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COMMENTARY
July 24, 2004
The 9/11 report
We now have the report of the independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the U.S. to supplement the Senate Select Committee report on intelligence failures in the Iraq war preparations. They cover overlapping ground. The latest study concludes about the failure to stop 9/11: it was no one's fault really; or else it was everyone's fault. I've been unable to find anything interesting in either report that I didn't already know. The best I can say for the latest is that it is written in passable English. The one big proposal of the "9/11 Commission" strikes me as foolish. It is to consolidate U.S. intelligence gathering under a single directorate. The opposite makes more sense: to shake up the many smaller agencies then abet competition among them to get at the facts leaving the decision-makers in the White House to wrestle directly with often conflicting information rewarding and punishing for results. One of several little ironies in the 9/11 report is that it makes a good if belated case for invading Iran before Iraq. It shows the U.S. had more circumstantial evidence of Iranian involvement in the international terror networks and quite possibly in the facilitation of 9/11 itself than it had for Iraq. We are beginning to hear Democrats -- the ones who want to pose as "tough on terrorism" -- taking this line. Good luck to them. President Bush did mention three specific regimes in connexion with the phrase "axis of evil" -- and the Iranian and North Korean ones are still in business and certainly still feeding the international Jihad (Iran for ideological North Korea for mercenary motives). We are thus still waiting for these other two shoes to drop. Moreover Saudi Arabia Syria Syrian-controlled Lebanon and arguably several other regimes are still in the supply chain and hardly co-operating with U.S. efforts to root it up. By the Bush Doctrine enunciated in the President's third-last State-of-the-Union address each richly qualifies for armed molestation. Call Mr. Bush a war-monger if you will; in my eyes he's beginning to look like a wuss. His great strength to date has been doing what he says he will do thus making his demands credible. In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion a much higher level of co-operation was obtained from Libya Sudan Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia and Iran. But the advantage has been frittered away as the Bush administration has gone "all multilateral" in response to continuing criticism over Iraq. I myself underestimated the ability of the Western media to turn the victory in Iraq into an apparent defeat through selective reporting and sheer verbiage. While the current relaxation of Washington's belligerency may be attributed to the U.S. election cycle -- in the absence of another huge terror hit on the U.S. itself the voters are getting bored with foreign wars -- I detect a deeper pusillanimity. In retrospect it took much too long to invade Iraq and the various "evil-doers" were given too much opportunity to prepare for it. Moreover the Bush administration allowed itself to be bogged down in Iraqi reconstruction. In war as in physics speed counts for mass: and now the whole world is watching the lumbering pace at which the Americans deliver a punch. Iran has been effectively conceded a window of opportunity to develop and deploy nuclear weapons; the pressure has been taken off the Saud dynasty to clean up its act on American instead of Arabian terms. Mr. Bush promised to take the battle to the enemy both at home and abroad. The 9/11 report catalogues and embodies the bureaucratization of that effort its transformation into a defensive action in which vast resources are deployed to guard against the possibility of pinpoint strikes -- the expense further increased by the need to maintain legal niceties and economic normality while the country is under threat. The attempt to be simultaneously at peace and at war is not sustainable. The U.S. was not expecting to get hit on the morning of 9/11/01 and therefore no one was on his toes: that is the chief finding of the 9/11 Commission. Since almost every specific failure it highlights in the existing security systems has been fixed where convenient or addressed where inconvenient the report is practically useless. It does not wrestle with the developing threat: for the Jihadis have also been learning from their experience what America's real vulnerabilities are: a mindset that continues to rank "political correctness" above questions of life and death; and a political and media "opposition culture" that has itself embraced an anti-American ethos compatible with the Jihad's. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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