My great regret is that
I didn't get Osama bin Laden – Clinton
By Sun News
Tuesday, July 15, 2004
 |
Bill Clinton
Photo by Sun News Publishing |
|
|
I want to ask you about Osama bin Laden. You say in your
book that you made several efforts to kill him. In retrospect
do you believe, though, that you should have mustered some
kind of special mission, some kind of special forces mission,
even though many of your senior military advisers opposed
that at the time. Do you think you should have done it?
Well what I wish now is that I had had a more vigorous military
debate. One of the discussions that I had with the September
11 commission involved the reorganization of the military
in the 1980s under the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which has done
a lot of good. It's helped to rationalize military spending,
it's helped us to downside the military and spend more on
areas where we needed. It's done a lot of good.
But essentially it's made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff a much more powerful and centralized authority there.
So when people began to second-guess the fact that I didn't
send the special forces into Afghanistan even though concededly
nobody knew where bin Laden was, nobody knew where [Ayman]
al-Zawahiri was, nobody knew, but we had a general idea of
where they were operating.
After September 11, when people began to second-guess that,
I wish that I had had a military debate because basically
the Pentagon and [the Joint Chiefs chairman] were strongly
opposed to it, they thought that the chances of those guys
getting killed were high. And that's what they signed on to
do, to risk their lives, but they didn't want to get killed
with no reasonable prospect of accomplishing the mission.
So their view was: We don't know where these people are, we
have no reasonable intelligence, we know we can't trust people
on the ground because they told us bin Laden was gonna be
at this training camp we hit.
We contracted with all these Afghan tribals and its borne
no result for us. So we think it's very high risk for a very,
very low chance of return, and we recommend against it.
But I'm the commander-in-chief, or I was then, and they would
have gone if I had ordered them to. I wish I had debated it
a little more thoroughly because if you look at it, the record
will reflect that I took every other alternative that I had
based on the available intelligence.
We did, it is true, consider bombing three other sites, three
other times, but in each case the CIA before the mission could
be completed said we just don't have that much confidence
in our intelligence.
So you know, when something like September 11 happens you
think, "Well gosh, I wish I had done everything."
Now the other issue which I have been asked about is slightly
different, which is after the USS Cole [was bombed in Yemen]
in October [2000], do I wish I had ordered the special forces,
and the answer to that is, I would have done it in a heartbeat
to special forces and more with or without international support,
once I got the CIA and the FBI to agree and make an official
finding that bin Laden was responsible.
I just assumed he was from the day it happened, and everyone
else did. But it was not until after I left office that the
FBI and the CIA made a finding. If they had given me a finding
beforehand I would have gone after him without regard to the
politics, the timing, the election, the court cases, anything
going on in America. I would have done it, but I didn't get
the confirmation, and America didn't get it until after I
left office.
You mentioned what you could or might have been able to do.
Sometime in 1996 you spoke to a group of people in Long Island
about this whole issue of Sudan, was Sudan ...
That was in 2001 ...
OK. Was Sudan asked to extradite [bin Laden]? Did you miss
the opportunity to have him extradited?
And I miss ... what I said there was wrong. What I said was
in error. I went back now and did all this research for my
book and I said that we were told we couldn't hold him, implying
that we had a chance to get him and didn't. That's not factually
accurate.
Here's what is factually accurate. In 1996 and before then,
when we found out about bin Laden, we had first thought he
was a financier of terrorism but not a ringleader. In the
beginning. When he took up residence in Sudan after having
been ejected from Saudi Arabia, it is true that at some point
during that period, there was some discussion in the Justice
Department casting a doubt on how long we could hold him ...
on the question of had he committed, or did we have evidence
that he committed, an offense against the United States.
But that was never part of the question about whether we could
get him. When he left, the idea that the Sudanese offered
to hand him over to us is just absurd. The idea that they
told us when he was leaving, and he was landing in the Gulf
and we could get him at another airport, is absurd, and the
idea that they tried to give him to us instead of giving him
to Afghanistan is just not true. I have now gone back and
reconstructed all the records, read all the documents, and
that is just not true.
As you were leaving office and Mr. Bush was coming in, before
the inauguration, you met with him, and in your book you say
that you told him that Osama bin Laden would be his leading
national security problem, his threat, and that your own failure
to have caught him was your biggest disappointment.
And you say that, quote, "He listened to what I had to
say without much comment, and then changed the subject to
how I did the job." What did you think at that moment?
