Speech
before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on December 6, 2001:
The Honorable
L. Paul Bremer
Chairman, President Clinton’s National Commission on Terrorism
Chairman and CEO, Marsh Crisis Consulting
It’s a great pleasure to be back here again and to see so
many people here. I know you have a
very busy day, so let me tell you a bit about what I would like to cover and
then, of course, we’re going to leave some time for questions.
I thought I would talk a bit about how I see the current
situation with terrorism, including the campaign against terrorism in
Afghanistan and wherever else it is, and I’d like to talk a bit about the
implications of that analysis for the campaign as we go forward from Afghanistan
and finally a little bit about the implications of all of this for businesses
because I know many of you are businessmen and women.
Let me talk a bit about the terrorist situation.
Like everybody in the room, I was shocked by what happened on September
11th. It was certainly a
horrifying thing, but I have to say that I was not surprised.
I was not surprised because the events of September 11th were
predictable and, indeed, were predicted, among other things, by the National
Commission on Terrorism which, as Curtis [Mack] mentioned, I had the honor to
chair. In our report to President Clinton on June 5, 2000, we said that there
will be mass casualty terrorist attacks in the United States.
We also said that we expected that those attacks would perhaps use
biological agents.
We were not alone in reaching that conclusion.
Almost everybody who has studied terrorism over the last fifteen years
had reached the same conclusions because of the changes and the trends in
terrorism, which I’ll say a word about in a minute.
So, the event we saw on September 11th do not constitute a
one-off event. They are part of a
pattern of terrorism that goes back at least a decade.
But it is also the case, and I will talk about that too, that the new
geo-political situation the United States finds itself in also increases the
likelihood that we’re going to continue to see this kind of terrorism directed
against America in the years ahead.
Now, let me say a word about both of those facts – trends
in terrorism and America’s geo-political situation. On the question of the trends in terrorism, you have to go
back a bit to understand the analysis. When
terrorism came upon us in the late 60s -- which is when modern terrorism really
announced itself, you may recall, with a bunch of hijackings in 1968 -- we were
faced for the next twenty years or so from the late 60s to the late 80s by and
large with terrorist groups who had motives that effectively led those terrorist
groups to be discriminate in their attacks. The motives of those groups tended to be narrow, political
objectives. They wanted to get
American bases out of Germany, or they wanted to get Belgium out of NATO.
These were terrorist groups in Europe that were quite
active in the 70s – sometimes they were Middle East terrorist groups operating
in the 70s and in the 80s, but basically their objective was to kill enough
people, to cause enough disruption, that the press would come to the scene and
pay attention. The terrorists would
then declare their responsibility and say, “We did it because…” and they
would describe their cause, their analysis being that there must have been a
latent support for that cause, whatever the cause was, out among the public, and
if they could get the press there it would become the magnifying voice, the
megaphone for their cause, and that would then engender sympathy in the public
at large. So the idea was to kill
enough people to be sure that the press and the public paid attention, but not
to kill so many people that you would turn off this latent support that was, in
theory, out there among the public. So,
in effect, the “old terrorists,” as I now call them, had a self-imposed
restraint on the number of people they killed and on the kind of attacks they
did. We would see attacks where
maybe 10, 20, several dozen people were killed, but by and large the objective
was not to kill a lot of people. It
was to get a lot of attention and to get a lot of publicity.
Now, the United States took the lead in the first Reagan
administration to develop a Western counter terrorist strategy to deal with that
kind of terrorism. It was based on
three principles: first of all, no concessions to terrorists, which makes a lot
of sense, because if you start making concessions to terrorists you’re
essentially heading down the path of blackmail. Secondly, terrorists are criminals and should be brought to
justice. We have laws against the
kinds of things terrorists do. If
you kidnap somebody and take him hostage, you make him a hostage, that’s
kidnapping and that’s against the law. If
you assassinate somebody, that murder – that’s against the law.
If you set off a bomb that’s arson – that’s against the law.
And so the second pillar of that policy was to say there are laws and we
should apply them to the terrorists to deter them from conducting attacks. The third pillar of the Western strategy that was put
together was to say that we cannot tolerate that states support terrorism.
And I would argue that during the course of the decade of the 80s,
cooperating with our European allies we put together that strategy and it had
some significant successes. We had some failures, but we had some significant successes.
