Taken together, the 9/11 hearings and the 2004 presidential
campaign are an almost lethally demoralizing combination. William
Faulkner famously said (or wrote) that the past is not really dead;
it is not even past. Well, he was a smart man but even he probably
couldn’t have anticipated the way we have gone spelunking down the
memory hole these last few weeks, mining for votes. First,
Bush/Kerry rekindled the debate over Vietnam. Then, the hearings
turned into the kind of “it wasn’t my fault; it was all
your fault” sort of exercise that obscures the past in the
smog of partisanship when what most people outside of Washington
would settle for is a little more clarity.
With this crew and these hearings — fat chance. When it is not
about votes; it is about book sales and television ratings. Will
the hearings produce any new information or insights or — perish
— the kind of wisdom it will take to prevent a future 9/11?
No.
One would like to say that this is not for lack of trying but,
alas. The hearings are plainly meant to change votes, not policy or
tactics. The exercise is a pumped-up campaign commercial, longer
and more expensive than the average 30 second spot and just about
as illuminating.
One watches the former governors of New Jersey and Illinois (two
states where the government can’t rein in the Mafia), a former
special counsel to the Watergate Committee (who still seems to
think that the bad guys live in the White House), a former
congressperson, former Secretary of the Navy … watches the
whole cast of formers and despairs. The CIA may have been
inept before 9/11 (having been emasculated by inquisitions like
this one) but one feels some compassion for Director Tenet. He was
dealing with the unknown and groping in a fog of incomplete and
conflicting information. These guys are dealing with actual events;
with facts. (“Facts on the ground” is the current, fancy locution.)
Their job is not to guess what might happen but to explain what has
already happened, and they have had months to get ready with the
added benefit of lavish staff. Still, they can’t get it right. And
don’t appear, really, to be trying.
Dealing with shadows on the wall and specters in the night, the
CIA blew it.
These guys are shooting at fish in a barrel and missing with
every shot.
At the end of the day (as everyone likes to say), the commission
will deliver a report and it will not do much to explain why we
were so utterly and disastrously surprised on 9/11. Nor is it
likely to prevent our being surprised again.
THE THING IS, surprise attacks are America’s weakness. Just as some
boxers are suckers for the left hook, we have a way of getting
surprised. Consider: Pearl Harbor, Manila (where the Japanese
caught us unprepared 24 hours after Pearl Harbor), and the
Battle of the Bulge. Then, we were surprised when the North Koreans
invaded the South and again when the Chinese came across the Yalu.
Nobody saw Sputnik coming. Khrushchev caught us off guard with the
Berlin Wall and missiles in Cuba.
In Vietnam, Tet was a complete surprise.
Jimmy Carter was surprised when the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan.
We were surprised in Beirut when a suicide bomber blew up the
Marine Barracks.
Likewise, George Bush when Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait.
And, of course, every single terrorist attack in the
'90s came as a big surprise. Which led up to the gaudiest and most
lamentable of all the surprise attacks, this one on our own
soil.
PERHAPS THE COMMISSIONERS could take a day away from their lawyerly
nitpicking and ask if there might be something in the American
character or psyche that makes us especially vulnerable to surprise
attacks. (They ain’t going to do it, but one can dream.) Could this
be the dark side of a peculiarly American virtue? Part complacency
and smugness in our own strength and perceived invulnerability but,
also, a kind of naïve trust and belief that since it is unfair
to hit someone when he isn’t looking, people won’t do that. Jimmy
Carter was shocked, shocked when the Soviet Union sent
troops into Afghanistan. And our intelligence services before World
War II — good as they were — labored under an administration
whose Secretary of War didn’t believe that “gentlemen read other
gentlemen’s mail.” This presupposed, of course, that the world was
full of gentlemen.
Old habits die hard. The CIA and, especially, the FBI were
restricted in what they could do before 9/11 by policies that
required them to act like gentlemen. No racial profiling. No
sharing of foreign and domestic intelligence product. No peeking;
no fair.
In one sense, the commission’s self-inflicted irrelevance is
… well, irrelevant. The lesson of 9/11 has already
been learned and a doctrine to prevent its repetition has been
formulated. Without actually saying it, President Bush made it
plain that as a nation, we are tired of being surprised by our
enemies, over and over again.
What else, after all, is the Bush doctrine of preemption? We are
not, it says, going to wait around for the opportunity to turn the
other cheek. If you are planning on hitting us with a surprise
attack, be prepared to be surprised, yourself.
For this new doctrine to work, two things are necessary. First,
intelligence must be good (we can’t afford to be “gentlemen”) and
the commission hasn’t done much to make one hopeful on this score.
Nor, in truth, has President Bush. Admiral Kimmel and General Short
were relieved after Pearl Harbor. George Tenet is still running the
CIA, insisting that the agency did a good job.
And, then, preemption isn’t much of a doctrine unless your
enemies believe you mean it. In undermining the administration that
formulated the doctrine, the commission makes it less credible.
So, when the hearings are over — and it can’t come soon enough
— the commission may have made us more vulnerable to a
repeat of 9/11. Will, in short, have made the situation it was
created to solve, worse.
Surprise, surprise.
Geoffrey Norman is a writer in Dorset,
Vermont.
