Nobody quite knows how the Hebrew word effess, meaning
“nothing,” evolved into the Yiddish word eppess, meaning
“something.” Considering this etymology, eppess is best
defined as “the smallest amount of something that is more than
nothing.” The episode of 9/11 has now led to President Bush
offering the latest ode to the art of eppess. He has
proposed that the fertile womb of government spawn a new mutation,
the Director General of Intelligence.
Asking Congress, in his capacity as Recommender-In-Chief, to
authorize this new position, he asserted that it is “a good idea.”
Is it an idea whose time has come? Or is it an idea whose timing
has come? Trusting souls believe the President to mean that doing
this is a good idea. Cynical types are wont to interpret that doing
“at least one thing that the 9/11 commission suggested” is a good
idea.
For us, as members of the vast right-wing conspiracy, trust is
absolutely essential, or the whole edifice could come tumbling
down. A shrug at the Spectator can become a smirk at Fox
News and eventually metastasize into a sneer on Limbaugh.
Constrained to take the President at his word, we must examine this
“good idea” by a substantive standard. In which case, we identify
three areas of complaint. 1) The premise is wrong. 2) The process
is wronger. 3) The idea itself is wrongest.
The premise is that all decisions that are followed by bad
events must by definition be bad decisions. They will prove to us
that the decisions leading up to our pre-Sept. 11 defense posture
were wrong by the very fact that we were attacked. This is somewhat
akin to the tickets that State troopers used to write both parties
after a traffic collision, citing them for “failure to avoid
accident.” It is possible to make all the right decisions and still
harvest a regrettable result.
The inverse of this fallacy is something that we encounter
everyday in the business world, where a guy who made a few
successful deals begins to assume that he must be a genius. We
should not suppose that the Ken Lays of this world began their
careers as rapacious predators, trying to part fools from their
money. They were simply guys whose decisions worked out well a few
times, which they mistakenly took as evidence of infallibility.
Bad decisions can turn out well: Jamie Lee Curtis married
someone other than me, yet she seems to be happy. Good decisions
can turn out badly: Wally Pipp was right when he said that taking
just one day off would do him a world of good.
OUR DECISIONS LEADING UP to 9/11 were substantially correct. We did
not allow bombings in Tanzania and Yemen to give our national life
the flavor of paranoia. There was no immutable logic that decreed
that we hunker in bunkers. We valued the openness of our society,
which is the key to our spiritual strength as much as to our
financial success, far more than the sum total of all the bellicose
bellowing of the cave-dwellers in Afghanistan and the
palace-dwellers in Iraq.
In the end, 19 ruffians managed to kill 3,000 innocent people
and cost our economy a trillion dollars, all for the price of a
plane ticket apiece. It was a devastating blow, and it sparked
vehement return visits to Afghanistan and Iraq. We have also
tightened up our internal security to an extent, in an effort to
further minimize risk.
All of this is not to say that there were not lessons to be
learned. Some of the obstacles that bits of info encounter as they
swim through the bureaucratic bloodstream, originally conceived as
checks and balances, had hardened into clots. And it would have
been nice if someone had spelunked more seriously for Bin Laden
before September 11. But those are bathwater issues, not baby
issues. Frankly, those problems benefited more from the
self-correcting experience of the attack than from any pontifical
commissions. Remember, any bureaucrat’s first impulse is “cover
your keister”; that same impetus has them scurrying to make darned
sure it doesn’t happen again on their watch.
There is no need to scapegoat some schnook at the CIA for
missing the import of some Arab chatter about “the mother of all
terrorist bombings.” I don’t think that it’s giving away any
national-security secrets when I tell you that the radio waves are
saturated with tripe like that on a constant basis. Most of this is
bombast, not bombing. Arab teenagers want the same thing that
American teenagers want, but they have been told that the maidens
are more amenable up in Heaven. Unless they meet a guy who knows a
guy, they usually have to content themselves with bluster and
braggadocio, just the same as our teenagers.
