Why Nobody Saw 9/11 Coming

ONDON — Did the Bush administration, before the 9/11 attacks, fail to take terrorism seriously enough? At first the contention seems unlikely. Isn't this the most hawkish administration in living memory? Wasn't it President Bush who coined the phrase "war on terror"?

Yet in the current hearings on the attacks — and in the controversy surrounding the new book by Richard A. Clarke, the administration's first counterterrorism chief — the words "neglect" and "failure" keep cropping up.

And there is something to these accusations — although perhaps not in the sense that the people making them intend. The administration's early failures on terrorism cannot be pinned down to individual instances of "neglect." To understand what really went wrong, we need to go back to the last decades of the cold war, when people like Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney first started to make sense of terrorism.

In the 1970's and 80's, the predominant view among Washington hawks was that none of the various terrorist groups that operated in Western Europe and the Middle East was truly independent. They were all connected through a vast terrorist network, which was created and supported by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. The Communists' aim, the hawks believed, was to destabilize the Western societies without being directly linked to violence.

It all seemed to make perfect sense, and books like "The Terror Network" by Claire Sterling, which argued the network hypothesis with considerable force and conviction, became essential reading for anyone who wanted to make his way in the Reagan White House.

The idea that the sinister hand of the Kremlin was behind groups like the Italian Red Brigades and even the Irish Republican Army revealed the deep sense of paranoia within political circles at the time. More important, the idea of the Communist terrorism network buttressed the conservative fixation on states as the only major actors in the international political system.

According to the classically "realist" mindset, only states can pose a significant threat to the national security of other states, because lesser actors simply do not have the capacity, sophistication and resources to do so. Hence, if terrorists suddenly became effective in destabilizing countries like Italy, they couldn't possibly have acted on their own. They must have had state sponsors, and it was only by tackling the state sponsors (in this case, the Soviet bloc), that you could root out the terrorists.

During the cold war, the paradigm of "state-sponsored terrorism" was useful, if not entirely correct. Most terrorists did receive help from states, and there were some links between disparate groups, although not to the extent that many in the United States believed. And some of the worst atrocities — like the 1983 attack on United States military headquarters in Beirut — were in fact carried out by groups that had been created by "rogue states" like Iran, Libya and Syria.

With the end of the cold war, however, things changed. While there was no longer a prime state sponsor for any "terror network," there was also no longer any need for one. It became easy to travel from one country to another. Money could be collected and transferred around the globe. Cell phones and the Internet made it possible to maintain tight control of an elusive group that could move its "headquarters" across continents. In fact, by the end of the decade, it seemed as if the model of state-sponsored terrorism had effectively been reversed: Al Qaeda was now in charge of a state — Afghanistan under the Taliban — rather than vice versa.

But the Washington hawks failed to see what was happening. The world around them had changed, but their paradigm hadn't. For them, states continued to be the only real movers and shakers in the international system, and any serious "strategic" threat to America's security could only come from an established nation.

Consider an article in the January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine by Condoleezza Rice, titled "Campaign 2000 — Promoting the National Interest." Ms. Rice, spelling out the foreign policy priorities of a Bush White House, argued that after years of drift under the Clinton administration, United States foreign policy had to concentrate on the "real challenges" to American security. This included renewing "strong and intimate relationships" with allies, and focusing on "big powers, particularly Russia and China." In Ms. Rice's view, the threat of non-state terrorism was a secondary problem — in her to do list" it was under the category of "rogue regimes," to be tackled best by dealing "decisively with the threat of hostile powers."

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that there was relatively little interest in Al Qaeda when the Bush team took over. For most of 2001, the national security agenda really consisted of only two items, neither of which had anything to do with the terrorist threat of radical Islam. First, the administration increased its efforts to bring about regime change in Iraq, which was believed to be the prime source of instability in a region of great strategic importance.

The second goal was a more competitive stance toward China. Missile defense — this time against attack by China and North Korea — was put back on the table. Even the collision of an American spy plane with a Chinese fighter in 2001 is an indication of the administration's mindset — intelligence resources were deployed not to find Osama bin Laden, but to monitor what many White House hawks considered the most likely future challenger of American power.

Sept. 11, 2001, brought about a quick re-orientation of foreign policy. What didn't change, however, was the state-centered mindset of the people who were in charge. According to Mr. Clarke, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld immediately suspected Saddam Hussein, and suggested military strikes against Iraq. While cooler heads prevailed at the time, and there was a real effort to track down and destroy the Qaeda network, there was also a reluctance to abandon the idea that terrorism had to be state-based. Hence the administration's insistence that there must be an "axis of evil" — a group of states critical in sustaining the terrorists. It was an attempt to reconcile the new, confusing reality with long-established paradigm of state sponsorship.