I didn't necessarily draw any adverse conclusion. But I knew
that he as being told by people like [Deputy Defense Secretary]
Mr. [Paul] Wolfowitz, who saw the world in a very different
way, that the biggest issue was Saddam Hussein.
And I knew he was being told by some people whose service
dated back to the '80s that the most important security issue
was building missile defense. And I acknowledged that to him.
I said, because I thought, I watched President Bush, and he
won that election in 2000, or at least he got close enough
to get it into the Supreme Court, because he had good instincts.
He had pretty good, what is called emotional intelligence,
you know, intuitive feel.
So I said, "I know that your people have concluded, and
I've read your statements, that Saddam Hussein and missile
defense are the two big security issues." And so I said,
"This has nothing to do with me being a Democrat and
you being a Republican, I just believe objectively, I've been
reading this for eight years, I've been watching this. I think
by far your biggest problem is bin Laden and al Qaeda, and
it's my great regret that I didn't get him. I tried."
And I said, the second problem by far is the absence of a
peace process in the Middle East, because that's fueling all
of this.
And the third problem is the continuing tension between India
and Pakistan because they both have nuclear weapons. And the
Pakistani military is full of people who have ties to the
Taliban and by extension to al Qaeda.
Then I would rank North Korea, and then Iraq, and that's just
my opinion. So I didn't blame him for not saying anything.
Because I had presented him with a very different worldview
than he had been getting from these other folks.
So I didn't think it wasn't that he didn't pay attention,
I just think he thought ... he might have thought it wasn't
prudent for him to say "I disagree" or "I agree."
And I do think presidents have to be careful what they say,
because whatever you say, someone is liable to repeat it.
So I drew no adverse inference from his silence.
Let me ask you about the Middle East peace process, something
that you spent a lot of time and capital on. You know, there's
been sort of a debate in some circles after your presidency
that perhaps you did too much. Perhaps you focused too much
attention on it. And the reality is that not as much has been
done since you left office. This administration has felt that
it's better to preserve its capital and work at a different
way.
If you were appointed a special envoy, let's say, some time
in the future to the Middle East, what specifically would
you do to get this peace process back on track?
Well, first of all, I can understand why President Bush and
any other leader would be reluctant to invest a lot of time
and effort after all the time and effort I invested. And after
I'd been promised that we would have a deal and then we didn't.
So I can understand that.
On the other hand, there is one rule we know. I don't think
that when you're dealing with the Middle East or with any
thorny, long-simmering problem, you can hold yourself to a
standard that says the only success is a complete agreement.
Because if that's your standard, then your success or failure
totally depends upon what other people decide to do and how
they read their own interests.
That is, you know the old adage, "You can lead a horse
to water but you can't make it drink." What I know is
that whenever America is involved, fewer people die. Now,
so to me, my great dream was to have a comprehensive peace.
I wanted to do it because I though it would help secure Israel,
I thought it would give the Palestinians finally the decent
life they deserved. I wanted to do it because I thought it
would undermine terror. I wanted to do it because I thought
it would help reconcile the West to Islam. I wanted to do
it because I thought it would help the Arab states to lay
down the burden of blaming politics and pick up the responsibility
for their future.
I think 10 great things would happen if we worked this deal
out. But I also wanted fewer people to die. So, and I think
that if you go back to when President Bush and [Secretary
of State] Colin Powell came up with this "road map,"
acknowledging that there ought to be a Palestinian state,
and one of the good things they did, that I approved of, was
say that the power ought to be broadened in the PLO, and the
PLO, Palestinians ought to have a prime minister as well as
[Yasser] Arafat as president.
I thought all that was good, and they waited two years to
do it for the reasons you said, but I thought that was good.
So what would I do now? Now I would say, "Look guys,
in private, we all know, within two or three degrees of difference,
what the final peace agreement is going to look like, if there's
ever going to be one."
Is that the Clinton parameters?
My parameters, the Geneva agreement, all these things.
You know Israel is never going to agree to an unlimited right
of return, because then you'll have two Arab-majority Muslim
states in the holy land in 30 years. And the Palestinians
are never going to agree to take a state that doesn't include
eastern Jerusalem and more or less 97% of the West Bank. Enough
to give the Israelis the settlements that take in 80% of the
settlers and then some sort of little land swap.
And we now no longer -- it's an easier problem on the stationing
of the Israel Defense Forces along the Jordan River for a
period of time because Saddam Hussein's gone. That's the one
thing that could help settle the thing. So we all know this.
Now here's the question: how many more kids are going to die
before we make this deal?
