Which raises another mystery: why, the morning after Tenet’s disturbing testimony before Congress, Ridge and his staff declined to notch up the national terror-warning system from yellow (or elevated) to orange (high)–which itself is not even the highest level (red). “They went round and around on this,” said one administration official. Why no change? As a White House official explains, “We don’t have the operational ability to do it”–to stay at such a high level of readiness and counterterror threats.
Translation: America doesn’t have the resources to take on the threats it’s hearing about, much less the ones it doesn’t yet know about. And that doesn’t include invading Iraq–which will require another level of attention, money and personnel. The CIA is already “stressed out,” says one agency officer. It’s not just a question of whether the United States may be biting off more than it can chew by taking on Iraq, says this source: “The fact is, we haven’t been able to chew what’s in our mouth for 10 years.”
One fear is that Qaeda “franchises”–groups linked to or inspired by bin Laden–have spread to new places or re-emerged, hydralike, in old places. In Indonesia, long a weak link in the war on terror, officials are praying that the Oct. 12 Bali bombing may get that country’s sluggish leader, Mega-wati Sukarnoputri, to crack down. But Jakarta needs care and feeding. “I think we’re definitely going to have to put more people on the ground,” said Zachary Abuza, an expert on Southeast Asian terrorism. “Certainly a lot more people on the payroll. We’ll have to hire more Indonesians to be spies or informers.”
All these gathering dangers–and headaches–help explain another of last week’s quandaries: why an administration that for months has been straining to prove that Saddam Hussein is developing nukes revealed only under pressure that it had ironclad proof of North Korea’s nuclear program. The White House revealed it had learned over the summer that North Korea–like Iraq, a member of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”–had a secret uranium-enrichment program for bombmaking. Even more amazingly, the White House said Pyongyang had admitted this two weeks before, on Oct. 3, yet the Bush team came out with the news only when reporters were about to break the story (officials say they delayed because they were consulting with allies on what to do). A day later White House reporters were told President Bush would not discuss North Korea, with one official acknowledging “it is not something we want to elevate.” Said another: “This is an administration with a pretty full plate; we would like some things taken off.”
That may be wishful thinking. A nuclear-armed North Korea is potentially at least as scary as Iraq. More so in some ways: North Korea has test-fired a missile with close to intercontinental range, after all; Iraq hasn’t even test-fired the engine for a missile that can go farther than a souped-up Scud. The main difference is that no one in the administration has decided what to do about North Korea’s recalcitrance while the Bush team has built up a yearlong head of steam on Iraq. And unlike Iraq, an attack on North Korea, which has 950,000 troops just 20 miles or more from Seoul (and from 37,000 U.S. troops deployed in South Korea), is all but unthinkable. That is the main reason Bush rejected a military response after a briefing by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers, sources say, and an administration spokesman pointedly declined to say the United States was interested in “regime change” in Pyongyang.
The administration’s contrasting response to the twin nuclear threats from Iraq and North Korea could not have been more dramatic. Even as North Korea declared the 1994 Clinton-era “framework” for containing its plutonium-fueled nuclear program “nullified” –raising the danger that it would begin producing more plutonium bombs–Bush officials insisted the program could be salvaged. “Here’s a clear case where containment and deterrence is working,” a White House official said. Administration officials argue that Bush sees a real opportunity to bring China, Japan and South Korea onboard to pressure Pyongyang, and the North Koreans themselves may be signaling a willingness to deal. Even so, Iraq skeptics pounced on the policy discrepancies. “I think they’re rediscovering containment and deterrence, which they were pooh-poohing,” says retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, a Bush Mideast envoy who has annoyed the administration with his fierce public criticism of its Iraq policy. “You’ve got to pick your fights. I rank Iraq as number six or seven in terms of problems. We don’t have the resources and attention, and the risk is too high to go down to that level right now.” (Responded one administration official: “I think it’ll be a while before [Zinni] goes to the Mideast for us again.”)
A key problem in the war on terror is getting enough money and manpower, sources tell NEWSWEEK. Ridge has ordered agencies to develop detailed plans for ramping up security measures at each threat level, but changing from yellow to orange would require agencies to implement those measures–perhaps indefinitely. In the absence of new information that would justify lowering the threat level, the Coast Guard would have to maintain expanded harbor patrols, and Customs would have to keep up intensive inspections of cargo, trucks and airplanes. “The concern was, we have no exit strategy on this,” said an administration official. And it means that a strapped intelligence community must work that much harder–even though a much-needed reorganization of its many agencies has not begun. Even hawks like former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a confidant of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s, say the nation hasn’t reckoned with the full costs of the war on terror. By his estimate, defense and intelligence spending will have to leap from just over 3 percent of the GDP to 5 percent, a difference of up to $200 billion, by 2005. Says Gingrich, “We need a national debate that’s not occurring right now” about spending more money.
