The Hell of Good Intentions Page 40

  14. Rice and Zelikow worked together on the NSC staff under George H. W. Bush and later coauthored a book on their experience. Zelikow attended briefings on U.S. counterterror policy as a member of Bush’s transition team, and Rice hired him to draft the White House’s National Security Strategy in 2002. After Rice was appointed secretary of state in 2005, she picked Zelikow as her counselor at the State Department. Given these close professional ties, Zelikow was hardly the ideal person to help determine if Rice, Bush, or other administration officials bore significant responsibility for failing to prevent the September 11 attacks.

  15. Ernest May, “When Government Writes History: The 9/11 Commission Report,” History News Network, June 24, 2005, at http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/11972.

  16. See Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 245.

  17. The key reports are: Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade, available at https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/taguba.pdf; Department of the Army, The Inspector General, Detainee Operations Inspection (July 21, 2004), at www1.umn.edu/humanrts/OathBetrayed/Mikolashek%20Report.pdf; and Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations (Washington, DC: August 2004). On Rumsfeld’s role in approving harsher interrogation methods, see Mayer, The Dark Side, pp. 220, 240–41.

  18. “Abu Ghraib, Whitewashed,” editorial, The New York Times, July 24, 2004.

  19. Eric Rosenburg, “Abu Ghraib Is Like ‘Animal House,’ but Rumsfeld Should Not Resign,” Deseret News, August 25, 2004, at www.deseretnews.com/article/595086544/Abu-Ghraib-like-Animal-House-but-Rumsfeld-should-not-resign.html .

  20. “Pentagon Panel: Top Brass Was Lax in Abu Ghraib Oversight,” NBC News, August 8, 2004, at www.nbcnews.com/id/5807013/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/pentagon-panel-top-brass-was-lax-abu-ghraib-oversight/#.U9aZglYQf0A.

  21. “Getting Away with Torture: Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees,” Human Rights Watch, April 2005, p. 21.

  22. See Seymour M. Hersh, “The General’s Report,” The New Yorker, June 25, 2007.

  23. Bush admitted approving the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Vice President Cheney said publicly that he had been a “big supporter” of the same technique. See David Cole, “Obama’s Torture Problem,” NYRBlog, November 18, 2010, at www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/nov/18/obamas-torture-problem/.

  24. Charlie Savage, “Obama Reluctant to Look into Bush Programs,” The New York Times, January 11, 2009.

  25. See especially Mark Danner, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), and Mayer, The Dark Side.

  26. See Paul Farhi, “Bill Kristol Knows His Predictions Have Been Bad, but He’s Going to Keep Making Them,” The Washington Post, February 17, 2016; and Stephen M. Walt, “The Shattered Kristol Ball,” The National Interest 97 (September/October 2008).

  27. See Steven R. Weisman, “Wolfowitz Resigns, Ending Long Fight at World Bank,” The New York Times, May 18, 2007.

  28. In that role Abrams frequently colluded with Israeli officials seeking to derail peace initiatives pushed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others. See Jim Lobe, “US/Mideast: Rice Faces Formidable Mideast Foe,” InterPress News, February 21, 2007, at www.ipsnews.net/2007/02/us-mideast-rice-faces-formidable-white-house-foe/; and Shahar Smooha, “All the Dreams We Had Are Now Gone,” Ha’aretz, July 19, 2007.

  29. See David Rose, “The Gaza Bombshell,” Vanity Fair, April 2008; “Hamas Coup in Gaza,” International Institute for Strategic Studies, Strategic Comments 13, no. 5 (June 2007); and “Elliot Abrams’ Uncivil War,” Conflicts Forum (2007), at www.conflictsforum.org/2007/elliot-abrams-uncivil-war/.

  30. See Eric Alterman, “The Rehabilitation of Elliott Abrams,” The Nation, March 13, 2013. Tellingly, Alterman writes, “What does it say about our most influential and important institutions that this lifelong embarrassment to American democracy can be embraced as one of their own?”

