The left should look in the mirror



The Left Should Look in the Mirror
By David Horowitz
Mr. Horowitz, co-author of The Kennedys, is editor-in-chief of
FrontPage Magazine.

It figures. The guilty ones are the first to point the finger. Now the
same Democrats who for eight years slashed the military, crippled the
CIA, blamed America for the enemies it made, opposed the projection of
American power (missiles excepted) into terrorist regions like
Afghanistan and Iraq, dismissed acts of war as individual misdeeds,
rejected airport security on "racial profiling" grounds, defended a
commander-in-chief who put his own libido above the security of his
fellow citizens, and still oppose essential defense measures like
holding suspects and imposing immigration controls ­ these same
appeasers of the political left are now in full war cry against a
Republican President hoping to pin him with responsibility for the
9/11 attack.

To remind readers of the facts that the left is eager to forget, this
is what I wrote in February about the ways the left has undermined
American security:

The September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center
marked the end of one American era and the beginning of another. Like
Pearl Harbor, the September tragedy awakened Americans from insular
slumbers and made them aware of a world they could not afford to
ignore. Like Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush condemned the attacks
as acts of war, and mobilized a nation to action. It was a sharp
departure from the policy of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, who in
characteristic self-absorption had downgraded a series of similar
assaults—including one on the World Trade Center itself—to criminal
matters involving individuals alone.

The differences between the September 11 attacks and Pearl Harbor were
also striking. The latter was a military base situated on an island
3,000 miles distant from the American mainland. New York, on the other
hand, is America's greatest population center, the portal through
which immigrant generations of all colors and ethnicities come to seek
a better life. The World Trade Center is the Wall Street hub of the
economy they enter, and its victims were targeted for participating in
the most productive, tolerant and generous society human beings have
created. In responding to the attacks, President Bush took note of
this: "America was targeted for attack," he told Congress on September
20, "because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in
the world. And no one will keep that light from shining."

In contrast to Pearl Harbor, the assault on the World Trade Center was
hardly a "sneak attack" that American intelligence agencies had little
idea was coming. Its Twin Towers had already been bombed eight years
earlier, and by the same enemy. The terrorists themselves were already
familiar to government operatives, their aggressions frequent enough
that several commissions had been appointed to investigate. Each had
reached the same conclusion. It was not a matter of whether the United
States was going to be the target of a major terrorist assault; it was
a matter of when.

In fact, the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the September 11
attacks had first engaged U.S. troops as early as 1993 in Somalia. The
Americans' purpose in being there was humanitarian: to feed the
starving citizens of this Muslim land. But these goodwill ambassadors
were ambushed by al-Qaeda forces. In a 15-hour battle in Mogadishu, 18
Americans were killed and 80 wounded. A dead U.S. soldier was dragged
through the streets in an act calculated to humiliate his comrades and
his country. The Americans' offense was not that they had brought food
to the hungry. Their crime was who they were—"unbelievers," emissaries
of "the Great Satan," in the political religion of the enemy they now
faced.

The defeat in Mogadishu was not only a blow to American charity; it
was a blow to American power and American prestige. Nonetheless, under
the leadership of America's then commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton,
there was no military response to the humiliation. The greatest
superpower the world had ever seen did nothing. It accepted defeat,
and left.

The War

On February 26, 1993, eight months prior to the Mogadishu attack, al-
Qaeda terrorists had struck the World Trade Center for the first time.
Their truck bomb made a crater six stories deep, killed six people and
injured more than a thousand. The planners' intention had been to
cause one tower to topple the other and kill tens of thousands of
innocent people. It was not only the first major terrorist act ever to
take place on U.S. soil, but—in the judgment of a definitive account
of the event—"the most ambitious terrorist attack ever attempted,
anywhere, ever."

Six Palestinian and Egyptian conspirators responsible for the attack
were tried in civil courts and got life sentences like common
criminals, but its mastermind escaped. He was identified as Ramzi
Ahmed Yousef, an Iraqi Intelligence agent. This was a clear indication
to authorities that the atrocity was no mere criminal event, and that
it involved more than individual terrorists; it involved hostile
terrorist states.

Yet, once again, the Clinton Administration's response was to absorb
the injury and accept defeat. The president did not even visit the
bomb crater or tend to the victims. Instead, America's commander-in-
chief warned against "over-reaction." In doing so, he telegraphed a
clear message to his nation's enemies: We are unsure of purpose and
unsteady in hand; we are self-indulgent and soft; we will not take
risks to defend ourselves; we are vulnerable.

The al-Qaeda terrorists were listening. In a 1998 interview, Osama bin
Laden told ABC News reporter John Miller: "We have seen in the last
decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the
American soldier who is ready to wage Cold Wars and unprepared to
fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut when the Marines fled after
two explosions. It also proves they can run in less than 24 hours, and
this was also repeated in Somalia. We are ready for all occasions. We
rely on Allah."

Among the terrorist entities that supported the al-Qaeda terrorists
were Yasser Arafat's Palestine Authority and the Palestine Liberation
Organization. The PLO had created the first terrorist training camps,
invented suicide bombings and been the chief propaganda machine behind
the idea that terrorist armies were really missionaries for "social
justice." Yet, among foreign leaders Arafat was Clinton's most
frequent White House guest. Far from treating Arafat as an enemy of
civilized order and an international pariah, the Clinton
Administration was busily cultivating him as a "partner for peace."
For many Washington liberals, terrorism was not the instrument of
political fanatics and evil men, but was the product of social
conditions—poverty, racism and oppression—for which the Western
democracies, including Israel were always ultimately to blame.

The idea that terrorism has "root causes" in social conditions whose
primary author is the United States is, in fact, an organizing theme
of the contemporary political left. "Where is the acknowledgment that
this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or
'humanity' or 'the free world'"—declared the writer Susan Sontag,
speaking for this faction—"but an attack on the world's self-
proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific
American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the
ongoing American bombing of Iraq?" (Was Susan Sontag unaware that Iraq
was behind the first World Trade Center attack? That Iraq had
attempted to swallow Kuwait and was a regional aggressor and sponsor
of terror? That Iraq had expelled UN arms inspectors—in violation of
the terms of its peace—who were there to prevent it from developing
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons? Was she unaware that Iraq
was a sponsor of international terror and posed an ongoing threat to
others, including the country in which she lived?)

