Missile Defense, Not Terror, Was Bush’s ‘Most Urgent Threat’ Before 9/11

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — In a major address four months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush declared the potential threat of ballistic missile attacks the “most urgent threat” facing the United States and his administration acted accordingly.

From its earliest days until the attacks, the Bush administration appeared to treat the missile threat as its top national security priority by aggressively lobbying for the hastened development and deployment of a controversial antiballistic missile defense system, according to a review by Global Security Newswire of administration statements and official documents.

White House officials lately, including national security adviser Condoleezza Rice testifying yesterday before a panel investigating the attacks, have argued terrorism was at least on par with a number of top priorities for the administration.

The review, a survey of presidential speeches, statements and press conferences regularly catalogued by the White House, finds senior officials were dispatched across the globe during that period to consult and assuage foreign leaders regarding the administration’s missile defense plans. 

The administration asked Congress to double annual missile defense funding to $8 billion for fiscal 2002, making it the largest U.S. weapons program. Missile defense also was a major subject at Bush’s meetings with major foreign leaders and he repeatedly spoke publicly on the matter.

At the same time, Bush said little publicly about al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, despite numerous previous suspected attacks, including the strike against the warship USS Cole in October 2000,according to the review.

Bush also said little publicly of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein prior to 9/11, though his administration has since been accused of a predisposition toward invasion and U.S. fighter jets regularly were shot at while patrolling Iraqi no-fly zones.

“Until Sept. 11, the top national security priority of the Bush administration had been the development and deployment of a national missile defense system,” said Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in an analysis he published this week on his Web site titled “Missile Obsession Distorted Threat Priorities.”

Cirincione said the administration came to power with a sense of political urgency on missile defense.

“They had learned the lessons of the Reagan and Bush administrations. They realized that they had limited time and had to move on this as quickly as possible to lock it in so that no future president could reverse it. They wanted to smash the Antiballistic Missile Treaty in the first year, and pour money into the program to create facts on the ground in their first term,” he said in an interview.

Missile defense “had an almost religious power” for administration neoconservatives, “evoking the Reagan legacy and this belief that creating an effective defense against ballistic missiles was largely the function of political will,” he said.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd drew similar conclusions six days before 9/11, writing, “Why can George W. Bush think of nothing but a missile shield? Our president is caught in the grip of an obsession worthy of literature.”

Administration officials have said there are potential threats necessitating the defense, citing foremost intelligence projections for North Korean missile development.

April 1 stories in the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun recently revived the issue over the administration’s focus. The Post reported that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice after the attacks aborted a speech scheduled for Sept. 11 addressing “the threats and problems of today” that focused largely on missile defense. The Sun report, also surveying Bush’s statements, concluded the president said little publicly about terrorism in comments and speeches prior to 9/11.

Facing questioning by an independent commission examining why the attacks were not prevented, Bush administration officials have argued their focus on al-Qaeda was not trumped by missile defense, but rather coincided with many top priorities. They repeatedly have cited a classified presidential security directive on terrorism that was reportedly awaiting Bush’s signature on 9/11 that was developed during the previous spring and summer.

“President Bush understood the threat and he understood its importance. …  It was the very first major national security policy directive of the Bush administration — not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaeda,” Rice told the commission yesterday.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who also cited the directive at an April 1 press briefing, called al-Qaeda “a top priority” among others, referring also to missile defense and confronting rogue regimes seeking dangerous weapons.

“One doesn’t have the luxury of dealing only with one issue if you are the United States of America. There are many urgent and important issues,” Rice also told the commission.

However, Bush’s directive was signed in September, more than four months after his May 1 missile defense address at the National Defense University in which he declared potential missile threats from “rogue” states the nation’s top security concern.

“Unlike the Cold War, today’s most urgent threat stems not from thousands of ballistic missiles in Soviet hands but from a small number of missiles in the hands of these states, states for whom terror and blackmail are a way of life,” he said.

That speech was devoted to making the case for more aggressively developing and deploying a missile defense system, including by controversially ending or amending the ABM Treaty.

In his talk, Bush said he would quickly dispatch senior representatives — Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and deputy national security adviser Steve Hadley — to allied capitals in Europe, Asia, Australia, and Canada, as well as to China and Russia, to consult with leaders and seek support for the plan.

“Their trips will be part of an ongoing process of consultation involving many people and many levels of government, including my Cabinet secretaries,” the president said. 

Such trips continued into July and August 2001, according to Cirincione.