Now, what has happened starting in the late 80s and during
the 90s is we have seen a shift in terrorist motives, and it is the shift in
motives, as our National Commission report pointed out, that leads to a
different analysis and the need for a different strategy.
The new terrorists, to distinguish them from the old ones, are very often
operating out of hatred or revenge or they’re operating, as we’ve seen with
Al Qaeda, out of a warped religious extremism.
Sometimes they operate because they have an apocalyptic view of what is
going to happen in the world. These
people have a different motive, and those motives imply a quite different
tactic. Because those people are
acting out of those kinds of motives, they do not care about keeping the number
of people they kill down. In fact,
for some of them, they want to kill as many people as possible.
If you’re acting out of hatred or revenge or religious extremism, the
objective is not to keep the number of people down, it’s actually to increase
it.
And so during the 1990s there were basically three things
that happened – three data points. Number
one: while the number of terrorist incidents went down during the 1990s, the
number of casualties went up. The
chart goes this way, which showed the terrorists were conducting fewer attacks
but when they conducted them they were more deadly.
Secondly, during the 1990s fewer and fewer terrorist attacks were
actually claimed by any group. They didn’t go out and say, “We did this because…”
the way they had done before. And
thirdly, more and more terrorist attacks involved suicides.
Suicides like the ones we’ve seen in Israel in the last three days,
including yesterday.
When I was Reagan’s ambassador for counter-terrorism and,
incidentally, Curtis will appreciate this with his long-standing association
with President Reagan, the President used to introduce me to people as his
“terrorism expert,” and I used to have to correct him and say, “Mr.
President, I’m your counter-terrorist expert.”
Sometimes the distinction is a little thin, and I do confess that my
colleagues at the State Department sometimes thought I was more of a terrorist
than a counter-terrorist, given the bureaucratic battles we had to fight.
I commissioned a study in 1988 from the CIA to look back at
all of the terrorist incidents that we have recorded from 1968 -- this new wave
of terrorism started in 1988 -- and asked them to tell me how many of the
terrorist attacks that had happened involved suicides.
It was very interesting. It
was less than two percent. So the
terrorists we were facing as late as the l980s were basically people who
didn’t want to get caught, they didn’t want to go to jail, and they didn’t
want to die. Well, look at what
we’ve got now. A very different
problem. When you think that through, you then realize that two of the three
pillars of our old strategy are essentially irrelevant.
First of all, no concessions. Okay,
it still makes a lot of sense not to make concessions to criminals or
terrorists. It’s perfectly
reasonable not to make concessions. But
it’s not very relevant to this kind of terrorist that we’re talking about
because these guys are not trying to start a negotiation.
They’re not trying to get somebody else out of jail, they’re not
asking for American bases to leave Germany.
They’re acting again, as I said, out of hatred and revenge.
So there is no negotiation to be had with them, therefore, the question
of making concessions is essentially irrelevant.
It’s still a good policy, but it has nothing to do with these guys.
Well, what about the second one – treating terrorists as
criminals? Well, again, if you look
at the question of the old terrorists it made sense. They didn’t want to be captured, they didn’t want to go
to jail, so the threat of putting them in jail for a long time effectively, it
could be argued, was an effective deterrent.
But that’s not much of a deterrent for somebody who’s willing to fly
an airplane at 500 miles an hour into a building.
He’s not very concerned about whether he’s threatened with spending a
couple of years in jail. So, as
President Bush has said we need to turn that around.
The question isn’t bringing terrorists to justice.
The question is bringing justice to terrorists.
So, we are now left, having had three pillars of a
counter-terrorist strategy, we’re left basically with one, which is the
question of state support for terrorism. I’ll
come to that in a minute and for what it means, but the point is we have had a
change in the entire texture of the threat of terrorism which has been visible
since the early 90s or even late 80s.
Now, on top of that there is the new geo-political
situation that the United States finds itself in.
The fall of Soviet Communism left the United States, it’s commonly
remarked, in a position of basically international dominance.
I would argue that it is a position of international dominance:
political, economic, military, even cultural, that is without precedent in world
history. No, you’ll protest –
there were the Romans. Yes, the
Romans dominated what was known then as the known world.
