YESTERDAY DHAHRAN,
TOMORROW PEARL HARBOR II?

(Washington, D.C.): In the wake of Tuesday’s horrific
terrorist bombing of the U.S. military compound in Dhahran, Saudi
Arabia, America’s leaders and people alike are wondering: How
could this have happened? As the initial shock and
anguish subside, they are sure to be replaced with recriminations
over warnings disregarded and precautionary steps neglected.

The Start of the Blame Game

Last night’s broadcast of ABC News’ World News Tonight
With Peter Jennings gave a taste of what is, inevitably, in
store:

Pentagon Correspondent David Ensor:
“There have been plenty of warnings,
Peter. In fact, in the last six months, the State Department
has issued these six advisories warning Americans that they
had evidence that they might be targeted, that American
targets might be hit in Saudi Arabia. The last one warned
that there was an anonymous telephone threat of retaliation
against Americans if four Saudis charged with a previous
bombing were executed. And they were, at the end of last
month. So steps were taken, about 20 different steps, to
upgrade security at this one location, including those cement
barricades. But it clearly wasn’t enough.”

* * *

Peter Jennings: “…Can we now
anticipate that people are going to want to make
changes?”

Ensor: “There’s an urgent
worldwide review underway, Peter, of security at
military installations and, for that matter, at embassies and
consulates. And there are going to be some changes,
I am told.”

Jennings: “Okay….A very senior
Saudi Arabian who knows this compound well asked us today,
‘Why do the Americans live in a building right on the
perimeter?’ This was a 400-building complex, he said. Why do
the Americans not live deeper inside? ABC’s Jim Wooten
tonight on how this had happened.”

Jim Wooten: “We’ve seen
these pictures before — the Beirut embassy and the Marine
barracks; New York’s World Trade Center; Oklahoma City;
Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Hundreds of Americans injured and
killed by bombs hidden in trucks or cars. And now this.”

[Footage of] William Perry, Secretary of Defense:
“If it were not for the fence and the security barrier
around these apartments, there would have been many, many
more casualties.”

Wooten: “But Secretary Perry and
others in the government, by now quite familiar with this
nightmare, know 100 feet is no protection against two
and a half tons of high explosives. So why was this
truck that close to the apartment? In these times, in that
place, how could this be? The perimeter was a chain link
fence, eight feet high and topped with concertina wire and
one set of heavy concrete barriers on each side. No way to
penetrate that, yet for these terrorists no need. They simply
parked their truck and their bomb just beyond the perimeter,
only 35 yards from the target. Most kids can throw a football
that far.”

[Footage of] Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA
Chief, Counterterrorism: “To have a
35-yard security perimeter in light of the history of attacks
against U.S. military facilities in the Middle East, is
absolutely reprehensible.”

Wooten: “By the end of the day, the
country’s top military officer, General Shalikashvili, was
saying it’s time to take a new look at security.”

[Footage of] General John Shalikashvili: “We
certainly have to take into consideration a very different
threat than we had in the past.”

Jim Wooten: “This is Pennsylvania
Avenue. The White House is down there. The street has been
closed for some time now in an effort to keep terrorist
vehicles at least this far away — 300 yards.
So any inquiry into what happened yesterday will surely have
to focus on whose idea it was to let them get any closer than
that to American troops in Dhahran.”

The Fire Next Time

The truth of the matter is, of course, that this crime
— heinous as it was — will appear quite trivial compared to the
acts of terror about which the United States is now being
warned and against which the Clinton Administration is
determined to remain inadequately defended: the danger of attacks
involving ballistic missile-delivered weapons whose destructive
power immensely exceeds the 2 tons of high explosive used in
Dhahran.

An impressive array of qualified intelligence professionals,
defense experts, strategic analysts and other specialists have
concluded that the threat of such attacks is growing, not only
against U.S. forces and allies in places like Saudi Arabia and
elsewhere around the world, but also against the American people
themselves. The Administration, nonetheless, is determined to
disregard these warnings. Instead, as George Will put it in a
nationally syndicated column appearing in today’s Washington
Post (see the attached):

“…The Clinton Administration suggests wagering the
Nation’s safety on a sanguine prediction that seems
to have been produced by a premise designed to induce
complacency. The premise is that at least fifteen
years will elapse before a ballistic missile threat to the 48
contiguous states can be developed indigenously
by a rogue state such as Iraq or North
Korea.” (Emphasis added.)