“In the two months before Sept. 11, five Cabinet members, including national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, traveled to Moscow. They were not there to coordinate counterterrorism operations or share threat assessments … [but to] convince the Russian leadership to scuttle the Antiballistic Missile treaty,” he wrote.

Bush himself before the attacks discussed the plan among other topics in meetings with the leaders of Germany, Japan, Poland, Russia, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Bush’s May 1 statement was not an anomaly, nor the first word on the president’s missile defense emphasis. As a presidential candidate, he vowed to deploy a system and criticized incumbent President Bill Clinton for leaving “unfinished business” by concluding the technology was not ready for use.

The administration’s formal budget presentation document for fiscal 2002, delivered to Congress in February 2001, also identified developing theater and national missile defenses as the country’s “most pressing national security challenge,” while mentioning terrorism once and not referring to Iraq in its list of 15 major policy priorities. It advocated missile defense deployment “at the earliest possible date.”

The document listed three national security goals: to improve troop morale, develop “new generation” weaponry, and protect the American people “from missile attack and threats of terror,” but proposed no new actions to address terror.

Bush’s missile defense plan was viewed as no easy undertaking. The administration faced a vocal Democratic opposition in Congress and skepticism from friendly and allied governments. Officials also sought to avoid strategic blowback by convincing Russia and China that the system and removal of ABM Treaty restrictions were not intended to neutralize their missile capabilities.

Critics from the scientific community charged that the technological challenge was so great the system would never work effectively. Arms control critics, meanwhile, charged that abandoning the treaty restrictions could undermine global stability and that the defenses would address an improbable threat, while drawing money from the most probable danger to the United States: terrorism.

Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.) made that case in a Sept. 10, 2001, speech at the National Press Club, saying “real threats come into this country in the hold of ship, or the belly of a plane or are smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack.”

Administration officials have argued that missile defenses were needed to deter rogue countries, potentially including Iraq, from acts of aggression backed by ballistic missiles.

“They seek weapons of mass destruction to intimidate their neighbors and to keep the United States and other responsible nations from helping allies and friends in strategic parts of the world,” Bush said in his May 1 speech.

“When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the world joined forces to turn him back. But the international community would have faced a very different situation had Hussein been able to blackmail with nuclear weapons,” he said.

During his Jan. 17, 2001, confirmation hearing, Secretary of State-designate Colin Powell acknowledged the challenge, saying he expected “to be spending a lot of my time” discussing U.S. missile defense plans with foreign leaders.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, certainly was aware of the gravity of the al-Qaeda threat. The New York Times had published four long, front-page stories on the organization just prior to Bush’s inauguration and officials told the 9/11 commission last month they were extensively briefed by Clinton administration officials on the global terror threat and al-Qaeda.

“Early on, we made clear to the Congress and the American public that we understood the scope and compelling nature of the threat from terrorism,” Powell said last month, citing February 2001 testimony by his acting assistant secretary for intelligence, Tom Fingar. 

Fingar, a Clinton administration holdover, testified then, “unconventional threats probably pose a more immediate danger to Americans than do foreign armies, nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, or the proliferation of WMD and delivery systems.”

He also cited intelligence suggesting al-Qaeda might target Americans “on almost every continent,” Powell noted.

Powell’s confirmation testimony the prior month, though, did not list al-Qaeda among the 20 administration foreign policy priorities, the Associated Press reported last week. “Neither did the senators who questioned him,” the story added.

9/11 commissioners yesterday pressed Rice to explain why, given al-Qaeda’s history and declaration of war against the United States, the administration had not acted with greater urgency to address the threat. 

Rice acknowledged the administration was not on a “war footing,” and that top administration leaders had not met on the subject until Sept. 4, despite heightened threat warnings during the summer of 2001.

She said, though, the “vast majority” of threat intelligence pointed to overseas attacks, and that the administration faced well-known “structural problems” hampering intelligence sharing between law enforcement and intelligence, that required a change in thinking too daunting to perform prior to 9/11.

“The unfortunate … fact is that sometimes until there is a catastrophic event that forces people to think differently, that forces people to overcome old customs and old culture and old fears about domestic intelligence … that you don’t get that kind of change,” she said.

Powell at his confirmation hearing, though, had suggested the administration was engaged in such a difficult task of perception change with missile defense.

“I have also been through several things like this over the years where people see something new come along and they are terrified. It’s going to shake old patterns of behavior. It’s going to be terrible.  Everything’s going to be blown apart. But if it’s the right thing to do, you do it anyway,” he said.

“So sometimes you have to go through these political barriers and you have to go through these barriers of understanding if you think you’ve got a system that really does make sense and it’s your obligation to sell it,” he concluded.

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