The most precious resource of all may be the time and attention of the president and his senior staff, who are not known for their ability to delegate. That’s especially true of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, where a tight inner circle of civilians is trying to wrestle a skeptical military into line. “Everything is last minute,” complains a civilian Pentagon bureaucrat. “Everything is an emergency… It’s exhausting everyone.”
Yet the challenge ahead is not just whether the nation has the resources. As new attacks mount, Americans are coming to grips with a depressing reality: that the age of terror may turn out to be more like living in some kind of endless horror movie, when death can erupt out of any corner of the screen. For Americans there will be, as Tenet said, “no more sighs of relief” when the nation can stand down from terror threats. Some cases will go unsolved: just last week, the first anniversary of last fall’s anthrax attacks passed with little notice–and no arrests. Despite having taken more than 3,000 suspects into custody worldwide, Tenet all but admitted in his testimony that authorities can’t know the “time and date” of most attacks (one reason Ridge decided against elevating the threat level). Officials are conceding they just can’t get to that level of precision–and may never be able to.
One example: in early October, NEWSWEEK has learned, U.S. intelligence distributed an alarming report about a possible attack against ships passing through the Persian Gulf, with a port in Yemen mentioned as a likely target. Just days after the report was sent to the White House and via e-mail to FBI counterterrorism agents, on Oct. 6 an explosion ripped through the French oil tanker Limburg while it was en route to the same port in Yemen. This was about as specific a warning as officials have had–and yet there still was not enough detail to thwart the attack.
For now, perhaps the biggest unknown is what will come out of a policy that administration hawks are pushing hard: an invasion of Iraq. White House officials dismissed fears that any military action in Iraq will distract from the larger war on terror, saying the two are, as one official put it, “two sides of the same coin.” A senior intelligence official insisted that while invading Iraq will draw off some intelligence resources, Washington’s anti-Qaeda effort will not be jeopardized. Asked whether the United States can “walk and chew gum at the same time,” another Bush official shot back, “Hasn’t it been the military strategy for the last 20 years to conduct two different military campaigns in two different theaters?” Yes, but in this case it’s one regional theater, and a global one. No one in the Pentagon ever made plans for that.
And in Washington, a debate is heating up over what an Iraq campaign will do to the balance of power between resource-strained authorities and ever-evasive terrorists. Arab diplomats warn the problem is not the most commonly heard one–that the “Arab street” will erupt against friendly regimes like Egypt or Saudi Arabia–but that more-mysterious terror threats will emerge if an Iraq invasion reminds Muslims who the “Great Satan” is. “It’s not that they will sympathize with Al Qaeda, but that they will hate America,” says a senior Arab diplomat.
The administration seemed to moderate its approach toward Iraq last week. Secretary of State Colin Powell compromised on a key U.N. resolution that will authorize new, tougher weapons inspections and threaten “consequences” if Saddam resists. A vote is expected as early as this week. “Iraq is not happening in a vacuum,” said Sen. Chuck Hagel, a prominent critic of the rush to take on Iraq. “It is very clear once again that the only answer is to work through the U.N., with our allies across the world. We do not have the resources alone to deal with this.”
Yet hard-liners see attacking Iraq as more necessary than ever, if only to drive home a point that America will not stand down. “I believe deeply that Iraq is a key step to convince the Arab world about our seriousness,” says Gingrich–in other words, to force Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran to crack down on terror. “If we back off now we will have substantially damaged any believability we have.” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz warned again that “Saddam Hussein consorts and conspires with our terrorist enemies,” though evidence of that remained scant.
Skeptics argue that the Bush team hasn’t fully reckoned with the complexities of an Iraq occupation. The administration has likened that task to what America did in Japan and Germany after World War II. But others say another possible analogy is the disastrous U.S. presence in Somalia in 1993, or the equally unrewarding Israeli occupation of Lebanon, which gave birth to Hizbullah. The Pentagon has also been rocked by a study by a former U.S. Army colonel, Scott Feil, that suggests as much as one third of the Army could be tied up in an Iraq occupation, costing $16 billion annually. Worse, the military no longer has the range of skills–lawyers, civil administrators–it had with the draft at the end of World War II. Another retired general, John Sheehan, is scornful about the lack of planning. “At some point, you can’t just… jump out of an airplane and figure out what you’re going to do when you get on the ground,” he says. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Zinni tells NEWSWEEK that, ironically, the Bush administration is now demonstrating the kind of considered policy toward North Korea that is lacking on Iraq. “What happened in [the Iraq] situation is, we said we’re going to war, then we said reluctantly we’d look at other alternatives. It’s exactly the reverse of the way it’s supposed to be: going to war is a last resort.” The tragedy now, he argues, is that the Bushies can’t back down on Iraq without costing America credibility. And in the war on terror, the administration needs all the credibility it can get.
