Blame Dodger - The Age of Sacred Terror - Book Review

National Review, Nov 11, 2002 by Byron York

The Age of Sacred Terror, by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon (Random House, 490 pp., $25.95)

'There are few more durable illusions in American life than the omnipotent presidency," write Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, two former Clinton National Security Council staffers, in their new book. "Yet anyone who has worked in the White House knows that the office has remarkably little real power, not only when it comes to dealing with Congress and the judiciary but also in running the vast, unwieldy contraption that is the executive branch."

The alleged weakness of the presidency has been a common complaint over the years, one favored particularly by unsuccessful presidents and their aides. Benjamin and Simon argue that that weakness greatly hampered Bill Clinton as he tried to respond to the terrorist attacks- the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, the African embassy attacks in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000-that befell the United States during his watch. The president fully grasped the terrorist threat, the authors write, "but others in the government only glimpsed the problem." As much as Clinton wanted to fight back, he was repeatedly frustrated by the government he putatively ran.

For example, after the embassy bombings, the White House ordered the State Department to prepare for possible chemical or biological attacks at embassies around the world. The department resisted. Meetings were held, and then more meetings, and still more meetings, but nothing was done. Finally, the White House gave up. "Odd as it may seem," Benjamin and Simon conclude, "a presidential phone call to convince the State Department to protect its own people was something no one could seriously contemplate." Clinton, it seems, lacked the power to tell his secretary of state what to do.

Nor could the president impose his will on the Pentagon. When Clinton realized that cruise-missile attacks would not be sufficient to get Osama bin Laden, and instead wanted a "boots on the ground" plan, he got the runaround from Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Instead of trying to address the problem, Benjamin and Simon write, Shelton gave the White House a proposal for a huge troop commitment that he knew would be politically unacceptable. Shelton's maneuver left a "bad taste," the authors say. "The civilian leaders . . . felt that the Pentagon was blowing them off when they badly needed a solution."

And then there was the FBI. Not only did director Louis Freeh harbor a "hatred" of Bill Clinton, Benjamin and Simon claim, but attorney general Janet Reno, Freeh's boss, "confessed to the White House that she simply had no control over the director." Neither did the president, who, beset by scandal and under investigation by the FBI for alleged campaign-finance violations, would have found it politically damaging to fire Freeh. The authors' conclusion: "Freeh could not be removed; the Bureau could not be held accountable."

Much of this book is a tale of such frustration. Faced with internal opposition, Clinton and his team accomplished less than they hoped in the fight against terrorism. But the authors do not truly grapple with a glaring weakness in their case: Yes, presidents complain about the bureaucracy, but some are able to bend it to their will, while others are bent by it. George W. Bush, for example, has encountered resistance from the State Department, the Pentagon, and others in the war on terrorism. But those interests-the same ones that pushed Clinton around-have largely given way in the face of Bush's determination. Bush is not an omnipotent president, but he is, unlike Clinton, a leader, and the people who work for him know that.

But a stubborn bureaucracy, it turns out, was not Clinton's only challenge. According to Benjamin and Simon, Clinton also had a serious problem with the press. In particular, journalists did not believe his explanation for his August 1998 decision to launch a cruise-missile strike on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The strike, along with another missile attack on al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, came just days after Clinton's testimony in the Monica Lewinsky case, and many reporters suspected they were a "wag the dog" maneuver to divert attention from the scandal. Benjamin and Simon claim that such suspicions were completely unfounded because of "the absurdity of the idea that any president, and especially one with such a famously acute political sensibility, would actually think he could get away with wagging the dog."

And yet, that is what many reporters believed-and the weakness of the evidence that al-Shifa was involved in the production of chemical weapons did nothing to help the White House. That skepticism was fatal, the authors argue, because it led the public to tragically underestimate the danger posed by bin Laden and his terrorist organization. "The dismissal of the al-Shifa attack as a scandalous blunder had serious consequences, including the failure of the public to comprehend the nature of the al-Qaeda threat," Benjamin and Simon write. "With public discussion of the threat in the years before September 11, there would have been a chance to talk about sustained military action against Afghanistan and the use of U.S. ground forces to hunt down the terrorists."