And if it's not politically possible to make a deal more or
less like what everybody knows it has to be, then what can
we do to keep people alive? And what can we do to keep the
forces of peace viable, in both Israel and the Palestinian
Authority, until we get around to the point that we can make
this deal?
So if [Israeli Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon says, for example,
"I want to withdraw from Gaza unilaterally" and
[opposition Labor Party leader] Shimon Peres says, "If
I think it's the beginning of a serious peace process maybe
we'll have a national unity government," I think the
Untied States of America ought to support that.
And I think we ought to say, "Do it, but don't humiliate
the Palestinians when you do it." There's all kinds of
ways to withdraw from Gaza. And then say, "If you'll
help us with the terror, it's the beginning of the peace process."
But the main thing is, everybody knows now. The one good thing
by putting [the] plan out and having [former Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud] Barak say yes and then a year later, after
I was gone, having Arafat say yes. The one good thing is,
we all know now. We know more or less what a final deal is.
So the question is, How long are we gonna take? How many young
people are going to die on both sides? And how do we keep
as many people alive as possible and working towards it, without
wrecking the political careers of the Palestinians and the
Israelis who are committed to peace. That's the issue.
You mentioned staking everything on one big agreement. But
that's what you did. Do you regret that?
Do you wish you had pushed for a partial agreement?
Well, no, because I gave them the option of going for a partial
agreement. I said, "If we can't do Jerusalem, let's do
everything with Jerusalem. If you can't give up right of return,
let the Israelis find out something they can't give up, and
let's do that." We tried that.
But the one problem we found, to be fair to both Arafat and
all the Israeli prime ministers I worked with after [Yitzak]
Rabin was killed, one thing that we turned out to be wrong
about, the fundamental framework of the peace agreement signed
on the White House lawn in 1993, I still believe was sound.
But the process that it set up turned out to be wrong, for
reasons that we had not contemplated.
What did the process do? It said, "OK, we're going to
take a couple years to make a comprehensive peace. We're going
to do easy things first, hard things last. We do easy things,
we'll build up confidence, everybody will like each other,
trust each other more, then we'll do all this hard stuff.
What was the problem? The problem was twofold: For the Palestinians,
the problem was that more and more Israelis kept going into
the settlement areas, aggravating that and making it therefore
harder for Israeli politicians to do things that would shut
them down.
On the flip side, the problem was, the longer we took to make
a final peace, the more competitors there were to the PLO
for the hearts and minds of the Palestinians and certainly
for terrorist actions. So it became more and more difficult
for the PLO to shut everything down.
So both sides wound up -- this piecemeal approach wound up
costing both sides a lot, and getting people in trouble. Like
[former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu made, I
thought, a very brave agreement at Wye River in '98. And then
he went home and found it very difficult to implement because
even though his Cabinet ratified it, his party wasn't really
for it. And look at all the grief Sharon has taken for wanting
to get out of Gaza.
Well, Arafat had the same thing on the other side. When Netanyahu
said after Wye River, I know we were going to pull out of
these three villages but we may have to do two. He and Barak
had some of the same problems, and it caused Arafat terrible
problems and Barak problems.
So both sides decided we ought to go for the final agreement
'cause Wye River, while it was a good agreement, turned out
to be death by a thousand cuts. That's why we got there.
One final question, how long do you think it will take to
get back to a place where there can even be some kind of process
again? Back to 2000 for instance?
In December, early December, right before I was leaving office,
as I recount in my book, I looked at Arafat and I said, "Now,
if you're not gonna do this, I wanna go to North Korea and
end their missile program."
I said, "You owe it to me to let me go if you're not
gonna do it. Don't you agree with that?" He said, "Sure.
You said you care more about my people than anyone ever has."
I do. And I said, "OK, shall I go to Korea, if you're
not going to do it." And he got big old tears in his
eyes and said, "You can't go. If we don't do this now,
it'll be five years, I've been telling you for months, it
will be five years."
So, it's gonna be about five years. And for whatever reason
he decided not to take the parameters and then when he took
them, he had an Israeli government that wouldn't give them
to him and an Israeli public that didn't trust him.
So we've got to inch back to that. But I think, you know,
there are a lot of people who want peace. A decent, honorable,
just, fair and reasonable one with reasonable compromises.
A lot of the Palestinians want it, a lot of the Israelis want
it.
The real question is to get the trust and the politics lined
up. That's what America ought to do. You know, we can't impose
a peace, we shouldn't impose a peace. It won't work if we
do. But we can help get the politics right, and if they want
a security guarantee we ought to give it to them.
Mr. president, thank you very much indeed for joining us.
|
