Why Pentagon officals should thank the aide who left notes in Starbucks

[LiviaOlivia]

DAILY EXPRESS
Nota Bene
by Spencer Ackerman

Only at TNR Online
Post date: 04.01.04

We've all had a good laugh at Eric Ruff. The hapless aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld found himself at the dangerous intersection of schadenfreude and partisanship yesterday when John Podesta's liberal Center for American Progress emailed reporters Ruff's strategy notes on how the Pentagon should respond to Richard Clarke's accusations. (Rumsfeld's spin fell victim to overcaffeination: Ruff left his talking points at a Dupont Circle Starbucks, and a patron turned them over to Podesta; the Pentagon subsequently confirmed their authenticity to UPI.) "We need to be careful as hell," Ruff quotes "DR" (Rumsfeld) as instructing. "Stay inside the line--we don't need to puff this." He adds, "This thing will go away soon and what will keep it alive will be one of us going over the line."

Far more significant than Ruff's negligence--which could happen to anyone--is the course of action his notes appear to recommend. They seem to be counseling Pentagon officials to insist that the Bush administration's pre-9/11 counterterrorism strategy--known as NSPD-9--included "military plans to attack Al Q." The problem is, as last week's 9/11 Commission hearings showed, this isn't really true. The Ruff episode suggests that the administration is still incapable of explaining its pre-9/11 counterterrorism policies in a candid fashion. It also suggests that far from a reprimand, Pentagon officials owe Ruff a thank you: His carelessness may have prevented them from tangling themselves in a web of dubious exaggerations, if not outright deceptions.

NSPD-9, prepared for the president's signature just days before September 11, is a tricky document for the Bush administration. For one thing, as the 9/11 Commission reported, its principal author was current White House enemy Richard Clarke. This led administration officials last week to contort themselves explaining how their bin Laden strategy was somehow more "comprehensive" than the one Clarke proposed in January 2001. (Clarke has said there are only cosmetic differences between his January 2001 plans and what came to be known as NSPD-9.) What's more, when the administration has tried to explain those differences, it has tended to resort to what 9/11 Commissioners Jamie Gorelick and Bob Kerrey have implied are falsehoods. Chief among these is the assertion that NSPD-9 contained a significant military component--an idea that appears in Ruff's talking points.

Ruff scribbled that NSPD-9 "called on to draw up targets in Afg develop military options." The public hasn't seen NSPD-9. But as Gorelick has described it, the document's principal military element was to "look for ways to oust the Taliban based upon individuals on the ground other than ourselves, at the same time making military contingency plans." That almost surely means that the administration intended to rely on Northern Alliance proxies to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban, while our own forces would be limited to planning for, in Gorelick's words, "contingenc"--that is, military engagement in only exceptional situations. Indeed, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told the Commission that direct U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan was envisioned only "after the horror of 9/11." According to Ruff's talking points, one way for the Pentagon to square this circle would be to mention that the "NSPD had an annex going back to July--contingency plans attack Taliban." (He is presumably referring to some sort of addendum to the document.) But that seems dishonest. If Gorelick's description of NSPD-9--which was ratified by Armitage under oath--is accurate, then the only thing the July addendum contained was a call for the military to consider contingencies. Contingencies aren't plans; they're what you do when plans fail.

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Spencer Ackerman is an assistant editor at TNR.
subcription req'd
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[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Kick.

What an amazing world we live in. Who knew Star Bucks would play such a big role in bringing this administration down? We now know that it is possible to get too relaxed.

I see an advertisement coming.