During the Clinton years the idea that America was somehow responsible
for global distress had become an all too familiar refrain among
leftwing elites. It had particular resonance in the institutions that
shaped American culture and policy—universities, the mainstream media
and the Oval Office. In March 1998, two months after Monica Lewinsky
became a White House thorn and a household name, Clinton embarked on a
presidential hand-wringing expedition to Africa. With a large
delegation of African-American leaders in tow, the President made a
pilgrimage to Uganda to apologize for the crime of American slavery.
The apology was offered despite the fact that no slaves had ever been
imported to America from Uganda or any East African state; that
slavery in Africa preceded any American involvement by a thousand
years; that America and Britain were the two powers responsible for
ending the slave trade; and that America had abolished slavery a
hundred years before—at great human cost—while slavery persisted in
Africa without African protest to the present day.

Four months after Clinton left Uganda, al-Qaeda terrorists blew up the
U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Clinton's continuing ambivalence about America's role in the world was
highlighted in the wake of September 11, when he suggested that
America actually bore some responsibility for the attacks on itself.
In November 2001, even as the new Bush administration was launching
America's military response, the former president made a speech at
Georgetown University in which he admonished citizens who were
descended "from various European lineages" that they were "not
blameless," and that America's past involvement in slavery should
humble them as they confronted their attackers. Characteristically the
President took no responsibility for his own failure to protect
Americans from the attacks.

The idea that there are "root causes" behind campaigns to murder
innocent men, women and children, and terrorize civilian populations
was examined shortly after the Trade Center events by a writer in the
New York Times. Columnist Edward Rothstein observed that while there
was much hand-wringing and many mea culpas on the left after September
11, no one had invoked "root causes" to defend Timothy McVeigh after
he blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995, killing 187
people. "No one suggested that this act had its 'root causes' in an
injustice that needed to be rectified to prevent further terrorism."
The silence was maintained even though McVeigh and his collaborators
"asserted that their ideas of rights and liberty were being violated
and that the only recourse was terror."

The reason no one invoked "root causes" to explain the oklahoma City
bombing was simply because Timothy McVeigh was not a leftist. Nor did
he claim to be acting in behalf of "social justice"—the historical
code for totalitarian causes. In an address to Congress that defined
America's response to September 11, President Bush sagaciously
observed, "We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all
the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human
life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except
the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and
totalitarianism."

Like Islamic radicalism, the totalitarian doctrines of communism and
fascism are fundamentalist creeds. "The fundamentalist does not
believe [his] ideas have any limits or boundaries,… [therefore] the
goals of fundamentalist terror are not to eliminate injustice but to
eliminate opposition." That is why the humanitarian nature of
America's mission to Mogadishu made no difference to America's al-
Qaeda foe. The terrorists' goal was not to alleviate hunger. It was to
eliminate America. It was to defeat "The Great Satan."

Totalitarians and fundamentalists share a conviction that is religious
and political at the same time. Their mission is social redemption
through the power of the state. Using political and military power
they intend to create a "new world" in their own image. This
revolutionary transformation encompasses all individuals and requires
the control of all aspects of human life, as Edward Rothstein pointed
out:

Like fundamentalist terror, totalitarian terror leaves no aspect of
life exempt from the battle being waged. The state is felt to be the
apotheosis of political and natural law, and it strives to extend that
law over all humanity…. No injustices, separately or together,
necessarily lead to totalitarianism and no mitigation of injustice,
however defined, will eliminate its unwavering beliefs, absolutist
control and unbounded ambitions.

In 1998 Osama bin Laden explained his war aims to ABC News: "Allah
ordered us in this religion to purify Muslim land of all non-
believers." As The New Republic's Peter Beinart commented, bin Laden
is not a crusader for social justice but "an ethnic cleanser on a
scale far greater than the Hutus and the Serbs, a scale that has only
one true Twentieth Century parallel."

In the 1990s America mobilized its military power to go to the rescue
of Muslims in the Balkans who were being ethnically cleansed by
Serbian communists. This counted for nothing in al-Qaeda's
calculations, any more than did America's support for Muslim peasants
in Afghanistan fighting for their freedom against the Red Army
invaders in the 1980s. The war against radical Islam is not about what
America has done, but about what America is. As bin Laden told the
world on October 7, the day America began its military response, the
war is between those of the faith and those outside the faith, between
those who submit to the believers' law and those who are infidels and
do not.

While The Clinton Administration Slept

After the first World Trade Center attack, President Clinton vowed
there would be vengeance. But like so many of his presidential
pronouncements, the strong words were not accompanied by deeds. Nor
were they followed by measures necessary to defend the country against
the next series of attacks.

After their Mogadishu victory and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,
unsuccessful attempts were made by al-Qaeda groups to blow up the
Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and other populated targets, including a
massive terrorist incident timed to coincide with the millennium
celebrations of January 2000. Another scheme to hijack commercial
airliners and use them as "bombs" according to plans close to those
eventually used on September 11, was thwarted in the Philippines in
1995. The architect of this effort was the Iraqi intelligence agent
Ramzi Yousef.

The following year, a terrorist attack on the Khobar Towers, a U.S.
military barracks in Saudia Arabia, killed 19 American soldiers. The
White House response was limp, and the case (in the words of FBI
director Louis B. Freeh) "remains unresolved." Two years later al-
Qaeda agents blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing
245 people and injuring 5,000. (One CIA official told a reporter, "Two
at once is not twice as hard. It is a hundred times as hard.") On
October 12, 2000 the warship USS Cole was bombed while re-fueling in
Yemen, yet another Islamic country aligned with the terrorist enemy.
Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed and 39 injured.

These were all acts of war, yet the President and his cabinet refused
to recognize them as such.

Why the Clinton Administration Slept

Clinton's second term national security advisor, Sandy Berger,
described the official White House position towards these attacks as
"a little bit like a Whack-A-Mole game at the circus. They bop up and
you whack 'em down, and if they bop up again, you bop 'em back, down
again." Like the Administration he represented, the national security
advisor lacked a requisite appreciation of the problem. Iraq's
dictator was unimpressed by sporadic U.S. strikes against his regime.
He remained defiant, expelling UN weapons inspectors, firing at U.S.
warplanes and continuing to build his arsenal of mass destruction. But
"the Administration held no clear and consistent view of the Iraqi
threat and how it intended to address it," observed Washington Post
correspondent Jim Hoagland. The disarray that characterized the
Clinton security policy flowed from the "Administration's growing
inability to tell the world—and itself—the truth." It was the
signature problem of the Clinton years.

