The Path to 9/11

I should say something about The Path to 9/11, the docudrama the first half of which was broadcast by ABC last night despite complaints from Bill Clinton and members of his administration. The second half will be broadcast tonight. I saw the screening of the first half at the National Press Club on August 23 and reported on it in this blog. The Clintonites attacked particularly strongly two scenes from the first half. The first is one in which National Security Adviser Sandy Berger is seen refusing to approve an attack on the al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. The administration did indeed refuse to approve such an attack, but it didn't happen the way it did in the docudrama. Plans to attack the al Qaeda compound were sidelined earlier in the process.

I think the Clintonites have a legitimate basis for complaint here, although, it should be added, Berger does not speak with entirely clean hands, having been convicted of spiriting documents out of the National Archives. I have known Berger, though not well, over many years, and I was astonished that he would do something like that. Was he trying to alter the historical record? Even if so, I think it was unfair to portray him as The Path to 9/11 did.

The other Clintonite complaint is that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is portrayed as having insisted on informing the Pakistani government that the United States was sending a missile over Pakistani territory aimed at an al Qaeda installation in Afghanistan. She is shown doing this after another character has protested that al Qaeda sympathizers or allies in Pakistan will probably tip off Osama bin Laden.

Albright apparently never made such a statement; the American military informed the Pakistani military about the missile. I have less of a problem with this scene. I remember feeling irritated by the statement attributed to Albright–and then immediately concluding that she was absolutely right. There probably was a risk that the Pakistanis would conclude that the missile was aimed at them by India. There was therefore a risk of a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India. Millions of people, perhaps tens of millions, might be killed in such an exchange.

The United States, it seems to me and I should think to most Americans of all political stripes, has a responsibility to prevent such a terrible thing from happening, even if it makes it harder to get bin Laden. We Americans sometimes have the illusion that there is always a perfect course of action, which you would have taken if you were not so stupid. But sometimes there is no perfect course of action. You have to aid Stalin to defeat Hitler. Sometimes it's difficult to make choices. But I think the statement attributed to Albright was absolutely right.

Why did Clinton and others in his administration protest the docudrama so strongly? Presumably because they want people not to come to the conclusion that his administration was tragically negligent in failing to prevent 9/11. But isn't that obvious? With the huge advantage of hindsight, it is clear that in eight years the Clinton administration did not do enough to stop al Qaeda. It is clear also that in the first eight months of 2001 the Bush administration did not do enough to stop al Qaeda.

I am sure that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and all the responsible officials in their administrations wish they had done more. So do we all.

But which of us warned of the danger? I can think of a few who did: my former U.S. News colleague Steven Emerson, scholar Daniel Pipes, and American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen. Perhaps you can think of others.

But I didn't take Steven's and Daniel's analyses seriously enough. And I can't remember writing before 9/11 about the dangers posed by al Qaeda and other Islamofascist groups. So I don't feel entitled to furiously condemn the Clinton and Bush administration officials who failed to see what I failed to see. The 9/11 attacks alone were condemnation enough. And not just of certain public officials but of all of us in a position to have an impact on public opinion who did not alert others to the danger we unknowingly faced.