Bottom line, the premise is wrong. 9/11 is not anyone’s fault,
nor does it expose a fault line in our intelligence community.
ONCE YOU BUY THE premise, you find yourself stuck with the process.
So, sure enough, we were bequeathed a 9/11 commission. Former
bureaucrats and politicians, nostalgic for the days that taxpayers
greased the wheels of their limos, came huffing and puffing out of
retirement, eager to shower us with the wisdom that guided them
into their former desuetude. The word spread like wildfire across
the putting greens and the canasta tables of the land: there is a
BUDGET!
The first problem with this process is that the gathering of
evidence is virtually guaranteed to distort context. Say that one
memo out of a million that is generated by a given unit over the
course of a year warns of “possible devastating terrorist attacks
in the homeland.” The cascade of memos offering every possible
scenario serves to obviate the significance of this one speculation
among many. But when a commission member holds up that one memo and
waves it at a CIA Director or a Cabinet minister, it acquires an
individual personality that its author never dreamed possible. This
form of hindsight is 20-20 revision.
The other glaring flaw of this process is the need to demand
changes. It is simply inconceivable for a commission of this sort
to issue a summation that reads “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
This would make its entire existence seem to have been redundant.
The pressure to justify its expenditure of public funds and
patience becomes insuperable.
They always fall into the same trap, that of the Program
Director at the Number One radio station. At first, he basks in
having propelled his craft to the summit. Then he begins to get
nervous; if he does nothing to change the format, some efficiency
expert will argue that the position of program director may be
eliminated. So he starts tinkering with his already winning
formula, and before long the station slides downhill.
Here, too, if the commission does not want to look like an
error, it must cite errors of commission — and omission. It must
offer plans to shake things up, to turn things over, to shift
things around, to reassess and reassert and reassign. Before you
know it, the old system that worked has been junked, and its
replacement is a whole lot worse, if only because green discolors
more than rust. The commission scraps and meddles, but it does not
necessarily iron. The process is wronger than the premise.
Finally, wrongest of all is the idea itself. We all recognize
the Director of General Intelligence; he is the doddering old dodo
in Len Deighton novels who is too busy polishing his political
alliances to worry overmuch about his work product. Unless someone
has a Churchillian figure in mind, or even an Acheson, letting one
address be the final port of call for all intelligence information
and analysis practically guarantees that much, if not most,
valuable material will arrive at a dead end. One office means one
viewpoint, that is a hard and fast rule of bureaucracy. If you want
diverse approaches, you must set up divergent channels.
GENERALLY, TOO, MONOPOLY IS not an idea that works any better in
government than it does in the private sector. The Departments of
State and Defense have job descriptions with a great deal of
overlap, a recipe for tension, friction, and attrition. In
administration after administration, the tales of infighting and
arm-wrestling are traded with lip-smacking relish. Still, the
overall result of this clash is positive. Most of the tension is
converted into creativity. The only response to backbiting is to
keep busy on the front burner.
If you want to examine the effectiveness of a monopoly in a
governmental setting, ask yourself two questions. 1) What fabulous
innovative thing has the Department of Interior done for you lately
to improve your life as a citizen? 2) Who the heck is the Secretary
of Interior anyway?
Creating a Directorate of General Intelligence to mold the
entire colorful display of intelligence flavors into one
plain-vanilla report for the President is an absolutely awful idea
that will make us drastically less equipped for the next unpleasant
surprise. The problem is that when that happens, the next
commission will have every option but one: they will never be able
to admit that the previous body saddled us with a new nightmare.
Once we take off the multi-colored dreamcoat, we will not get
another shot at the kingdom.
Mr. President, if you must do eppess, why not something
dynamic that will capture the public imagination without letting
your decision-making be “out of commission”? Why not assemble all
the leaders of the different arms of the intelligence structure in
the Oval Office and announce that you are going to make the exact
opposite move? You will have a separate quasi-cabinet meeting once
a week with the “intelligence cabinet,” in which each group will
have a chance to put forth what it considers to be its matter of
highest priority.