Underlying the Clinton security failure was the fact that the
Administration was made up of people who for twenty-five years had
discounted or minimized the totalitarian threat, opposed America's
armed presence abroad, and consistently resisted the deployment of
America's military forces to halt Communist expansion. National
Security Advisor Sandy Berger was himself a veteran of the Sixties
"anti-war" movement, which abetted the Communist victories in Vietnam
and Cambodia, and created the "Vietnam War syndrome" that made it so
difficult afterwards for American Presidents to deploy the nation's
military forces.

Berger had also been a member of "Peace Now," the leftist movement
seeking to pressure the Israeli government to make concessions to
Yasser Arafat's PLO terrorists. Clinton's first National Security
Advisor, Anthony Lake was a protégé of Berger, who had introduced him
to Clinton. All three had met as activists in the 1972 McGovern
presidential campaign whose primary issue was opposition to the
Vietnam War based on the view that the "arrogance of American power"
was responsible for the conflict rather than Communist aggression.

Anthony Lake's own attitude towards the totalitarian threat in
Southeast Asia was displayed in a March 1975 Washington Post article
he wrote called, "At Stake in Cambodia: Extending Aid Will Only
Prolong the Killing." The prediction contained in Lake's title proved
to be exactly wrong. It was not a small mistake for someone who in
1992 would be placed in charge of America's national security
apparatus. Lake's article was designed to rally Democrat opposition to
a presidential request for emergency aid to the Cambodian regime. The
aid was required to contain the threat posed by Communist leader Pol
Pot and his insurgent Khmer Rouge forces.

At the time, Republicans warned that if the aid was cut the regime
would fall and a "bloodbath" would ensue. This fear was solidly based
on reports that had begun accumulating three years earlier concerning
"the extraordinary brutality with which the Khmer Rouge were governing
the civilian population in areas they controlled." But Anthony Lake
and the Democrat-controlled Congress dismissed these warnings as so
much "anti-Communist hysteria," and voted to deny the aid.

In his Post article, Lake advised fellow Democrats to view the Khmer
Rouge not as a totalitarian force—which it was—but as a coalition
embracing "many Khmer nationalists, Communist and non-Communist," who
only desired independence. It would be a mistake, he wrote, to
alienate Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge lest we "push them further into
the arms of their Communist supporters." Lake's myopic left-wing views
prevailed among the Democrats, and the following year the new
president, Jimmy Carter, rewarded Lake with an appointment as Policy
Planning Director of the State Department.

In Cambodia, the termination of U.S. aid led immediately to the
collapse of the government allowing the Khmer Rouge to seize power
within months of the congressional vote. The victorious
revolutionaries proceeded to implement their plans for a new Communist
utopia by systematically eliminating their opposition. In the next
three years they killed nearly 2 million Cambodians, a campaign
universally recognized as one of the worst genocides ever recorded.

The Warnings Ignored

For nearly a decade before the World Trade Center disaster, the
Clinton Administration was aware that Americans were increasingly
vulnerable to attacks which might involve biological or chemical
weapons, or even nuclear devices bought or stolen from broken pieces
of the former Soviet Union. This was the insistent message of
Republican speeches on the floors of Congress and was reflected in the
warnings of several government commissions, and Clinton's own
Secretary of Defense, William Cohen.

In July 1999, for example, Cohen wrote an op-ed piece in the
Washington Post, predicting a terrorist attack on the American
mainland. "In the past year, dozens of threats to use chemical or
biological weapons in the United States have turned out to be hoaxes.
Someday, one will be real." But the warnings did not produce the
requisite action by the commander-in-chief. Meanwhile, the nation's
media looked the other way. For example, as the president of the
Council on Foreign Relations told the New Yorker's Joe Klein, he
"watched carefully to see if anyone followed up on [Cohen's speech].
But none of the television networks and none of the elite press even
mentioned it. I was astonished."

The following year, "the National Commission on Terrorism—chaired by
former Reagan counter-terrorism head Paul Bremer—issued a report with
the eerily foreboding image of the Twin Towers on its cover. A bi-
partisan effort led by Jon Kyl and Dianne Feinstein—was made to attach
the recommendations of the panel to an intelligence authorization
bill." But Senator Patrick Leahy, who had distinguished himself in the
1980s by opposing the government's efforts to halt the Communist
offensive in Central America "said he feared a threat to 'civil
liberties' in a campaign against terrorism and torpedoed the effort.
After the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, Kyl and Feinstein tried yet
again. This time, Leahy was content with emaciating the proposals
instead of defeating them outright. The weakened proposals died as the
House realized 'it wasn't worth taking up.'"

After the abortive plot to blow up commercial airliners in the
Philippines, Vice President Gore was tasked with improving airline
security. A commission was formed, but under his leadership it also
"focused on civil liberties" and "profiling," liberal obsessions that
diluted any effort to strengthen security measures in the face of a
threat in which all of the proven terrorists were Muslims from the
Middle East and Asia. The commission concluded that, "no profile [of
passengers] should contain or be based on … race, religion, or
national origin." According to journalist Kevin Cherry, the FAA also
decided in 1999 to seal its passenger screening system from law-
enforcement databases thus preventing the FBI from notifying airlines
that suspected terrorists were on board."

In 1993, the FBI identified three charities connected to the
Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas that were being used to
finance terrorist activities, sending as much as $20 million a year to
America's enemies. According to presidential adviser *** Morris, "At
a White House strategy meeting on April 27, 1995—two weeks after the
Oklahoma City bombing—the President was urged to create a 'President's
List' of extremist/terrorist groups, their members and donors 'to warn
the public against well-intentioned donations which might foster
terrorism.' On April 1, 1996, he was again advised to 'prohibit fund-
raising by terrorists and identify terrorist organizations.'" Hamas
was specifically mentioned.

Inexplicably Clinton ignored these recommendations. Why? FBI agents
have stated that they were prevented from opening either criminal or
national-security cases because of a fear that it would be seen as
'profiling' Islamic charities. While Clinton was 'politically
correct,' Hamas flourished.