  31. See Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Weisman, and Eric Lichtblau, “Trump Overrules Tillerson, Rejecting Elliott Abrams for Deputy Secretary of State,” The New York Times, February 10, 2017.

  32. See Stephen M. Walt, “So Wrong for So Long: Why Neoconservatives Are Never Right,” Foreign Policy (online) at http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/21/neoconservatives-so-wrong-for-so-long-iraq-war-iran-deal/.

  33. Miller, Malley, Indyk, Kurtzer, and Ross have all written conflicting accounts of the Oslo process, placing blame for its failure on a number of culprits (including the Palestinians). See Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” New York Review of Books, August 9, 2001; Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004); Aaron D. Miller, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (New York: Bantam, 2008); Martin Indyk, Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009); and Daniel B. Kurtzer et al., The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Israeli-Palestinian Peace 1989–2011 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

  34. The Israeli journalist Barak Ravid called Ross “one of the most central people in the White House in everything that has to do with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He has whispered in the ear of U.S. President Barack Obama, maintained a secret and direct channel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his envoy Isaac Molho, and undermined U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell … Despite the fact that he is considered to be Netanyahu’s man in the White House, he did not manage to get almost anything from the Israeli prime minister. In Ramallah, his status is even worse. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pushed him aside and effectively declared him a persona non grata. As far as Washington was concerned, he had a far greater impact: mainly a negative one.” See “Dennis Ross Discovers Palestine,” Ha’aretz, January 9, 2009, at www.haaretz.com/blogs/diplomania/dennis-ross-discovers-palestine-1.406290.

  35. Ross believed that the United States should be ready to use force to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, and he cosigned a public letter expressing doubts about the emerging agreement in June 2015. See “Public Statement on U.S. Policy Toward the Iran Nuclear Negotiations,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, June 24, 2015, at www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/public-statement-on-u.s.-policy-toward-the-iran-nuclear-negotiations. Ross continued to push a hard-line approach toward Iran after the agreement was signed, recommending that the United States give Israel bombs designed to destroy Iran’s buried nuclear facilities “and the aircraft needed to carry it.” See Dennis B. Ross, “How to Make Iran Keep Its Word,” Politico, July 29, 2015.

  36. On Indyk’s support for the Iraq War, see Martin S. Indyk and Kenneth M. Pollack, “How Bush Can Avoid the Inspections Trap,” The New York Times, January 25, 2003; and Martin S. Indyk and Kenneth M. Pollack, “Lock and Load,” Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2002.

  37. Dennis Ross and David Makovsky, Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East (New York: Viking, 2009).

  38. Experts disagree on whether the relevant agencies failed to do an adequate job of collection and analysis in the run-up to war in Iraq, or whether they allowed themselves to be politicized and manipulated by a White House determined to go to war. Either way, it was a significant analytic failure. For alternative perspectives, see Joshua Rovner, Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Thomas Powers, “How They Got Their Bloody War,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010; and Fulton Armstrong (with reply by Thomas Powers), “The CIA and WMDs: The Damnin
g Evidence,” New York Review of Books, August 19, 2010.

  39. See Adam Goldman, “Ex-C.I.A. Officer Suspected of Compromising Chinese Informants Is Arrested,” The New York Times, January 16, 2018.

  40. See Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, “CIA Officers Make Grave Mistakes, Get Promoted,” NBC News, February 9, 2011, at www.nbcnews.com/id/41484983/ns/us_news-security/t/cia-officers-make-grave-mistakes-get-promoted/#.U9uvFFYQf0C. See also Matthew Schofield, “CIA Knew It Had the Wrong Man, but Kept Him Anyway,” McClatchy News Service, June 30, 2016, at www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article86890087.html.

  41. Clapper later told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that his answer was the “least untruthful” he could give in an open hearing.

