Thursday, April 08, 2004
Finding fault for September 11
The partisanship that has plagued the 9/11 commission and its investigation -- including the applause that punctuated the questioning of Condaleeza Rice this morning -- is appalling and without historical precedent. Unfortunately for the Bush Administration, it surrendered the moral high ground on the timing of the investigation by failing to roll some heads after the attacks.
It is obvious and uncontroversial that there were significant intelligence failures before both Pearl Harbor and September 11 -- in both cases we were caught entirely by surprise, and in both cases there were clues that, in retrospect, might have been construed to justify defensive measures. A country sustains spies in peacetime because, among other things, they can warn of a sneak attack.
However, the inquiry into Pearl Harbor was carried out after the war so as not to undermine the effort required to win the war. Waiting to hunt for the guilty until after the war makes a lot of sense. Public conflict within the government gives comfort to the enemy. It would have during the '40s, and it does today. Look at the many Islamist jihadists who openly express their hope that their actions will drive Bush from office just as they influenced the elections in Spain. Division within the American government can only encourage them.
So why are we in the middle of the September 11 inquiry during the war against Islamist jihad? Perhaps times have changed, and the "permanent campaign" now extends through any national crisis. Or maybe it is because so many people do not believe that we are at war, except in Iraq. Or is it the prospect that this war might last a long time, or that its victory conditions are not well defined, that drives the timing of the inquiry? Stratfor, by the way, argued in its letter a couple of weeks ago that many wars have seemed potentially endless:
Only with the benefit of hindsight can one make the argument that previous wars would be temporally contained. As British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey so poignantly stated in 1914 -- at the start of World War I, the shortest of the 20th century's major conflicts -- "The lights are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." The review could have waited.
Stratfor argues that we were able to defer the Pearl Harbor inquiry because Roosevelt cleaned house after that disaster, which meant that -- at some superficial level -- the people in the chain of command most obviously "responsible" for the failure of Pearl Harbor in the abstract sense were fired or marginalized.
This housecleaning was not necessarily fair. Adm. Husband Kimmel, Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), for example, was fired even though a strong case could be made that he was less responsible than others for Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, Pearl Harbor happened on his watch and he was gone.
It went deeper than that. Roosevelt wanted to signal that something had gone terribly wrong not only with one person but also with a generation of leaders. Relatively junior commanders Chester Nimitz and Dwight Eisenhower were catapulted into senior command positions. Not all of the old leaders were replaced -- consider Douglas MacArthur or George Marshall -- but there was a broad enough housecleaning that no one could escape the fact that the war had changed everything. You could argue that Roosevelt did this to protect himself, but if so, he was doing his job.
Bush, on the other hand, kept his team intact, including people he had inherited from Clinton, such as George Tenet. As Stratfor argues, there were good reasons for this, and political reasons. The country was in a state of shock, and the battle moved to Afghanistan very quickly. Changing horses in mid-stream would have caused other problems. The political reasons are obvious:
The man who was institutionally responsible for detecting Sept. 11 was CIA Director George Tenet. He as 2001's Kimmel. Whether it was his fault or not, Sept. 11 was an intelligence failure. Tenet was in charge of intelligence, and it happened on his watch. Kimmel was sacked -- but Tenet was not a Bush appointee. He had been appointed by Bill Clinton. Bush began with a crippled presidency due to the Florida fiasco. He did not have the national authority of Roosevelt, and he badly needed bipartisan support. Bush obviously respected Tenet since he kept him on after his election. He might have decided to keep him on after Sept. 11 in order to help bulletproof his administration. Tenet was, after all, a Clinton appointee.
The problem for Bush was that this tremendously increased the pressure for a formal inquiry into the intelligence failures preceding September 11 before the conclusion of the war. After December 7, those who were responsible for Pearl Harbor, in the formal sense at least, were no longer in the chain of command. After September 11, the same people who were on the watch at the time of the attack were now responsible for the prosecution of the war. Evaluation of their competence, therefore, is important to understanding whether the war itself is in capable hands. Hence the September 11 commission and these hideous hearings.
Ultimately, this reasoning is unfair. Roosevelt had been in office for more than 8 years before Pearl Harbor, and was therefore personally responsible in a very fundamental sense for America's military planning in the Pacific. Bush had been in office less than 8 months, and was very distracted by the most apparent threat at the time, China. Remember the downing of the EP-3 aircraft over Hainan Island? It was the single most newsworthy foreign policy crisis -- if you can call it that -- between Bush's inauguration and September 11. But unfair or not, Bush should have anticipated that the failure to roll some heads after September 11 would make it impossible to resist a wartime hunt for the guilty.