In the end, the 9/11 hearings are likely to find that the intelligence failure that led to the horrific attacks stemmed from the longstanding problems of wrongly placed agents, failed communications between government departments and lack of resources. But it was also a failure of vision — one for which the current administration must take responsibility.

Peter R. Neumann is a research fellow in international terrorism at the Department of War Studies, King's College London.

Clipped this from the a report on the latest Newsweek poll taken AFTER Clarke's testimony. This should make people feel better. We can win this. We just have to fight like heck. It will not be won by news reports or campaign speeches, it will be won by us here talking to neighbors, freinds and co-workers. Even if you just get them signed up as Bush volunteers to get the Bush Talking Points Emails to help spread the truth, we take another step towards victory.

A strong majority (65%) of Americans say former President Bill Clinton and his administration did not take the threat of global terrorism seriously enough (26% disagree), while a majority (61%) of Americans say President George W. Bush and his administration have taken the threat as seriously as they should have (34% disagree). Forty-three percent say both administrations are equally to blame for not preventing the September 11 attacks (24% say the Clinton administration is more to blame, 17% say the Bush administration).

I keep hearing people (mostly liberals) say that another 9-11 will never happen again. Even after the 3-11 event in Madrid they say this. It annoys me to no end that a large segment of America has grown so complacent in such a short time, and yet this is the same segment that says Bush did nothing to stop 9-11 and it was

And part of that is the fault of Bush being SO successful. We are doing such a good job of drawing the terrorists out of their spider holes and killing them in Iraq and Afganistan that people think they are safe. To bad the same people who are so sure they are safe refuse to give Bush the credit for our successes

This looks very partisan. It would have been better for the writer to take his title more seriously and discuss, "Why Nobody Saw 9/11 Coming," if indeed it is true that nobody did forsee such an event.

The "paranoids" who worried about IRA or Red Brigade connections to the KGB were probably in advance of the rest of the establishment that simply ignored or dismissed terrorist groups. The author marshalls no evidence that people who didn't worry about "state-sponsored terrorism" were particularly concerned about "non-state-sponsored terrorism."

There's something a little bizarre about the whole article. The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center indicated the presence and activity of such groups for those who were interested in such things, but it's not clear that the Clinton administration or anyone else took the hint.

> Clancy's "Net Force" (book) because/I had heard he used/a cool martial arts/adviser

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Master Dave McNeill, Soke

* Developer of the Combat Cane as featured in NET FORCE by Tom Clancy

No one could have foreseen 911. It's totally impossible for any normal, sane human being to even begin to think about planes full of passengers smashing into skyscrapers full of people.

But I'll tell you what COULD have prevented it:

1. The United Nations NOT having replaced the word "terrorist" with "freedom fighter"

and

2. The entire world's media NOT having totally supported all Palestinian and all other Arab terrorist atrocities!

And guess what? Scroll down to the bottom here cause they're STILL doing it!

>No one could have foreseen 911. It's totally impossible for any normal, sane human being to even begin to think about planes full of passengers smashing into skyscrapers full of people.

Lots of sane people
thought of it before bad guys.
Hell, a TV show

did an episode
showing planes headed for the
WTC complex . . .

>Rainbow Six is real good, and has radical environmentalist whackos trying to depopulate the planet with airborne Ebola biological agent...

I will check it out.
There's an MST3K
episode, "Agent

from HARM" where bad guys
try to spread killer "spore germs"
over US crops . . .

"Ah yes, it's the '60s again, and studly secret agents are running all over the place, proud and free. The eponymous "Agent For H.A.R.M." is one Adam Chance, a joyless fellow who favors yellow cardigan sweaters and looks like Dr. Smith's less effeminate younger brother. Chance is assigned to protect one Dr. Jan Steffanic, a scientist recently defected from a vague Iron Curtain country (remember them?). Turns out Steffanic is on the cutting edge of some wacko technology which shoots "spores" at people, turning them into quivering masses of green-grey fungus - quite a disgusting little fate, as you might imagine. Dr. Steffanic also has a frequently-bikini-ed niece, who is certifiably hot. And though she is easily 25 years younger than Chance (really, when has that ever mattered in the world of movies?), they become entangled. They survive an onslaught of fey, mincing Euro-bad guys, one of whom is the artist known as Prince. Turns out the niece -- like most alluring women in these kind of movies -- is Evil and not to be trusted. She is exposed as a double agent for the Commies, and then the movie mercifully ends."

If you liked that quote...try this one in regard to Ted Kennedy.

"The danger was too imminent and too appaling for men to be willing to condemn those who were successful in saving them from it. But I fully understood and expected that when there was no longer danger, when the fear had been forgotten, attack would be made upon me; and as a matter of fact the attack was begun, and has continued at intervals ever since; my ordinary assailant being some politician of rather cheap type."
- Theodore Roosevelt

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