1998 Embassy bombings and September 11

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US Embassy in Tanzania damaged by a truck bomb, 1998-08-07

How might the world be different if US President Bill Clinton had treated the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania 1998-08-07 as a law enforcement issue?

Before the bombing, the Afghan government had reportedly already agreed to extradite bin Laden to Saudi Arabia for treason, where he would almost certainly have been executed. After the bombing, Muslim clerics around the world were condemning bin Laden and al-Qaeda for their unjustified taking of human lives and defiling the name of Islam in the eyes of the world.[1]

The remains of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan after it was destroyed 1998-08-20 as part of "Operations Infinite Reach"

That reportedly turned 180 degrees when the US bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan and al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan 13 days later on 1998-08-20: Bin Laden suddenly became a Muslim hero, challenging what seemed to them to be an evil empire, the US, which was supporting corrupt governments oppressing Muslims around the world, especially in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel. "Donations to bin Laden, which had been falling off for several years, increased markedly. ... [Saudi businessmen] transferred millions of dollars through Islamic charities to bank accounts linked to bin Laden".[2] When the Saudis came for bin Laden in September, as previously agreed, the Afghan government refused to extradite him.[3]

A little over a year later, on 1999-11-19, an America West flight made an emergency landing when two Saudis tried to break into the cockpit. Investigations by the FBI determined that those and other actions by Saudis in the US appeared to be preparing for something like the suicide mass murders of September 11, 2001, supported by the Saudi embassy and consulates in the US.[4]

If the US had treated the 1998 embassy bombings as law enforcement issues, bin Laden would likely have been extradited to Saudi Arabia in September, tried for treason and executed -- without having achieved the high profile he gained after Operation Infinite Reach and without the explosive growth in Islamic terrorism that has followed. In particular, without that Operation, suicide mass murders of September 11, 2001, would likely never have occurred, as fewer Muslims, especially employees of the Saudi embassy and consulates in the US, would likely have been willing to support such a violent conspiracy against the US. Chomsky (2001, p. 21) wrote, "a massive assault on a Muslim population would be the answer to the prayers of bin Laden and associates, and would lead the U.S. and its allies into a diabolical trap, as the French foreign minister put it." This is an application of a general principle that when people are killed and property destroyed, the apparent perpetrators often make enemies. This is blindingly obvious to anyone -- except the perpetrators, who believe they are simply defending themselves.[5]

After the USS Cole was bombed in Aden, Yemen, 2000-10-12, the Afghan government reportedly concluded that they needed to get rid of bin Laden and started working with the US Government to do so. After the November US election, the Afghan government and the Clinton administration allegedly agreed on means but passed it to the G. W. Bush administration for implementation, where it stalled.[6] After September 11, the Afghan government refused to hand over bin Laden unconditionally but offered, e.g., to try him if the US provided evidence. The US refused[7] and invaded instead.

Without mentioning these specific events, Mott's (2022, 2023) summary of US foreign and military policy between the Presidencies of William McKinley and Joe Biden suggests that these events are a feature of how national security advisors (and politicians) are selected. They were not rare events.

Analysis[edit | edit source]

The claim that bin Laden would have been extradited to Saudi Arabia without Operation Infinite Reach was not mentioned in three books by Michael Scheuer (2002, 2004, 2008), who was the Chief of the unit in the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) charged with tracking bin Laden between 1996 and 1999 as part of his 22-year career with the CIA. Scheuer (2004, p. xv) expressed serious concern about how the US responded to the September 11 attacks, saying, "[T]he US became bin Laden's only indispensable ally." He seemed unaware of the connection mention by Burke (2003) and Mueller (2021a, b) that bin Laden would likely have been extradited to Saudi Arabia in September 2008 without Operation Infinite Reach,[8][9] which raises questions about the veracity of the claims by Burke and Mueller.

But even if the above summary of the reactions of Muslim clerics to the 1998 embassy bombings and to Operation Infinite Reach is overstated, it should nevertheless be clear from other research that without Infinite Reach, bin Laden and al-Qaeda likely would not have gotten as much support as they did subsequently -- if any at all -- especially from wealth Saudis and employees of the Saudi embassy and consulates in the US. That reduction in support would have made it more difficult and possibly impossible to successfully execute attacks like those that actually occurred on September 11, 2001.

Other relevant research includes the following:

  • General David Petraeus as commander of US Central Command reportedly understood that “you can't kill your way out of an insurgency, … [Y]ou have to find other kinds of ammunition, and it's not always a bullet."[10] General Stanley McChrystal agreed, noting that, "the idea that violence can solve complicated political problems alone is not substantiated by evidence or by my experience."[11] He noted that, "Outside Kabul, Afghans often lived in large, multigenerational homes (called qalats) with high walls that resembled fortresses, and to enter uninvited was a cultural taboo," leading to many deaths and alienating many Afghans, who might otherwise have supported the US.[12] He also described a "cross-border operation [from Afghanistan] into Pakistan to strike Taliban who were using border areas for safe haven. ... [T]he mission ... became a very visible gunfight in which a number of Taliban were killed, and the public violation of sovereignty aroused the ire of the Pakistanis.[13]
  • Material on "Why people obey the law", e.g., Tyler and Huo (2002), which documented how people in different ethnic groups have the same concept of rule of law as majority of whites but different experiences, extending the work of Tyler (2006). This work was primarily based on research in the US.
  • Jones and Libicki (2008) identified 268 terrorist groups that ended between 1968 and 2006. Twenty of those groups -- 7 percent -- were ended by military force. Ten percent won. Forty percent succumbed to law enforcement. The remaining 43 percent ended with negotiations like the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. While they didn't identify all the groups in which military force was tried unsuccessfully, it still seems that military force may be the least effective response to terrorism.
  • Mann (2017) claims that community policing (which he called "Village Stability Operations") was working in Afghanistan and might have won the war there if it had been expanded to meet the need.
  • Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) created an inventory of all the major violent and nonviolent governmental change efforts of the twentieth century -- over 200 violent revolutions and over 100 nonviolent campaigns. Twenty-five percent of the violent revolutions succeeded while 53 percent of the nonviolent campaigns did. More importantly, when they looked at the change in the level of democratization before vs. after the conflict, they found that win or lose, on average violence promotes tyranny while nonviolence builds democracy.
  • A standard exception to this apparently near universal respect for rule of law seems to be that many people with power believe they should be above the law:
  1. The Scythian philosopher Anacharsis in ancient Athens said that "Laws are spider-webs, which catch the little flies, but cannot hold the big ones."[14]
  2. Machiavelli tells his Prince that a head of state must have a different standard of behavior for himself than for everyone else or risk ruin. This justification has been routinely extended to support uses of force and nuclear weapon states threatening the extinction of civilization, which may be counterproductive.
  3. The same day as the embassy bombings, President President 'Clinton started meeting with his "Small Group" of national security advisers ... . The group's objective was to plan a military response to the East Africa embassy bombings.' If the Clinton administration considered treating the 1998 embassy bombings as a law enforcement issue, documentation of that is not easy to find.[15]

If you, dear reader, have a perspective supported by credible source(s) that have been overlooked or misinterpreted in the above, please "be bold but not reckless" in attempting to improve this analysis. Absent that, it seems quite likely that the spectre of Islamic terrorism would have largely died out after 1998 if the Clinton administration had treated the embassy bombings of that year as a law enforcement issue and not an excuse for use of military force.

See also[edit | edit source]

Bibliography[edit | edit source]

Notes[edit | edit source]

  1. ↑ Burke (2003, p. 167). See also Mueller (2021a, b).
  2. ↑ Burke (2003, ch. 12, esp. p. 163).
  3. ↑ Burke (2003, p. 167). See also Mueller (2021a, b).
  4. ↑ Sperry (2017). Joint US Senate & House Committee investigating intelligence failures before and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (2016, pp. 419, 433). The exact date and the location of the emergency landing are documented in DeAnda (1999).
  5. ↑ Graves (2005).
  6. ↑ St. Clair and Cockburn (2004). Beyond this, it seems unlikely that the USS Cole would have been bombed 2000-10-12 if the US had treated the 1998 embassy bombings as a law enforcement issue. Many people all over the world would have been eager to support a law enforcement effort to provide evidence against those who supported, planned and executed the embassy bombings. Osama bin Laden would likely have been extradited to Saudi Arabia, as previously planned, tried, convicted and executed. Meanwhile, the US could almost certainly have gotten cooperation from Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, and elsewhere in identifying co-conspirators and getting them extradited to Kenya and Tanzania. The sentences may not have included death, because the most recent executions in Kenya and Tanzania were in 1987 and 1994, respectively. However, pursuing rule of law would not have allowed the US to showcase its military might.
  7. ↑ Robertson and Wallace (2001).
  8. ↑ Scheuer has become highly controversial, especially since 2013 when he recommended complained of the counterproductive approach to terrorism followed by US presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama and UK Prime Ministers Blair and Cameron, then quoted favorably Algernon Sidney, who was executed by the British Crown for sedition for having said that, “There must therefore be a right of proceeding judicially or extra-judicially against all persons who transgress the laws ... . For which reason, by an established law among the most virtuous nations, every man might kill a tyrant; and no names are recorded in history with more honor, than of those who did it." Scheuer (2013). See also Frum (2014).
  9. ↑ The CIA is far from perfect. Tetlock and Gardner (2015) describe a "Superforecasting" methodology that they say outperformed intelligence analysts with access to classified information on forecasting tasks assigned to them by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) using people with no particular expertise other than a willingness to question their own judgement and repeatedly modify their published judgements based on new evidence and further thought -- outperforming IARPA's "control group" by 60 and 78 percent, respectively, in two successive years.
  10. ↑ DePaulo (2017).
  11. ↑ McChrystal and Butrico (2021, p. 131).
  12. ↑ McChrystal and Butrico (2021, pp. 152-153).
  13. ↑ McChrystal and Butrico (2021, pp. 24-25).
  14. ↑ Quoted in both the Wikipedia and Wikiquote articles on "Anacharsis", accessed 2022-10-29.
  15. ↑ This is quoted from the section of the Wikipedia article on "Planning the strikes" in the Wikipedia article on their response, "Operation Infinite Reach" as of 2022-12-05. The primary reference for that quote was Barletta (1998), which in turn references Watson and Berry (1998). No matches were found for "extrad" in either the Wikipedia article on "Operation Infinite Reach nor in Barletta (1998) nor in Watson and Berry (1998). Coll (2005), also cited in discussing this "Small Group", reported that early in 1998 Bill Richardson, US Ambassador to the UN, talked with President Clinton about asking the Taliban about extraditing bin Laden. Clinton encouraged him, suggesting other administration officials to brief about this (Coll, 2005, p. 384); it's unclear whether Richardson knew about the negotiations between the Taliban and the Saudis on extraditing bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. However, when the embassies were bombed shortly thereafter, Richardson was not included in the "Small Group" who decided how to respond, which suggests that President Clinton and his "Small Group" felt no need to seriously consider extradition.
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