In failing to heed the signs that America was at war with a deadly
adversary, overcome the ideological obstacles created by the liberal
biases of his administration and arouse an uninformed public to
concern, it was the commander-in-chief who bore primary
responsibility. As one former administration official told reporter
Joe Klein "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national
defense than any another President in recent memory." Clinton's
political advisor *** Morris flatly charged, "Clinton's failure to
mobilize America to confront foreign terror after the 1993 attack [on
the World Trade Center] led directly to the 9/11 disaster." According
to Morris "Clinton was removed, uninvolved, and distant where the war
on terror was concerned."

Opportunities Missed

By Clinton's own account, Monica Lewinsky was able to visit him
privately more than a dozen times in the Oval Office. But according to
a USA Today investigative report, the head of the CIA could not get a
single private meeting with the President, despite the Trade Center
bombing of February 26, 1993 or the killing of 18 American soldiers in
Mogadishu on October 3 of the same year. "James Woolsey, Clinton's
first CIA director, says he never met privately with Clinton after
their initial interview. When a small plane crashed on the White House
grounds in 1994, the joke inside the White House was, 'that must be
Woolsey, still trying to get an appointment.'"

In 1996, an American Muslim businessman and Clinton supporter named
Mansoor Ijaz opened up an unofficial channel between the government of
the Sudan and the Clinton Administration. At the same time, "the State
Department was describing bin Laden as 'the greatest single financier
of terrorist projects in the world' and was accusing the Sudan of
harboring terrorists." According to Mansoor, who met with Clinton and
Sandy Berger, "President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted
terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and
extradition of bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the
global networks constructed by Egypt's Islamic Jihad, Iran's Hezbollah
and the Palestinian Hamas. Among the members of these networks were
the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World
Trade Center. The silence of the Clinton administration in responding
to these offers was deafening."

President Bashir sent key intelligence officials to Washington in
February 1966. Again, according to Mansoor, "the Sudanese offered to
arrest bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or, barring that,
to 'baby-sit' him—monitoring all his activities and associates." But
the Saudis didn't want him. Instead, in May 1996 "the Sudanese
capitulated to US pressure and asked Bin Laden to leave, despite their
feeling that he could be monitored better in Sudan than elsewhere. Bin
Laden left for Afghanistan, taking with him Ayman Awahiri, considered
by the U.S. to be the chief planner of the September 11 attacks…"

One month later, the US military housing complex in Saudi Arabia was
blown apart by a 5,000 lb truck bomb. Clinton's failure to grasp the
opportunity, concludes Mansoor, "represents one of the most serious
foreign policy failures in American history."

According to a London Sunday Times account, based on a Clinton
Administration source, responsibility for this decision "went to the
very top of the White House. Shortly after the September 11 disaster,
"Clinton told a dinner companion that the decision to let bin Laden go
was probably 'the biggest mistake of my presidency.'" But according to
the Times report, which was based on interviews with intelligence
officials, this was only one of three occasions on which the Clinton
Administration had the opportunity to seize Bin Laden and failed to do
so.

When the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky became public in
January 1998, and his adamant denials made it a consuming public
preoccupation, Clinton's normal inattention to national security
matters became subsumed in a general executive paralysis. In ***
Morris's judgment, the United States was effectively "without a
president between January 1998 until April 1999," when the impeachment
proceedings concluded with the failure of the Senate to convict. It
was in August 1998 that the al-Qaeda truck bombs blew up the embassies
in Kenya and Tanzania.

The Failure to Take Security Seriously

Yet this was only half the story. During its eight years, the Clinton
Administration was able to focus enough attention on defense matters
to hamstring the intelligence services in the name of civil liberties,
shrink the U.S. military in the name of economy, and prevent the
Pentagon from adopting (and funding) a "two-war" strategy, because
"the Cold War was over" and in the White House's judgment there was no
requisite military threat in the post-Communist world that might make
it necessary for the United States to be able to fight wars on two
fronts. Inattention to defense also did not prevent the Clinton
Administration from pursuing massive social experiments in the
military in the name of gender and diversity reform, which included
requiring "consciousness raising" classes for military personnel,
rigging physical standards women were unable to meet, and in general
undermining the meritocratic benchmarks that are a crucial component
of military morale.

While budget cuts forced some military families to go on food stamps,
the Pentagon spent enormous sums to re-equip ships and barracks to
accommodate co-ed living. All these efforts further reduced the
Pentagon's ability to put a fighting force in the field—a glaring
national vulnerability dramatized by the war in Kosovo. This
diminished the crucial elements of fear and respect for American power
in the eyes of adversaries waiting in the wings.

During the Clinton years, the Democrats insistence that American power
was somehow the disturber—rather than the enforcer—of international
tranquility, prompted the White House to turn to multilateral agencies
for leadership, particularly the discredited United Nations. While
useful in limited peacekeeping operations, the UN was in large part a
collection of theocratic tyrannies and brutal dictatorships which
regularly indicted and condemned the world's most tolerant
democracies, specifically the United States, England and Israel, while
supporting the very states providing safe harbors for America's al-
Qaeda enemy. Just prior to the World Trade Center attacks, the UN's
"Conference on Racism" engaged in a ritual of America bashing over
"reparations" for slavery and support for Israel. The agendas had been
set by an Arab coalition led by Iran.

During the 1990s, Bill Clinton's most frequent foreign guest was
Yasser Arafat, whose allegiance to Iraq and betrayal of America during
the Gulf War could not have been more brazen. Following the defeat of
Iraq, a "peace process" was launched in the Arab-Israeli conflict that
predictably failed through Arafat's failure to renounce the terrorist
option. But why renounce terror if there is no price exacted for
practicing it?

Clinton and the Military

It is true that the Clinton White House was able, during its eight-
year tenure, to shed some of the Democrats' normal aversion to the use
of American military might. (As recently as 1990 only 6 Democratic
Senators had voted to authorize the Gulf War against Iraq). But the
Clinton deployments of American forces were often non-military in
nature: a "democracy building" effort in Haiti that failed; flood
relief and "peace keeping" operations that were more appropriately the
province of international institutions. Even the conflict Clinton
belatedly engaged in the Balkans was officially characterized as a new
kind of "humanitarian war," as though the old kinds of war for
national interest and self-defense were somehow tainted. While the
Serbian dictator Milosevic was toppled, "ethnic cleansing," the casus
belli of the Western intervention, continues, except that the
Christian Serbs in Kosovo have now become victims of the previously
persecuted Albanian Muslims.