It is obvious and uncontroversial that there were significant intelligence failures before both Pearl Harbor and September 11 -- in both cases we were caught entirely by surprise, and in both cases there were clues that, in retrospect, might have been construed to justify defensive measures. A country sustains spies in peacetime because, among other things, they can warn of a sneak attack.
However, the inquiry into Pearl Harbor was carried out after the war so as not to undermine the effort required to win the war. Waiting to hunt for the guilty until after the war makes a lot of sense. Public conflict within the government gives comfort to the enemy. It would have during the '40s, and it does today. Look at the many Islamist jihadists who openly express their hope that their actions will drive Bush from office just as they influenced the elections in Spain. Division within the American government can only encourage them.
So why are we in the middle of the September 11 inquiry during the war against Islamist jihad? Perhaps times have changed, and the "permanent campaign" now extends through any national crisis. Or maybe it is because so many people do not believe that we are at war, except in Iraq. Or is it the prospect that this war might last a long time, or that its victory conditions are not well defined, that drives the timing of the inquiry? Stratfor, by the way, argued in its letter a couple of weeks ago that many wars have seemed potentially endless:
Only with the benefit of hindsight can one make the argument that previous wars would be temporally contained. As British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey so poignantly stated in 1914 -- at the start of World War I, the shortest of the 20th century's major conflicts -- "The lights are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." The review could have waited.
Stratfor argues that we were able to defer the Pearl Harbor inquiry because Roosevelt cleaned house after that disaster, which meant that -- at some superficial level -- the people in the chain of command most obviously "responsible" for the failure of Pearl Harbor in the abstract sense were fired or marginalized.
This housecleaning was not necessarily fair. Adm. Husband Kimmel, Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), for example, was fired even though a strong case could be made that he was less responsible than others for Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, Pearl Harbor happened on his watch and he was gone.
It went deeper than that. Roosevelt wanted to signal that something had gone terribly wrong not only with one person but also with a generation of leaders. Relatively junior commanders Chester Nimitz and Dwight Eisenhower were catapulted into senior command positions. Not all of the old leaders were replaced -- consider Douglas MacArthur or George Marshall -- but there was a broad enough housecleaning that no one could escape the fact that the war had changed everything. You could argue that Roosevelt did this to protect himself, but if so, he was doing his job.
Bush, on the other hand, kept his team intact, including people he had inherited from Clinton, such as George Tenet. As Stratfor argues, there were good reasons for this, and political reasons. The country was in a state of shock, and the battle moved to Afghanistan very quickly. Changing horses in mid-stream would have caused other problems. The political reasons are obvious:
The man who was institutionally responsible for detecting Sept. 11 was CIA Director George Tenet. He as 2001's Kimmel. Whether it was his fault or not, Sept. 11 was an intelligence failure. Tenet was in charge of intelligence, and it happened on his watch. Kimmel was sacked -- but Tenet was not a Bush appointee. He had been appointed by Bill Clinton. Bush began with a crippled presidency due to the Florida fiasco. He did not have the national authority of Roosevelt, and he badly needed bipartisan support. Bush obviously respected Tenet since he kept him on after his election. He might have decided to keep him on after Sept. 11 in order to help bulletproof his administration. Tenet was, after all, a Clinton appointee.
The problem for Bush was that this tremendously increased the pressure for a formal inquiry into the intelligence failures preceding September 11 before the conclusion of the war. After December 7, those who were responsible for Pearl Harbor, in the formal sense at least, were no longer in the chain of command. After September 11, the same people who were on the watch at the time of the attack were now responsible for the prosecution of the war. Evaluation of their competence, therefore, is important to understanding whether the war itself is in capable hands. Hence the September 11 commission and these hideous hearings.
Ultimately, this reasoning is unfair. Roosevelt had been in office for more than 8 years before Pearl Harbor, and was therefore personally responsible in a very fundamental sense for America's military planning in the Pacific. Bush had been in office less than 8 months, and was very distracted by the most apparent threat at the time, China. Remember the downing of the EP-3 aircraft over Hainan Island? It was the single most newsworthy foreign policy crisis -- if you can call it that -- between Bush's inauguration and September 11. But unfair or not, Bush should have anticipated that the failure to roll some heads after September 11 would make it impossible to resist a wartime hunt for the guilty.
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