  42. A signature strike is an attack on a suspect whose behavior fits the assumed profile of terrorist activity, even if the identity of the target is not known. See Amy Davidson, “John Brennan’s Kill List,” The New Yorker, January 7, 2013.

  43. www.c-span.org/video/?300266-1/obama-administration-counterterrorism-strategy.

  44. Carrie Johnson and Joby Warrick, “CIA Destroyed 92 Interrogation Tapes, Probe Says,” The Washington Post, March 3, 2009.

  45. See Marisa Taylor and Jonathan Landay, “After CIA Gets Secret Whistleblower Email, Congress Worries About More Spying,” July 25, 2014, at www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/07/25/234484/after-cia-gets-secret-whistleblower.html.

  46. See Jonathan S. Landay and Ali Watkins, “CIA Admits It Broke into Senate Computers; Senators Call for Spy Chief’s Ouster,” at www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article24771274.html#storylink=cpy.

  47. After the initial reports of CIA monitoring, Brennan accused lawmakers of making “spurious allegations about C.I.A. actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.” He subsequently added, “I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.” See Mark Mazzetti and Carl Hulse, “CIA Admits Penetrating Senate Intel Committee Computers,” The New York Times, July 31, 2014.

  48. Dustin Volz and Lauren Fox, “CIA Review Clears Its Spies of Wrongdoing,” National Journal, January 15, 2015.

  49. Carl Hulse and Mark Mazzetti, “President Expresses Confidence in CIA Director,” The New York Times, August 1, 2014. On the negative effects of the torture regime, see Douglas Johnson, Alberto Mora, and Averell Schmidt, “The Strategic Costs of Torture,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 5 (September/October 2016).

  50. On the pervasive weakness of congressional oversight, see Michael Glennon, National Security and Double Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 52–57.

  51. Glennon, National Security and Double Government, pp. 61–64.

  52. See Katrina Manson, “The Undercover Spy Picked as CIA Chief,” Financial Times, March 17, 2018.

  53. See Dan Lamothe, “Top Two Officers and Other Sailors Aboard the USS Fitzgerald to Be Disciplined Following Deadly Collision at Sea,” The Washington Post, August 17, 2017.

  54. See Thomas Ricks, “Whatever Happened to Accountability?” Harvard Business Review, October 2012; James Fallows, “The Tragedy of the American Military,” The Atlantic, January/February 2015; William Astore, “An Army of None,” Salon.com, March 23, 2016; at www.salon.com/2016/03/23/an_army_of_none_the_u_s_military_is_more_powerful_less_accountable_and_more_dangerous_than_ever_before/.

  55. Thomas E. Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today (New York: Penguin, 2012), pp. 388–94.

  56. See Andrew Bacevich, “Winning: Trump Loves to Do It, but American Generals Have Forgotten How,” TomDispatch.com, at www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176215/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich%2C_the_swamp_of_war.

  57. The Defense Department defines “unwanted sexual contact” as “completed and attempted oral, anal, and vaginal penetration with any body part or object, and the unwanted touching of genitalia and other sexually-related areas of the body.” Based on surveys, the Pentagon estimates that at least nineteen thousand servicemen or -women experienced an incident of this type in recent years. Total reported assaults are much lower, but still exceed three thousand cases per year. See Department of Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, FY 2012 at www.sapr.mil/public/docs/reports/FY12_DoD_SAPRO_Annual_Report_on_Sexual_Assault-VOLUME_ONE.pdf.

  58. The perpetrators of the Haditha massacre received light sentences under a plea agreement; Sergeant Bales was given a life sentence. See Charlie Savage and Elisabeth Bumiller, “An Iraqi Massacre, a Light Sentence, and a Question of Military Justice,” The New York Times, January 27, 2012; and Michael E. Miller, “U.S. Army Mass Murderer: ‘The Hate Grows Not Only for Insurgents, but Towards Everyone Who Isn’t American,’” The Washington Post, June 8, 2015.

