During these last few days, New York City and the nation's capital experienced some 9-11 déjà vu moments. In New York, a 747 belonging to the Air Force flew at an extremely low altitude circling around the southern tip of Manhattan with an F-16 fighter jet trailing close behind, sending people on the ground scrambling in panic. And in Washington, an airplane accidentally flew into restricted airspace, which caused the evacuation of the Capitol building, a lockdown of the White House, and President Obama's relocation to a more secure location. These conspicuous reminders of 9-11 come on the heels of the President’s decision to release of Top Secret memos detailing the interrogation techniques used by the Bush Administration following the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks. If policymakers are wise, they will take a moment to reflect on 9-11 and consider the sober charge the Commander-in-Chief bears to keep the nation safe and the means he may need to achieve that end.
Our two previous Presidents employed different approaches to the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda and others: President Bush viewed the conflict as a war, while President Clinton saw it more as a law enforcement issue. I wrote an article in 2006--while Democratic criticism of the means Bush chose reached a fevered pitch--in which I likened the two approaches to two characters from the movie Wyatt Earp (Warner Bros. 1994): Bush to the aggressive, stern Earp, willing to preemptively strike when violence appears imminent; Clinton to the affable Dodge City Sheriff Ed Masterson, more inclined not to use force to bring about compliance to the law.
Early in the movie, Earp learns that there are certain types of hardened, violent men who will not back down, who only understand force. While his family is moving West, a teenage Wyatt heads into a frontier town for supplies, where he witnesses two men brutally gun each other down in broad daylight. He's shocked and sickened by the harsh scene. Later that night Wyatt’s father, a lawyer (and a Justice of the Peace at some points in real life), played by Gene Hackman, checks in on his son at their campsite. “How you doing Wyatt?”, the elder Earp asks. "I'm okay Pa," Wyatt replies. His father continues, “You know I'm a man that believes in the law… But there are plenty of men who don't care about the law. Men who'll take part in all kinds of viciousness and don't care who gets hurt. In fact, the more they get hurt, the better. When you find yourself in a fight with such viciousness...hit first if you can. And when you do hit, hit to kill. You'll know. Don't worry. You'll know when it comes to that.”
Wyatt (now a grown man played by Kevin Costner) puts his father’s advice into practice as a sheriff in Dodge City, Kansas. He’s a deliberate man, not given to much introspection or overly concerned about what others think of his techniques of keeping the peace. For example, the Sheriff’s not afraid to pistol-whip someone upon the first sign of resistance. By contrast, Ed Masterson, a new deputy in Dodge City, prefers to use his innate ability to get along with people to convince them to make good choices. Wyatt identifies the problem early during Ed's first confrontation with a couple of armed cowboys, who’ve obviosuly been drinking. Ed and another deputy stop the men and inform them that there is a law against carrying firearms in Dodge City (which is clearly posted at the town's entrance, so the cowboys probably already knew they were in the wrong). Wyatt watches from nearby. One of the cowboy challenges Masterson, “Says who?” The deputy responds, “Says the law, that’s who,” but Wyatt has already heard enough. He comes up from behind and pistol-whips both cowboys, knocking them to the ground and yells with exasperation at Ed, “You talk too much!” “You didn’t have to do that Wyatt,” Ed responds. Wyatt takes the cowboys’ holstered guns away and then searches them, finding one had a small pistol concealed in his hand ready to be fired. Ed looks at the pistol, “Well, I’ll be a son-of-a-b----.”
Later that night, Earp gives his new deputy some advice, “If I were you, I'd look for another line of work. Politics, maybe…You could get killed in this line of work, Ed. You could get people around you killed. This is a harsh land, Ed. It doesn't suffer fools." "I'm not a fool, Wyatt," Masterson responds. "No, you're not. But you're not a deliberate man, Ed. I don't sense that about you. You’re too affable.” The townspeople, however, don't see it Wyatt's way: they prefer Masterson's congenial style and make him sheriff and send Earp packing to Texas. Unfortunately, Wyatt’s concerns about Ed prove accurate. The Sheriff has an encounter, much like the one Wyatt witnessed, but this time Masterson ends up dead. Dodge City sinks into lawlessness, and its leaders send an urgent telegram to Wyatt in Texas begging him to return.
Lamentably, President Clinton, by in large, employed the Ed Masterson approach in his dealings with Al Qaeda throughout his time in office. That group declared war on the United States back in the early 90’s and committed acts of war throughout that decade, starting with the bombing the World Trade Center in 1993, a little over a month into his Presidency. Six people died. Rather than meeting force with force, Clinton’s response was to open a criminal investigation, which resulted in some convictions a year later. Seven months after the World Trade Center attack, Al Qaeda trained forces ambushed of U.S. Army Rangers in Mogadishu, Somalia killing 18 Americans and dragging some of their mutilated bodies through the streets. Eighty-three other soldiers were injured in the gunfight. The United States responded by pulling out of Somalia. Then in 1998, Al Qaeda simultaneously bombed two United States’ embassies in Africa (Kenya and Tanzania) killing hundreds and wounding thousands more. The United States responded with some inconsequential cruise missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan. Finally in 2000, the last year of the Clinton Presidency, Al Qaeda bombed the U.S.S. Cole off the coast of Yemen, seeking to blast it out of the water and succeeding in greatly damaging the ship and killing 17 Navy crewmen, while injuring 39 others.