Among Clinton's deployments were also half-hearted strikes using
cruise missiles against essentially defenseless countries like the
Sudan, or the sporadic bombing of Iraq when Saddam violated the terms
of the Gulf peace. Clinton's strikes failed in their primary objective—
to maintain the UN inspections. On the other hand, a negative result
of this "Whack-A-Mole" strategy was the continual antagonizing of
Muslim populations throughout the world.

The most notorious of these episodes was undoubtedly Clinton's ill-
conceived and ineffectual response to the attacks on the African
embassies. At the time, Clinton was preoccupied with preparing his
defense before a grand jury convened because of his public lies about
the Lewinsky affair. Three days after Lewinsky's grand jury
appearance, without consulting the Joint Chiefs of Staff or his
national security advisors, Clinton launched cruise missiles into two
Islamic countries, which he identified as being allied to the
terrorists and their leader Osama bin Laden. One of these missiles hit
and destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, killing one
individual. Since the factory was the sole plant producing medicines
for an impoverished African nation, there were almost certainly a
number of collateral deaths.

The incident, which inflamed anti-American passions all over the
Islamic world, was—in conception and execution—a perfect reflection of
the distorted priorities and reckless attitudes of the Clinton White
House. It also reflected the irresponsibility of congressional
Democrats who subordinated the safety concerns of their constituents
to provide unified support for the presidential misbehavior at home
and abroad.

The Partisan Nature of the Security Problem

More than 100 Arabic operatives participated in the attack on the
World Trade Center Towers. They did so over a period of several years.
They were able to enter the United States with and without passports
seemingly at will. They received training in flying commercial
airliners at American facilities despite clear indications that some
of them might be part of a terrorist campaign. At the same time,
Democrats pressed for greater relaxation of immigration policies and
resisted scrutiny of foreign nationals on the grounds that to do so
constituted "racial profiling." To coordinate their terrorist efforts,
the al-Qaeda operatives had to communicate with each other
electronically on channels that America's high-tech intelligence
agencies normally intercept. One reason they were not detected was
that the first line of defense against such attacks was effectively
crippled by powerful figures in the Democratic Party who considered
the CIA the problem and not America's enemies.

Security controls that would have prevented adversarial agents from
even acquiring encryption devices that thwarted American intelligence
efforts were casually lifted on orders from the highest levels of
government. Alleged abuses by American intelligence operatives became
a higher priority than the abuses of the hostile forces they were
attempting to contain. Reporter Joe Klein's inquiries led him to
conclude "there seems to be near unanimous agreement among experts: in
the ten years since the collapse of the Soviet Union [and the eight
years of the Clinton presidency, and the seven since the first Al-
Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center] almost every aspect of
American national-security—from military operations to intelligence
gathering, from border control to political leadership—has been marked
by … institutional lassitude and bureaucratic arrogance…"

The Democrats’ Anti-Intelligence Bill

The Democrats' cavalier attitude towards American security in the
years preceding September 11 was dramatized in a series of annual
amendments to cut intelligence funds sight unseen, which was
introduced every year of the Clinton Administration (except 2000) by
Independent Bernie Sanders.

The Sanders amendment was initially proposed in 1993, after the first
al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center. In that year, the Democrat-
controlled House Intelligence Committee had voted to reduce President
Clinton's own authorization request for the intelligence agencies by
6.75%. But this was insufficient for Sanders. So he introduced an
amendment that required a minimum reduction in financial authorization
for each individual intelligence agency of at least 10%.

Sanders refused to even examine the intelligence budget he proposed to
cut: "My job is not to go through the intelligence budget. I have not
even looked at it." According to Sanders the reasons for reducing the
intelligence budget were that "the Soviet Union no longer exists," and
that "massive unemployment, that low wages, that homelessness, that
hungry children, that the collapse of our educational system is
perhaps an equally strong danger to this Nation, or may be a stronger
danger for our national security."

Irresponsible? Incomprehensible? Not to between a third and more than
half the Democrats in the House who voted in favor of the Sanders
amendment over the years. Ninety-seven Democrats in all voted for the
Sanders cuts, including House Armed Services Committee chair Ron
Dellums and the House Democratic leadership. As the terrorist attacks
on America intensified year by year during the 1990s, Sanders
steadfastly reintroduced his amendment. In 1995, 1996 and 1997 Barney
Frank introduced a similar amendment that would cut the intelligence
funds by less, but cut them still. In 1997, 158 Democrats voted for
the Frank Amendment. That same year a majority voted for a modified
Sanders amendment to cut intelligence funds by 5%.

According to a study made by political consultant Terry Cooper, "***
Gephardt (D-MO), the House Democratic leader, voted to cut on five of
the seven amendments on which he was recorded. He appears to have
'taken a walk' on two other votes. David Bonior (D-MI), the number-two
Democratic leader who as Whip enforces the party position, voted for
every single one of the ten cutting amendments. Chief Deputy Whips
John Lewis (D-GA) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) voted to cut intelligence
funding every time they voted. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), just elected to
replace Bonior as Whip when Bonior leaves early in 2002, voted to cut
intelligence funding three times, even though she was a member of the
Intelligence Committee and should have known better. Two funding cut
amendments got the votes of every single member of the elected House
Democratic leadership. In all, members of the House Democratic
leadership supported the Saunders' and Frank's funding cut amendments
56.9 percent of the time."

Many of the Democrats whose committee positions give them immense say
over our national security likewise voted for most or all of the
funding-cut amendments. Ron Dellums (D-CA), the top Democrat on the
Armed Services Committee from 1993 through 1997, cast all eight of his
votes on funding cut amendments in favor of less intelligence funding.
Three persons who chaired or were ranking Democrats on Armed Services
subcommittees for part of the 1993-99 period—Pat Schroeder (D-CO),
Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) and Marty Meehan (D-MA)—also voted for every
fund-cutting amendment that was offered during their tenures. Dave
Obey (D-WI), the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee that
holds the House's keys to the federal checkbook, voted seven out of
eight times to reduce intelligence funding.

