Eric Black
March 25, 2004
The Bush administration was slow to develop a counterterrorism policy, was blinded by its disdain for its predecessors, and could have done more after 9/11 to destroy Al-Qaida if it hadn't been focused on an unnecessary and counterproductive vendetta against Saddam Hussein, according to a former National Security Council official now living in Minnesota.
After a long career in government, Tom Maertens, 61, retired in 2002 to his hometown of Mankato and a lifestyle that includes more fishing than he could manage during his decades posted to Washington, Moscow and elsewhere. After 28 years as a foreign service officer, Maerten's last two assignments were with the National Security Council late in the Clinton administration and early in the Bush administration, and in the counterterrorism operation of the State Department. He held the counterterrorism job on Sept. 11, 2001, and until his retirement in February 2002.
The controversy over counterterrorism and the Iraq war, most recently because of the publication of Richard Clarke's book "Against All Enemies" and this week's testimony before the 9/11 commission, have provided Maertens a small share of the national spotlight to give his own insider's account of Clarke's critique.
Maertens, who says he has voted for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, broadly agrees with Clarke. The two worked together but were not close friends. While Clarke prepared to testify Wednesday, Maertens headed to Lanesboro, Minn., for some trout fishing and, in a telephone interview, gave this account of his experience before and after 9/11:
In its first months, the Bush national security staff was "so contemptuous of the Clinton administration" that they wanted to reject every policy they had inherited, Maertens said. "They viewed everything they had inherited as tainted by the character flaws of Clinton. They had a feeling that now the adults were back in charge and everything would be fine."
They commissioned a bottom-up review of every policy, including counterterrorism. But their top priority was withdrawing from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty to clear the way for a missile defense system, and the counterterrorism review proceeded without urgency, he said.
That all changed with 9/11, but the administration's desire to go after Saddam got in the way of going after Al-Qaida, he said. He didn't witness the conversation that Clarke says he had with Bush on the day after the attacks in which, according to Clarke, the president ordered him to look for a Saddam connection to 9/11 and seemed uninterested in any contrary evidence.
But Maertens said he was present for similar conversations involving top administration officials, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, whom Maertens said "was clearly beating the drums for war against Iraq."
Wolfowitz insisted that Saddam had played a role in 9/11, despite the lack of any credible evidence, Maertens said. Wolfowitz and others urged their staff members never to think about Al-Qaida without thinking of Iraq.
After 9/11, the United States sent about 11,500 troops to Afghanistan to finish off the Taliban and help search for remnants of Al-Qaida. About 150,000 troops, at the peak, were massed in and around Iraq to overthrow Saddam, Maertens noted.
"If the war against Al-Qaida has been such a high priority, as [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld is now claiming, why not demonstrate it by putting as many troops into Afghanistan as they later put into Iraq?" Maertens asked.
Maertens argues that more troops in Afghanistan would have increased the chance that Osama bin Laden and other top terrorist leaders would have been caught or killed and that Al-Qaida would have been more effectively dismantled. The Iraq war was worse than a distraction from the war against Al-Qaida, Maertens said. It actually helped the enemy recruit more anti-American fighters by confirming in the minds of many Muslims that the United States is engaged in a worldwide assault against Islam and is motivated by a desire to control the oil of the Persian Gulf region, he said. "I'm worried that we may be helping them create more recruits than we can ever destroy," he said.
© Copyright 2004 Star Tribune