  59. “Beginning in 2010,” notes Seth Jones of the RAND Corporation, “there was a rise in the number of Salafi-jihadist groups and fighters, particularly in Syria and North Africa. There was also an increase in the number of attacks perpetrated by al Qa’ida and its affiliates.” See Seth G. Jones, A Persistent Threat: The Evolution of Al Qa’ida and Other Salafi Jihadists (Washington, DC: RAND Corporation, 2014), p. x. See also International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, Living under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from U.S. Drone Practices (2012); and Hassan Abbas, “How Drones Create More Terrorists,” The Atlantic, August 20, 2013.

  60. Ricks, The Generals, p. 392; Barton Gellman and Thomas E. Ricks, “U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight; Failure to Send More Troops Termed Major Error,” The Washington Post, April 17, 2002.

  61. Associated Press, “Sex Is Major Reason Military Commanders Are Fired,” January 21, 2013; at www.military.com/daily-news/2013/01/21/sex-is-major-reason-military-commanders-are-fired.html.

  62. For a careful campaign analysis suggesting that deploying U.S. troops would have worked, see Peter John Paul Krause, “The Last Good Chance: A Reassessment of U.S. Operations at Tora Bora,” Security Studies 17, no. 4 (2008).

  63. Civilians in the Pentagon and the White House bear primary responsibility for failing to plan the occupation, but Franks did not challenge their rosy assessments or inadequate preparations. See Ricks, The Generals, chap. 27.

  64. See Dexter Filkins, “The Fall of the Warrior King,” The New York Times Magazine, October 23, 2005; Ricks, The Generals, pp. 422–25.

  65. See “Marine to Serve No Time in Haditha, Iraq Killings Case,” USA Today, January 24, 2012; and “Squad Leader in Haditha Killings Discharged from Marine Corps,” Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2012.

  66. Nor is it clear how innovative the surge really was, insofar as many of the tactical innovations Petraeus adopted had been developed by units serving in the field. On this point, see James A. Russell, Innovation, Transformation, and War: Counterinsurgency Operations in Anbar and Ninewa Provinces, Iraq, 2005–2007 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

  67. When he announced the “surge,” President Bush said its aim was “to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad” to “help make reconciliation possible … these [U.S.] teams bring together military and civilian experts to help local Iraqi communities pursue reconciliation.” See “President’s Address to the Nation,” January 10, 2007; at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-7.html. See also Peter Beinart, “The Surge Fallacy,” The Atlantic, September 2015; and Peter W. Galbraith, Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), chap. 1.

  68. Bacevich explains: “Without pertinent standards, there can be no accountability. Absent accountability, failings and weaknesses escape notice. Eventually, what you’ve become accustomed to seems tolerable. Twenty-first-century Americans inured to wars that never end have long since forgotten that bringing such conflicts to a prompt and successful conclusion once defined the very essence of what generals
were expected to do.” See “Winning.”

  69. See Petraeus’s testimony in “The Status of the War and Political Developments in Iraq,” Hearing before the Committee on Armed Services, 110th Congress, 1st sess., September 10, 2007 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2008). In a December 2009 hearing on Afghanistan, McChrystal told a congressional committee, “The next eighteen months will likely be decisive and ultimately enable success,” adding that “we can and will accomplish this mission.” The following month, he told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that he “believed we had turned the tide.” Petraeus issued a similarly optimistic assessment a year later, though it was at odds with U.S. intelligence assessments and followed by a major increase in the overall level of violence. See “Afghanistan,” Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, 111th Congress, 1st sess., December 2 and 8, 2009 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010), p. 103; “Top General Optimistic About Afghanistan,” ABC News, January 11, 2010, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABdm3bdUeDE; and Josh Rogin, “Petraeus’s Optimism About Afghanistan Not Shared at CIA,” Foreign Policy, April 27, 2011, at http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/04/27/petraeuss_optimism_about_afghanistan_not_shared_at_cia_0.