In 1994, Republican Porter Goss, a former CIA official and member of
the House Intelligence Committee, warned that the cuts now proposed in
the intelligence budget amounted to 16% of the 1992 budget and were
20% below the 1990 budget. Yet this did not dissuade Dellums, Bonior
and 100 or more Democrats from continuing to lay the budgetary ax to
America's first line of anti-terrorist defense. Ranking Committee
Republican Larry Combest warned that the cuts endangered "critically
important and fragile capabilities, such as in the area of human
intelligence." In 1998, Osama bin Laden and four radical Islamic
groups connected to al-Qaeda issued a fatwa condemning every American
man, woman and child, civilian and military included. Sanders
responded by enlisting Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio to author an
amendment cutting the intelligence authorization again.

The Republicans and National Security Issues

When Republicans took control of the House in 1994, Republican Floyd
Spence, now head of the National Security Committee, expressed his
outrage at the Democrats' handiwork in words that were eerily
prescient: "We have done to our military and to our intelligence
agencies what no foreign power has been able to do. We have been
decimating our own defenses….In this day and time you do not have to
be a superpower to raise the horrors of mass destruction warfare on
people. It could be a Third World country, a rogue nation, or a
terrorist group….These weapons of mass destruction are chemical,
biological, bacteriological….Anthrax could be released in the air over
Washington, DC…. That could happen at any time and people are talking
about cutting back on our ability to defend against these things or to
prevent them from happening. It is unconscionable to even think about
it. It borders on leaving our country defenseless."

Yet the warning signs continued right up to the disaster. Before and
after the 1999 Washington Post article by Defense Secretary Cohen,
"there was a series of more elaborate reports about grand terrorism,
by assorted blue-ribbon task forces, which warned of chemical,
biological, and nuclear attacks…" A report by former Senators Hart and
Rudman called for a huge "homeland security" campaign that would
include—in Joe Klein's summation for the New Yorker—"intensive
municipal civil defense and crisis response teams, new anti-terrorist
detection technology," and a new cabinet level position of Secretary
of Homeland Security, which was instituted by the Bush Administration
shortly after the attack.

Klein—a liberal Democrat and former "anti-war" activist—refused to
draw the obvious conclusion from these events, and place the
responsibility where it belonged—squarely on the shoulders of the
Democrats. Instead he wrote: "There can't be much controversy here.
Nearly everyone—elected officials, the media, ideologues of every
stripe—ignored these reports."

This is a falsehood so self-serving as to be almost understandable.
Fortunately there is an extensive public record attesting to the
intense and ongoing concern of Republican officials and the
conservative media over the nation's security crisis, and their
determined if unsuccessful efforts to expose and remedy it. There is
an equally extensive public record documenting the Democrats'
resistance to strengthening the nation's defenses and the liberal
media's efforts to minimize, dismiss and even ridicule attempts by
Republicans to do so. The national press's negative treatment of
Representative Dan Burton's and Senator Fred Thompson's committee
investigations into the efforts by Communist China to influence the
1996 presidential election is a dramatic instance of this pattern,
particularly since the liberal media have made campaign finance reform
one of their highest priorities.

In fact, the Chinese poured hundreds of thousands of—legal and illegal—
dollars into the Clinton-Gore campaigns in 1992 and 1996. The top
funder of the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign was an Arkansas resident and
Chinese banker named James Riady, whose relationship with Clinton went
back twenty years. Riady is the scion of a multi-billion dollar
financial empire whose throne room in Jakarta is adorned with two
adjacent portraits of Clinton and Chinese leader, Li Peng, the
infamous "butcher of Tiananmen Square." Though based in Indonesia, the
Riady empire has billions of dollars invested in China, and is a
working economic and political partnership with China's military and
intelligence establishments. The Riadys gave $450,000 to Clinton's
1992 presidential campaign and another $600,000 to the Democratic
National Committee and Democratic state parties—and that was just the
tip of the iceberg in their working partnership with Clinton.

The question that Democratic obstructions prevented the Thompson and
Burton committees from answering was whether these payments resulted
in the transfer of U.S. weapons technologies to Communist China. China
is known to have transferred such sensitive military technologies to
Iran, Libya, North Korea and Iraq. Beginning in 1993, the Clinton
Administration systematically lifted security controls at the
Department of Commerce that had previously prevented the transfer of
sensitive missile, satellite and computer technologies to China and
other nuclear proliferators. In the beginning of that year, Clinton
appointed John Huang, who was an agent of the Riady interests as well
as Communist China, to a senior position at Commerce with top security
clearance. Clinton later sent Huang to the Democratic National
Committee to take charge of fund-raising for his 1996 campaign.

In May 1999, a bi-partisan House committee, headed by Representative
Christopher Cox, released a report which was tersely summarized by the
Wall Street Journal in these harrowing words: "The espionage inquiry
found Beijing has stolen U.S. design data for nearly all elements
needed for a major nuclear attack on the U.S., such as advanced
warheads, missiles and guidance systems." Among the factors
contributing to these unprecedented losses—most of which took place
during the Clinton years—the report identified lax security by the
Administration.

Two committees of Congress headed by Dan Burton and Fred Thompson
attempted to get to the bottom of the matter to see if there was any
connection between these problems and the Riady-Huang fund-raising
efforts, particularly the illegal contributions by foreign agents of
the Chinese military and intelligence establishments. The
investigations failed because the Committee Republicans were
stonewalled by the Clinton Administration, their Democratic colleagues
and the witnesses called. In all, 105 of these witnesses either took
the Fifth Amendment or fled the country to avoid cooperating with
investigators. They did this not only with the tacit acquiescence of
the Clinton Administration, but the active help of Clinton officials.

There are scores of Republican congressmen—leaders of military,
intelligence and government oversight committees—who attempted to
sound the alarm on this front, and who expressed publicly (and to me,
personally) their distress at being unable to reach the broad American
electorate with their concerns about these national security issues
because of the indifference of the liberal media and the partisan
rancor of the Democrats.

In the year prior to the World Trade Center attack, I met in the
Capitol with more than a dozen Republican members of the House—
including members of the Armed Services Committee—to discuss how the
security issue could be brought before the American public. Given the
President's talent for political double-talk and the lock-step
submission of congressional Democrats to his most reckless agendas,
and without the possibility of media support for such an effort, not a
single member present thought that raising these issues would go
anywhere. Even attempting to raise them, they felt, exposed them to
damaging political risks. These risks included attacks by Democrats
and liberal journalists who would label them "mean-spirited
partisans," "right–wing alarmists," "xenophobes" and, of course,
"Clinton bashers."