Of course, we know it wasn’t the known world, but in effect the Romans
dominated the Littoral states around the Mediterranean and nothing more.
Well, you say “What about the Tang dynasty, the great era of Chinese
Empire?" True, the Chinese
Tang dynasty, which is one of mankind’s great periods of creativity and
everything, the Chinese dominated in effect what was the far eastern corner of
Asia and very little more. And then
you’ll say, “What about the British? They
had a great empire in the 19th century.”
Well, yes, they had a great empire, but all throughout the 19th
century the British power was countervailed by powers in Europe and in Asia.
There is today, in my view, no one nation or group of nations which can
credibly hope to countervail American power for at least the next decade.
It’s just not there. So
our domination is clear to everyone.
Second point: the Gulf War.
The lesson of the Gulf War was that a conventional army, even a very
well-equipped army -- and Saddam Hussein’s army at the time was the fourth
largest army in the world, equipped with the most modern Soviet aircraft,
artillery, tanks -- that army was crushed by the United States effectively in
four days after a 30-day bombing campaign.
So the lesson to all of those people out there is that America is
dominant and, incidentally, our domination has a price.
It provokes hatred, revenge, envy and resentment.
There’s a lot of that out there these days, but those people who hate
us now have to face reality and the reality is we’re dominant, we’re not
going to be countervailed by classic statescraft for, I would say, at least a
decade, and you cannot attack us effectively with conventional weapons.
The lesson is clear – if you’re going to attack America you have to
attack with unconventional weapons.
Terrorism is the ultimate unconventional weapon because it
allows the weak to attack the strong, it is inexpensive it is deniable -- a
state can use it and deny that it did it -- and it is, of course, devastating.
On the question of expense, incidentally, I’ve always argued that one
of the problems of terrorism is that it cost much more to defend against a
terrorist attack than to conduct one. The
World Trade Center attack is a classic example of the multiplier effect of
effective terrorism because the cost of the entire attack was probably somewhere
below a million dollars. At last
count, it probably did about one hundred billion dollars and more than that –
one hundred billion dollars of damage. So,
terrorism is a very effective unconventional weapon to use against the United
States.
During the 1990s we saw the fact that five of the
terrorists states, states which the United States defines as states supporting
terrorism, five of them have developed nuclear, biological and chemical weapon
programs -- most dramatically, of course, Iraq -- and ballistic missile
technology to deliver those weapons over long distances.
We also know that terrorist groups including Al Qaeda have tried to
acquire those kinds of unconventional terrorist materials.
So, we have a situation where we can no longer rely on our old analysis
and our old strategy, where because of the trends in terrorism it is safe to
assume what we saw on September 11th announces not the end of a
development but another data point along the line of development towards more
dangerous terrorism and in the United States, and where our geo-political
domination almost guarantees that our enemies will find it attractive to use
unconventional ways to attack us because they cannot attack us conventionally.
I put to one side the case of North Korea which is a place where we could
still face a major conventional war, but putting that aside, this analysis
suggests we’re going to see a fair amount of terrorism.
Now, what are the implications of this analysis for
American policy, particularly American policy towards terrorism?
Well, we are left at least with the question about state support for
terrorism. We have at least one
element of our old strategy that is still in place and relevant.
President Bush in his speech to Congress on September 20th put
this in a new and updated context when he basically said the objective of
American counter-terrorist policy must be to deny terrorists territory.
What he means by that is that a terrorist group which is able to operate
in a benign environment such as Al Qaeda has been able to do in Afghanistan for
the last five years, such as other terrorist groups were able to do in Lebanon
in the 70s and 80s where there was a benign environment, that allows terrorist
groups to plan for, recruit for, train for, and conduct very elaborate
sophisticated attacks of the kind we saw on September 11th.
Why? Well,
think about it. They don’t have
to worry about the local police monitoring their activities, they don’t have
to worry that somebody will break down the door at 2:00 o’clock in the morning
and break up their meetings. They
don’t have to worry about their communications being intercepted by local law
enforcement or their mail being intercepted, or them being surveilled by local
intelligence agencies. They operate
in a benign environment at a minimum and, indeed, in a welcoming environment in
the case of Afghanistan. That has
to stop. If the hypothesis is
correct, and I think it is, that terrorism is the face of the major
threat to national security in the next decade, then this is the problem for our
national security and we have to take the consequences of that analysis and say,
therefore, we have to deny terrorists territory starting with Afghanistan.
