But switching the villain from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein and Iraq appears to have been a dangerous and costly diversion at best.
And it is undeniable that a new American vision is needed. But it is unlikely to come from an administration that in December 2003 appointed James Baker to oversee the "restructuring" of Iraq's $100-billion-plus debt, which includes $25 billion owed to Iraq's biggest creditor, none other than the House of Saud. Moreover, it is difficult to believe that the answers can come from a man in the White House whose personal and political fortunes, from Harken Energy to the Carlyle Group, are so deeply entwined with the House of Saud, whose extended political family has taken in more than $1.4 billion from the Saudis, whose relationship with them goes back more than two decades, and who apparently feels so indebted to the House of Saud that he has censored twenty-eight pages in Congress's 9/11 report as if the billionaire Saudi royals are somehow more worthy of the government's concern than are the victims of 9/11.
Meanwhile, as the 2004 presidential campaign gets under way, President Bush has assiduously cultivated an image as an indomitable commander-in-chief who remains unassailable on the issue of national security -- an image that is belied by one incontrovertible fact: Never before has an American president been so closely tied to a foreign power that harbors and supports our country's mortal enemies.
NOTES:
1. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, screenplay by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, story by Dorothy M. Johnson, directed by John Ford.
2. Interview with Richard Clarke.
3. Ibid.
4. Interview with Charles Lewis.
5. Elsa Walsh, "The Prince: How the Saudi Ambassador Became Washington's Indispensable Operator," New Yorker, March 24, 2003.
6. Romesh Ratnesar, "A Twist of the Arm; Pushing Saudi Arabia to Up Its Antiterrorism Efforts, the U.S. Is Telling Riyadh It's Next on al-Qaeda's List," Time, December 9, 2002, p. 45.
7. Jack Shafer, "The PowerPoint That Rocked the Pentagon," Slate, August 7, 2002.
8. Ibid.
9. Dick Cheney, speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, August 26, 2002, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html .
10. President George W. Bush, Speech to UN General Assembly, September 12, 2002, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/0 ... 912-1.html .
11. Ari Fleischer, press briefing, December 2,2002, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases1200211 ... 202-6.html .
12. Richard Sale, "Staff Change Means Mideast Policy Shift," United Press International, February 26, 2003.
13. Ibid.
14. Seymour Hersh, "The Stovepipe," New Yorker, October 27, 2003, www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact .
15. Lisa Beyer et al., "Inside the Kingdom," Time, September 15, 2003, p. 38.
16. Interview with Youssef Ibrahim.
17. Ibid.