I believe Dick Cheney earned the nickname ‘Darth’ from his September 16, 2001 appearance on Meet the Press when he had the following exchange with host Tim Russert:
[In this piece, all emphasis is mine]
MR. RUSSERT: When Osama bin Laden took responsibility for blowing up the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, U.S. embassies, several hundred died, the United States launched 60 tomahawk missiles into his training sites in Afghanistan. It only emboldened him. It only inspired him and seemed even to increase his recruitment. Is it safe to say that that kind of response is not something we’re considering, in that kind of minute magnitude?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I’m going to be careful here, Tim, because I — clearly it would be inappropriate for me to talk about operational matters, specific options or the kinds of activities we might undertake going forward. We do, indeed, though, have, obviously, the world’s finest military. They’ve got a broad range of capabilities. And they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy.
We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
Cheney went on to say that we’d have to “have on the payroll some very unsavory characters” if we were going to penetrate the terrorist network that attacked us and break it up. At the time, only a small percentage of Americans disagreed with the vice-president. Clearly, we couldn’t allow the 9/11 attacks to go unpunished, nor leave the organizers free to plot follow-on attacks. Aggressively going after al-Qaeda, using some fairly rough tactics if necessary, wasn’t controversial. No one understood that to mean using torture, secret prisons, or tearing up habeas corpus. I think people envisioned something much closer to what the Obama administration approved last year and is being reported in today’s New York Times. Because al-Qaeda operated mainly in failed states or countries hostile to the United States, we couldn’t expect cooperation in arresting and extraditing them in a traditional law enforcement sense. In certain cases, Special Operations forces would be used in covert missions. Some countries’ sovereignty would be violated. In other cases, the governments would deny cooperating with us. That was part of the landscape in 2001.
During his campaign for office, Obama emphasized that we had gone off track when we attacked Iraq and that the real job was going after the kinds of terrorists who had the desire and capability to carry out mass casualty attacks. It’s funny, but back in that Sept. 16, 2001 Meet the Press interview, Dick Cheney seemed to agree with that strategy.
MR. RUSSERT: Saddam Hussein, your old friend, his government had this to say: “The American cowboy is rearing the fruits of crime against humanity.” If we determine that Saddam Hussein is also harboring terrorists, and there’s a track record there, would we have any reluctance of going after Saddam Hussein?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No.
MR. RUSSERT: Do we have evidence that he’s harboring terrorists?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: There is — in the past, there have been some activities related to terrorism by Saddam Hussein. But at this stage, you know, the focus is over here on al-Qaida and the most recent events in New York. Saddam Hussein’s bottled up, at this point, but clearly, we continue to have a fairly tough policy where the Iraqis are concerned.
MR. RUSSERT: Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No.
It wasn’t but a few days later that Cheney changed his tune and started telling people that Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi Intelligence officer in Prague. But, initially, he took the view that the proper response to 9/11 was not to invade Iraq but to get down in the weeds and track down the perpetrators wherever they might be.
Now, that more resembles what the New York Times is reporting than what Cheney actually did.
The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents.
The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces. Officials said the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate.
While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term, officials said. Its goals are to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to “prepare the environment” for future attacks by American or local military forces, the document said. The order, however, does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries.
Now, I have two major concerns about this report. The first is related to the scope of the mission. Here’s another thing that Cheney said in that 2001 interview:
MR. RUSSERT: Even if we take out Osama bin Laden, that will not stop terrorism.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. No. He’s the target at the moment. But I don’t want to convey the impression that somehow, you know, if we had his head on a platter today, that that would solve the problem. It won’t. You’ve got this organization, as I say, called al-Qaida. It’s — somebody described it the other day as — it’s like an Internet chat room, that people who come and participate in it, for one reason or another, engage in terrorism, have sometimes different motives and ideologies, but the tactics they use, the way they operate, their targets, that will continue until we go out, basically, and make the world unsafe for terrorists. And that’s a key part of the strategy, in terms of working aggressively with those nations that have previously provided support and sustenance and sanctuary, to see to it that they no longer do that.
I have always felt that our country went in the wrong direction when we decided it was our mission to rid the world of terrorism. What we needed to do was go after people who wanted to commit terrorism against us. We should have been very careful to limit the scope to assure we had an achievable mission. In trying to make the entire world unsafe for people who ‘for one reason or another, engage in terrorism’ we embarked on a mission lacking in nuance or achievability. So, I think our strategy would have been badly flawed even if we had never attacked Iraq. And that means that Obama’s policy, which resembles what Cheney originally talked about, is also flawed because it appears to be overly broad. And it isn’t just the breadth of the mission that concerns me. Limited violations of sovereignty in the interests of neutralizing a small number of people with connections to the 9/11 attacks would have been understood, both at home and abroad, as justifiable acts of self-defense. But, nine years later, as an established and ongoing policy to combat terrorism that has only the faintest connection to the original attacks? That policy risks creating more resentment (and, therefore, new terrorists) than it eliminates. I’d almost go so far as to say that such a policy assures such an outcome.
My second major concern is legal in nature. Specifically, we have to have statutory language that legalizes what the Pentagon is doing, and I don’t think we have that right now. This isn’t a moral qualm. The Pentagon isn’t doing anything that the CIA isn’t authorized to do. But, the Pentagon is doing it without either (I believe) Congressional authorization or (I am certain) Congressional oversight. It’s not satisfactory for the administration to tell us that the National Security Council is overseeing everything that is going on. That’s good, but the Congressional Intelligence Committees should have the same access to this information as they have for the activities of the CIA.
So, I am not pleased to read about these developments. The shift in strategy is an improvement over the Bush era policies, but I still don’t think it is a strategy that will ultimately make us safer or that it has an acceptable cost. And, the activities of our government need to be authorized by statute and subject to some Congressional oversight.