While the liberal media put up a wall of opposition, journalists in
the conservative media worked against the grain to make the issues
public. Bill Gertz, Ken Timperlake and William C. Triplett III wrote
books (Betrayal and The Year of the Rat) based on military and
intelligence sources, and data collected by the Thompson and Burton
committees that would have shaken any other administration to its
roots, but received little attention outside conservative circles.
Other conservative journalists including the Washington Times' Rowan
Scarborough and various writers for the Wall Street Journal's
editorial pages, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard pursued
the story but were also unable to reach a broad enough public to make
any impact. The conservative side of the ideological spectrum has no
apologies to make for disarming the nation in the face of its security
threats. The Democratic Party and its subsidiary institutions, the
liberal press and the left-wing academy, do.

The Lobby Against America’s Intelligence Services

One of the obvious causes of the many security lapses preceding the
World Trade Center attack was the post-Vietnam crusade against U.S.
intelligence and defense agencies dating from the Church Committee
reforms in the mid-Seventies and led by "anti-war" Democrats and other
partisans of the American left. A summary episode reflecting this mood
involved CIA operative Robert Baer, described by national security
reporter Thomas Powers, as "a 20-year veteran of numerous assignments
in Central Asia and the Middle East whose last major job for the
agency was an attempt to organize Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein
in the early 1990s—shuttling between a desk in Langley and contacts on
the ground in Jordan, Turkey, and even northern Iraq."

According to Powers, "That assignment came to an abrupt end in March
1995 when Baer, once seen as a rising star of the Directorate of
Operations, suddenly found himself 'the subject of an accusatory
process.' An agent of the FBI told him he was under investigation for
the crime of plotting the assassination of Saddam Hussein. The
investigation was ordered by President Clinton's national security
adviser, Anthony Lake, who would be nominated to run the [CIA] two
years later. [Lake's appointment was successfully resisted by the
intelligence community.]…. Eventually, the case against Baer was
dismissed …but for Baer the episode was decisive. 'When your own
outfit is trying to put you in jail,' he told me, 'it's time to go.
Baer's is one of many resignations [in the Directorate of Operations]
in recent years…."

Hostility to the CIA during the Clinton years ran so high that
intelligence professionals refer to it as the "'Shia' era in the
agency," Powers reported. The term referred to the Islamic sect that
stresses the sinfulness of its adherents. "We all had to demonstrate
our penance," a former CIA chief of station in Jordan told Powers.
"Focus groups were organized, we 're-engineered' the relationship of
the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence,"
which meant introducing "uniform career standards" that would apply
indiscriminately to analysts and covert operators in the field. This
meant high-risk assignments in target countries resulted in no greater
advancement up the bureaucratic ladder than sitting at a computer
terminal in Langley. "In the re-engineered CIA," comments Powers, "it
was possible for Deborah Morris to be appointed the DO's deputy chief
for the Near East. [The DO is the department of covert operations.]
"She worked her way up in Langley," an operative told Powers. "I don't
think she's ever been in the Near East. She's never run an agent, she
doesn't know what the Khyber Pass looks like, but she's supposed to be
directing operations [in the field]."

The end of the Cold War in 1991 inspired the reformers to close down
all the Counterespionage Groups in the CIA because their expertise was
no longer "needed." Spies were passé. "The new order of the day was to
'manage intelligence relationships.'" After interviewing many
operatives who had left the CIA in disgust during this period, Powers
concluded that in the Clinton years the Agency had become more and
more risk averse as the result of "years of public criticism, attempts
to clean house, the writing and rewriting of rules, …efforts to rein
in the Directorate of Operations, … catch-up hiring of women and
minorities [and] public hostility that makes it hard to recruit at
leading colleges."

A post 9/11 article by Peter Beinart, editor of the liberal New
Republic amplified Powers' observations. Beinart speculated that the
CIA's lapses may have occurred because of a fundamental mediocrity
that had overtaken the institution. This mediocrity was the direct
result of the attacks on the Agency (and on America's global purposes)
by the political left and the culture of hostility towards the
American government that had been successfully implanted in America's
elite universities—once the prime recruiting grounds for the
intelligence services.

Beinart began with a description of the recent assassination of Abdul
Haq in Afghanistan. Haq was potentially the most important leader of
the internal opposition to the ruling Taliban. Yet the CIA had failed
to provide him with protection. A key element in this disaster was the
fact that the CIA did not have a single operative who could
communicate with Haq in his native tongue, Dari. Nor did the CIA have
a single operative who spoke Pashto, the language of the Taliban, even
though al-Qaeda's base had been Afghanistan for years. The problem of
reading intercepted intelligence transcripts in Pashto was "solved" by
sending the transcripts to Pakistan to be translated by Pakistani
intelligence officials—who were also sponsors of the Taliban. Some CIA
officials believe it was Pakistani intelligence officials who warned
Osama Bin Laden to get out of Khost before U.S. missiles were launched
into Afghanistan after the embassy bombings in 1998.

The Abdul Haq assassination exposed the enormous human intelligence
gap that had developed within the agency during the post-Vietnam
years. As much as 90% of America's intelligence budget was being spent
on technology, electronic decryption and eavesdropping systems for the
National Security Agency, rather than human intelligence based on
agents in the field. Without human language skills much of this
information itself remained useless. In September 2001, the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence concluded: "At the NSA and
CIA, thousands of pieces of data are never analyzed or are analyzed
'after the fact'…. Written materials can sit for months and sometimes
years before a linguist with proper security clearance and skills can
begin a translation."

According to a 1998 article in The Atlantic Monthly written by a
former CIA official, "Not a single Iran-desk chief during the eight
years I worked on Iran could speak or read Persian. Not a single Near
East Division chief knew Arabic, Persian or Turkish, and only one
could get along even in French." These deficiencies become
intelligible only when one understands what happened to Middle Eastern
studies in American universities in the post-Vietnam decades.

