For no institution is the pain of failure more personal than for our military. When the military fails, their friends die and leave widows. Many of the living lose limbs or acquire post-traumatic stress disorder. And no institution has tried as hard as the U.S. military to understand why failure occurs or has worked as diligently to correct mistakes so that they do not recur. The formal Lessons Learned process is ingrained in the U.S. military's way of doing business. And yet there is Iraq.
The U.S. military is so richly deserving of our thanks and respect that few civilians have been willing to suggest that the Iraq disaster is at all the military's fault. Clearly the elected civilian commander-in-chief, his seasoned Vice President, the two-time Secretary of Defense, Congress, and others should bear most of the blame. But the military, more precisely the officer corps, and specifically many general officers over the course of thirty years, deserve some culpability. I say that not to add to the chorus of scapegoating and finger-pointing, but so that we as a nation can follow in the military's tradition of lessons learned, so that we can avoid Santayana's condemnation. And I believe the trail leads back to the military's own reactions to the national failure that was the Vietnam War. To understand Iraq, we need to remember Vietnam and what happened in the U.S. military after that war....
....Despite Shali's greater willingness to use force, a risk aversion deriving from the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine continued. That attitude was taken to its illogical extreme in dealing with terrorism. Before 9/11, as the President's head of counterterrorism, I came to the reluctant but inescapable conclusion that the U.S. military leadership did not want to be part of offensive operations against terrorists. On several occasions the National Security Advisor and his cabinet colleagues in the NSC Principals Committee asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to plan operations to go after terrorists. Sometimes the targets involved were just one man—a lone al Qaeda operative in a hotel room in Khartoum in 1998 or in 1995 a single terrorist working in the Water Department in Qatar. Every time the military came back, recommending against the operations and presenting plans intentionally oversized, involving enormously outsized forces that would have blown any chance of surprise and would have looked as if we were invading. The man working in the Qatar Water Department was reported to be the uncle of 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, whom we had hunted down in Pakistan in 1995.
The man in Qatar had been secretly indicted in New York, and evidence suggested that he had had a hand in other operations and would probably plan more. We wanted him badly, but we knew that if we approached the Qatari government to arrest him and hand him over, someone would probably tip him off and he would escape. The CIA correctly said it had no capability to stage covert snatches in Qatar, nor did the FBI. So, remembering that there were small Special Operations Command units trained to do just such things, I urged that the military be ordered to go in with a small team. The Chairman came back not with a small covert unit of Special Operations forces but with an enormous force package and a recommendation against using it. The principals decided not to overrule the military and instructed us to ask the Qataris to arrest the terrorist. We did, but then the Qatari police went to do so, our terrorist had, predictably, just fled the country. The man in the Qatar Water Department did, as we suspected, go on to plan other terrorist strikes. His name was Khalid Sheik Mohammed. He went on to mastermind the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