So, Afghanistan is the first phase in what promises to be,
as the President and Secretary of Defense have said, a long campaign.
We are, in my view, well on our way to finishing the first phase.
The first phase is the Afghan phase, which had itself two objectives:
one, to destroy as much as possible the terrorist infrastructure in
Afghanistan and, two, to throw out the Taliban.
The second, throwing out the Taliban, is actually just as important as
the first. It took my colleagues at
the State Department longer than it needed to take them to figure this out, but
the President set them straight. Basically,
we couldn’t have the Taliban stay in office, even if we had destroyed all of
the infrastructure and killed bin Laden and all of his deputies, because the
Taliban would have just allowed another terrorist cess pool to develop there six
months later. So we had to get rid
of the Taliban, it was an absolutely essential part of the strategy.
I would say we’re about 80 percent of the way there in terms of these
two objectives. If, as is reported,
Kandahar surrenders tomorrow, that will be a very important military and
political signal that we’re on our way to succeeding and throwing the Taliban
out for good. I think that as in
almost any human activity the last 20 percent is the hardest 20 percent so I
would expect we’re going to be pretty well engaged in Afghanistan now, on the
ground, with forces, at least through the spring and maybe beyond that.
We should not expect, that even when Kandahar falls, that that’s the
end of the game and the Marines can all come out.
I don’t think so.
But we are doing very well, and doing better than all of
the pundits and armchair generals thought we would do. It’s been an extremely well-thought-through campaign and
well-executed campaign. But it’s
just the beginning of a long campaign, because even after we’ve gotten rid of
the benign environment that the Taliban have created in Afghanistan, we have to
then address the question of other places where terrorists enjoy benign
environments. The list is pretty
easy to come up with. They are
places where governments simply say, “You terrorists can operate here.”
I’m not talking about places like the United States where Al Qaeda
operates and the other sixty countries or so in which Al Qaeda operates.
We have to root them out, too. I’m
talking about places which welcome and support terrorists to operate on their
territory – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, Libya -- and the
Palestinian Authority.
The events this week have showed, and I think it caught the
Administration a bit by surprise, that the logic of what the President said on
September 20th about denying terrorists territory has to apply to the
Palestinian Authority. This
administration, like the one before, has tended to play along with the double
game that Arafat has played now for some twenty years, which is that he comes
and tells us he’s in favor of peace and then he allows and encourages
terrorism to be launched against Israeli targets from his territory.
The double game, I think, ended last Sunday.
The Administration has been, to give it credit, consequential in its
statements. It has said, “Look,
we told the Taliban that they had to stop allowing a benign environment in
Afghanistan,” and they’ve effectively said to Arafat, “You’ve got to do
the same thing now.” The implied
point is, “Or you’re going to go the way of the Taliban.”
And, indeed, I think he will go the way of the Taliban if he doesn’t
clean up his act, not by our doing it but by the Israelis doing it.
So we now need to get very serious and address the problem
of terrorism in these other states which provide a benign environment for
terrorism. I don’t know what the
Administration’s strategy will be. I
outlined my view of the strategy today in the Wall Street Journal.
My view is we should not go directly to Iraq unless it’s shown that
Iraq was involved in the September 11th attacks or the anthrax
attacks. By the way, I think it’s
very unlikely that any foreign terrorist group was involved in the anthrax
attacks, but it can’t be excluded. September 11th, there is evidence of Iraqi
connections with Al Qaeda, and if the Administration gets clearer indications
that Iraq was involved, we’ll have to obviously go to war right away with
Saddam Hussein. Sooner or later,
we’re going to have to deal with Saddam Hussein.
My own view is to go after some of the softer targets first with
diplomacy, very robust diplomacy. My
particular candidate is either Yemen or Sudan, both countries which have
supported terrorism in the past but since September 11th, have
expressed an interest in working with us. I
think if we can lay out a very clear ultimatum to these two countries, one after
the other, we can build some momentum for our counter-terrorism campaign, which
will then give us a better position to stand on when the time comes for the
inevitable confrontation with Saddam Hussein.