The University Left Against The Nation’s Security

The story of the university left's subversion of the field of Middle
Eastern studies is recounted in a recent book by Martin Kramer, editor
of the Middle East Quarterly. As a reviewer summarized Kramer's
argument, "In the late seventies, the radical students of the 1960s
began to enter the professoriate. The way was cleared for them to
wrest power from the Middle East studies establishment when Edward
Said's Orientalism (1978) crystallized a new understanding of the
field." Said was a member of the ruling council of Yasser Arafat's PLO
and quickly became one of the most powerful academics in America,
eventually heading the Modern Language Association, whose 40,000
members make it the largest professional association of academics. On
November 21, 1993, eight months after the World Trade Center bombing,
Said wrote an article for the New York Times Sunday Magazine with the
revealing title "The Phony Islamic Threat." Said's title summarized
the intellectual shift in Middle East studies during the previous
decade. The new perspective that came to dominate the field was that
perceptions of a terrorist threat from Islamic radicals were
expressions of "Euro-centric" or racist attitudes by their Western
oppressors.

In his book, Orientalism, Said argued that all previous scholarship on
the Middle East was hopelessly biased because it was written by white
Europeans and thus "racist." According to Said, "All Western knowledge
of the East was intrinsically tainted with imperialism." In one stroke
Said thus discredited all previous scholarship in the field, paving
the way for its replacement by Marxist radicals like himself. With the
help of his left-wing academic allies, Said's extremist viewpoint
created the climate and context for a revolution in Middle Eastern
studies. This was accelerated by the "multi-culturalist" attitudes of
the university and racial preference policies in faculty hiring, which
involved the widespread recruitment of political leftists from the
Islamic theocracies of the Middle East. Before Said, "3.2% of
America's Middle East area specialists had been born in the region. By
1992, the figure was nearly half. This demographic transformation
consolidated the conversion of Middle Eastern studies into leftist
anti-Americanism."(Emphasis added.)

In a statement issued ten days after the World Trade Center attack,
the Middle East Studies Association—the professional organization
representing the field—refused to describe the perpetrators of the
attack as "terrorists," and preemptively opposed any U.S. military
response. Georgetown professor John Esposito, a former president of
the Middle East Studies Association and an academic star in the field,
made his name after the first World Trade Center attack by following
Said's example and disparaging concerns about Islamic terrorism as
thinly-veiled anti-Muslim prejudice. He was rewarded by being made a
foreign affairs analyst for the Clinton State Department and assigned
to its intelligence department.

The language deficiency at the CIA—to which the political takeover of
the academic profession greatly contributed—proved crucial at the
operational level. But it was only a reflection of the more profound
problem that afflicted the intelligence community because of the
universities' leftward turn. In Beinart's words, "Today's CIA is a
deeply mediocre institution. Its problems aren't legal or financial;
they're intellectual. The agency needs a massive infusion of
brainpower." How massive an infusion was indicated in an article
Beinart cited: "According to a 1992 New York Times story, applicants
for the CIA's 'Undergraduate Student Trainee Program' needed only a
combined SAT score of 900 and a grade point average of 2.75." This
compares to the average requirements for entrance into top ranked
schools like Harvard or Princeton, which require SAT scores above 1300
and grade point averages of 4.0. Princeton is one of many elite
universities that because of political pressure from the left
officially refuse to allow the CIA to recruit students on their
campuses and have refused to do so for more than a decade.

The only places the CIA can recruit its missing brainpower—"the only
institutions able to supply the world-class linguists, biologists, and
computer scientists it currently lacks—are America's universities."
But the universities have long since become the political base of a
left that has not given up its fantasies of social revolution and is
deeply antagonistic to America and its purposes. The root cause of the
nation's security problem is that, beginning in the 1960s the
political left aimed a dagger at the heart of America's security
system, and from a vantage of great power in the universities, the
media and the Democratic Party were able to press the blade home for
three decades prior to the World Trade Center disaster.

The main reason the CIA no longer recruits agents from top-ranked
schools is because it can't. "The men and women who teach today's
college students view the CIA with suspicion, if not disdain," as
Beinart put it. The formulation is, in fact, too mild. The left hates
the CIA and regards it as an enemy of all that is humane and decent.
To make their case, academic leftists drill the nation's elite youth
in a litany of "crimes" alleged to have been carried out by the CIA
since the late 1940s—the rigging of the Italian and French elections
of 1948 against popular Communist parties (whose aim, unmentioned in
this academic literature was to incorporate Western Europe into
Stalin's satellite system), the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1951
(whom they fail to identify as a Soviet asset who would have delivered
Iranian oil reserves to Stalin), the overthrow of the Arbenz regime in
Guatemala (whom the left portrays as a Democrat but who was in fact a
Communist fellow-traveler who chose to spend his exile years as a
privileged guest in Castro's police state), the "Bay of Pigs" (which
was the CIA's failed effort to overthrow the most oppressive Communist
regime in the hemisphere), and the "Phoenix Program" in Vietnam (which
was an attempt to prevent a Communist front set up by the Hanoi
dictatorship from overthrowing the Saigon government and establishing
a Communist police state in the South.)

In the perverse view of the academic left, the CIA is an agency of
torture, death and oppression for innocent masses all over the world
that otherwise would be "liberated" by progressive totalitarian
forces. Utilizing the powerful resources of the academy, the left has
created a vast propaganda apparatus to establish what is essentially
the view of the CIA held by America's fiercest enemies. The anti-
American propaganda is itself disseminated under the imprint of
America's most prestigious university presses including Harvard,
California, Duke, and Princeton.

University administrations have caved in to these leftists so
consistently as to leave themselves little room for maneuver. "When
the president of the Rochester Institute of Technology took a brief
leave to work for the CIA in 1991," recalls Beinart, "many students
and faculty demanded that he resign. Last year, when the government
tried to establish a program under which college students would
receive free language instruction in return for pursuing a career in
intelligence, the University of Michigan refused. As assistant
professor Carol Bardenstein told Time, "We didn't want our students to
be known as spies in training." (Apparently she would prefer them to
be helpless targets-in-waiting.) For caving in to these pressures, the
president of Michigan, Claude Bollinger, was rewarded by being
appointed president of Columbia University shortly after the September
11 bombing.

As Beinart points out, there can be reasonable concerns about the
proper functions of a university and the appropriate relationship of
government agencies to private institutions of learning (although the
University of Michigan is a state-financed school). "But most of the
squeamishness about training, and encouraging students to work for the
CIA doesn't have anything to do with the mission of the academy; it
has to do with ideological hostility to the instruments of American
power." This ideology is enforced by political correctness in the
university hiring process.

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