Despite the repeated acts of war, the Clinton Administration chose not to take the fight to Al Qaeda. His law enforcement approach to the conflict meant all the rules of law, not war, applied including presumption of innocence, restrictions on evidence that can presented at trial, and the difficult (often impossible) task of bringing the accused and witnesses and other evidence from overseas to the United States. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda continued to grow and plot and carry out attacks against the United States unmolested during Clinton's time in office. The President even had the opportunity to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden in 2000, but apparently allowed legal and political concerns to let him slip away.
George Bush, in contrast, following the 9-11 attacks, took a Wyatt Earp approach to dealing with Al Qaeda. He had gone to the smoldering Ground Zero and the Pentagon, while the smell of burnt flesh was still in the air; he had visited with and sought to console many of the thousands who lost loved ones that day and determined that he would do his part in preventing another such attack from ever happening again on American soil. Bush deployed the military throughout the world to go after Al Qaeda and take away their safe havens. One early victory came in in Afghanistan in November 2001, when U.S. intelligence pinpointed Mohammed Atef's, location--the leader of the Al Qaeda attacks against the United State embassies in 1998--and directed air strikes to take him out. The U.S. military, the CIA and our allies also captured Al Qaeda leaders around the globe. Some of these were submitted to harsh interrogation in order to determine if other attacks against the United States were imminent and learn more about the organization’s structure and bases of operation. One of those captured leaders was Abu Zubaydah. He was in charge of a thwarted plot to hit Los Angeles' Liberty Tower in a 9-11 style attack using terrorists from the Far East. He is also believed to have run the training camps in Afghanistan where some of the 9-11 hijackers trained. While being interrogated, Zubaydah revealed information that led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM)--the Mastermind of 9-11--in Pakistan in early 2003. KSM recruited for, helped bankroll and oversaw the 9-11 attacks as well as the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Further, as was already suspected, KSM admitted to (even boasted about) personally decapitating American journalist Daniel Pearl. Al Qaeda filmed the gruesome act and posted it online. KSM, at first, resisted efforts to divulge anything about Al Qaeda’s structure and future plans, only saying "You will know soon,": after being water-boarded, he revealed a lot of actionable intelligence, which the United States used to further break up Al Qaeda’s organization. The last three CIA Directors all stated valuable information in fighting the War on Terror came from harsh interrogation. That the United States has not been struck again since 9-11 says much about George Bush's Wyatt Earp strategy.
Barack Obama appears, so far, to be more of the Ed Masterson mold. Though he decided to keep key members of the Bush military team on including Defense Secretary Gates and General Petreaus, he informed them that we were no longer fighting the War on Terror, but were now engaged in overseas contingency operations. He further decided to release the Top Secret memos detailing the harsh interrogation techniques used by the Bush Administration, thus allowing our enemies to know how to train to resist American interrogators. Obama also opened the door to the prosecution of those established the guidance for the program (in a flagrant flip-flop from his earlier stated position), apparently unconcerned about what affect that may have on CIA agents as they wonder if they too could be subject to criminal prosecution.
President Obama's more friendly approach to our enemies is not limited to fighting what was previously known as the War on Terror. He stated during his campaign and now again as President that he's willing to meet with the Iranian regime without any preconditions regarding their nuclear weapons program or requiring Iran to renounce their intention "to wipe Israel off the map." Additionally, North Korea launched a long-range missile right over Japan, and the United States barely even responded. Incredulously, given the launch, the President announced plans to scale back our anti-ballistic shield program. Further, he glad-handed with Venezuelan "President" Hugo Chavez last week, even though the dictator regularly spews hatred against America and is actively creating an anti-American alliance in the hemisphere. Chavez has also befriended Iranian madman President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and recently hosted joint military exercises with Russia. Obama's style in dealing with all these men is very much in the Ed Masterson vane. Displaying such weakness in the face of thugs like Chavez (which is how even Nancy Pelosi described him) only invites their scorn and, in all likelihood, their future aggression.
John Kennedy learned this lesson in spades following his Vienna Summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the spring of 1961. Kennedy, like Obama, was trying to make a break with his predecessor (Eisenhower) and present a more friendly face to the Soviets. Khrushchev sized up the new President and decided he was weak. A little over two months later the Soviets began building the Berlin Wall, and within a year they were moving nuclear missiles into Cuba, precipitating the Crisis in the fall of 1962. Most historians see a direct link between Kennedy's performance at Vienna and the crises that followed, which brought the world to the brink of war and even nuclear Armageddon. (See NY Times article re the Summit).
In the end, the times dictate the type of President the United States requires, but it's almost always going to be a combination of a Wyatt Earp and an Ed Masterson. One can say Bush was too tough, but he clearly understood the kind of vicious men who care nothing about the law or human life, and he wanted to protect the United States from them. Obama, like Masterson, puts great credence in his personal charm and his ability to guide people to the right choice. So far it's had no effect on our enemies' actions including Iran and North Korea or deterred Russia or China from becoming increasing more aggressive towards the United States. Wyatt's warning to Ed Masterson seems just as relevant: it is a harsh time and "and it doesn't suffer fools," even well intentioned, affable ones.