We will have a confrontation with Saddam Hussein.
The only question is when does it come in the sequence of events.
The confrontation with the Palestinian Authority obviously came earlier
than the Administration has planned for, so they’ve lost a bit of control over
that, but there it is, they’re going to have to deal with it.
The second point in terms of a strategy now is really the
main conclusion of the Bremer Commission, which is the crucial importance of
good intelligence. I’ve been
involved in international affairs, foreign affairs, for 35 years now and I know
of no area where intelligence is more vital than in fighting terrorism, and I
know of no area where intelligence is more difficult to get than fighting
terrorism, because the objective of a counter-terrorism policy is to prevent
attacks. If you’re going to do
that you need to know about them ahead of time, and the only people who can tell
you about them ahead of time are terrorists.
So you basically have to have terrorist spies.
My view is that we have spent twenty-five years tearing down our
intelligence capabilities in this country, starting with very highly politicized
attacks on the CIA in the mid-70s followed by an extremely unwise decision by
then-DCI Stan Turner to lay off one-third of the operations officers in the
Carter Administration, and followed by some very restrictive guidelines put on
the agency by the Clinton Administration in 1995.
Incidentally, I saw this morning that there’s legislation in Congress
to repeal those very restrictive regulations.
We are going to have to get down and dirty if we’re going
to get good intelligence against terrorists.
It’s simply a fact of life. We’re
not going to get good intelligence about terrorists by sitting in the Biltmore
Hotel in Los Angeles. I guarantee
it. We’re going to have to put
really nasty people on our payroll and we’re going to have to realize that
that’s risky, that these people may embarrass us, they are by definition
criminals, but every single metropolitan police department in the United States
has criminals on its payroll. That’s
what informants are and we’re just going to have to grow up a little bit and
understand that an effective counter-terrorist policy is now more important than
it ever was and it’s going to require a much more risk-taking intelligence
community. That was, indeed, the
key recommendation of the Bremer Commission.
Incidentally, as Curtis pointed out, we issued our recommendations to the
President and Congress a year and one-half ago. We had about two-dozen recommendations in our report and, as
of September 11th, not a single one of our two-dozen recommendations
had been put into effect – not one.
Now, let me talk briefly about the implications of this for
business -- which comes a bit to my current business. It’s fashionable to say, but nonetheless correct, that
September 11th was a wake-up call for the American government and the
American people. We’re in a new
world now. I argue it’s also a
wake-up call for businesses, because while this was a crisis brought about by
terrorism, every business needs to be prepared to deal with crises. Crises happen on a regular basis to business.
Sometimes they are natural disasters, earthquakes for example.
Sometimes they are physical attacks like terrorism.
Sometimes they are environmental spills, like the Exxon Valdez.
Sometimes it’s a product recall. It
doesn’t matter. It could be an accusation of sexual discrimination or racial
discrimination. All of those things
can become crises. Businessmen, in
my view, need to get out of denial, thinking that “my company is not
susceptible to a crisis.” Every
company is. They happen, surveys
show, on average every four to five years: a company, a corporation, will face a
crisis. Marsh McClennon, the
company I work for, had 1900 people in the World Trade Center Tower when the
plane struck. It was, by
anybody’s definition, a crisis, and it was the fourth crisis that Marsh
McLennan has had in seventeen years. We
are right on the actuarial graph – four in seventeen years.
Crises do happen and you can get ready for them and you should.
A final point. What should we do as people? We should do what the President said, which is to go on and get about our business. We have to recognize we’re in a new situation, but we can’t let the terrorists change our way of life to the point where we are no longer enjoying the freedoms that we have fought and died for for the last 200 years. The problem for public policy and public policymakers is to find the balance – the balance between taking steps which are effective against terrorism but which do not trample the constitutional and civil liberties that are what America is about. So far, I think the administration has done a very good job finding that balance. There are certainly disagreements on where you draw the line, but there is no question that the Administration is acutely sensitive to the need to draw the line, as most Americas are. I think, with the kind of leadership we’ve had in the last couple of months and with a lot of patience and perseverance, we can get this problem of terrorism back down to a point where it doesn’t become an obsession with all of us all the time.
Thank you very much.