This purposeful manipulation of the National Intelligence
Estimate⁽¹⁾— and the
failure to put into place even the most modest missile defenses
(the functional equivalent, at least, of the concrete barriers
and security fence in Dhahran) has produced extremely sharp
criticism from R. James Woolsey, the Clinton Administration’s
first Director of Central Intelligence. In congressional
testimony last month, Mr. Woolsey declared:

“The key issue is that off Taiwan this past March, as
well as in the streets of Tel Aviv and Riyadh in early 1991,
we have been given an important insight into the future of
international relations. It is not an attractive vision. Ballistic
missiles can, and in the future they increasingly will, be
used by hostile states for blackmail, terror and to drive
wedges between us and our friends and allies. It is my
judgement that the administration is not currently giving
this vital problem the proper weight it deserves.“

So serious are Mr. Woolsey’s concerns about the
Administration’s dereliction of duty in failing to respond
appropriately to available warning about the threat of missile
attack that they evidently contributed to his decision yesterday
to endorse former Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole for
President — a man who has unequivocally pledged to defend
America against ballistic missile attack if elected.

Negotiating Away Even The ‘Concrete Barriers’

Matters have just been made worse by the announcement that the
Clinton Administration has negotiated changes to the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that are likely — indeed, seem
designed — to impede efforts by Congress, by a President
Dole or by anyone else to begin building effective missile
defenses. According to an Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency press release, “preliminary agreement” has been
reached on the texts of two documents: 1) a Memorandum of
Understanding that will “multilateralize” the ABM
Treaty and 2) an Agreed Statement “relating to
demarcation” between defensive systems limited by that
Treaty and those that are not.

The purpose — privately acknowledged by
Administration officials — of expanding the number of parties to
the ABM Treaty to include at least Ukraine, Belarus and
Kazakhstan (and possibly virtually every successor state to the
Soviet Union) is to make it more difficult to liberalize that
Treaty’s restraints on missile defenses. In place of the
one veto now exercised by Russia over needed U.S. programs, there
will be four, six, eight or more.

The effect, if not the object, of the
demarcation agreement will be to purchase the opportunity to
develop and deploy the least effective anti-theater ballistic
missile (ATBM) systems at the expense of encumbering development
and deployment of more capable ATBMs. Such programs as
the Navy Upper Tier and growth options for the Army’s THAAD
system — utilizing missiles with interceptor velocities in
excess of 3 kilometers per second — will almost certainly be
deemed henceforth to require Russian approval to proceed. At a
minimum, agreement has been reached on yet-to-be-announced
“confidence-building measures” which could effectively
impose geographic, numerical and/or other limitations on the
deployment of such promising anti-missile systems.

Most striking of all, these amendments to the ABM
Treaty — which could well have the effect of denying
the United States the equivalent in missile defense terms of the
modest protection in place in Dhahran before this week’s fatal
attack — have been constructed in such a way as to deny
the Senate its constitutionally mandated role in treaty-making.
Presumably, this reflects the Administration’s expectation that
they would not secure the needed two-thirds majority support
there.

The Administration’s willful disregard of the Constitution is
made more egregious by the fact that its approach would also
violate the FY 1996 Defense Authorization Act. Insult is added to
injury, moreover, by the pivotal role played in such machinations
by Robert Bell, the National Security Council’s Director for Arms
Control. It was, after all, Mr. Bell who in 1986-87 as a
staffer for Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) authored for the Senator a
series of impassioned denunciations of executive branch efforts
to alter the scope and nature of duly ratified treaties without
seeking the explicit consent of the Senate!

The Bottom Line

The latest mortal terrorist incident ought to be a wake-up
call for every American. As James Woolsey observed last night on
CNN:

“…It’s important…for everyone to be aware that
these types of incidents, whether it’s our own domestic
terrorists…or those from overseas, such as with the World
Trade Center, or some combination, we could see more
of this in the next months and years in the States.”

It would greatly exacerbate the present tragedy — and
defile the memory of those who were needlessly murdered in its
course — were we to worry now exclusively about the dangers of
future truck bombs packed with high explosive. If the
next act of terror, or the one after that, involves ballistic
missile-borne weapons of mass destruction, woe be to those who
will be held responsible for having ignored the myriad warnings,
obstructed prompt deployment of the necessary defensive measures
and otherwise betrayed their responsibility to the American
people to provide for the common defense.

1. For more on this travesty, see the
Center’s Decision Brief entitled Smoke
and Mirrors: Even by Clinton Standards, the President’s
Misrepresentations on Missile Defense are Scandalous
(No. 96-D 56, 12 June 1996).