In the first few days after 9/11 a well-meaning, deeply liberal friend of mine from Italy sent an email to dozens of US citizens offering words of comfort. At the end of his email he also asked that we consider why this happened. As was appropriate at that time, he was blugeoned with angry emails from people who did not want to hear about what caused this attack. Personally I wrote him that there may be a time to ask that question later, but it would indeed be much, much later.
Richard A. Clarke–the former presidential adviser (to both Bush and Clinton) and author of the forthcoming book Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terrorism–seems to think it’s now time to ask that question:
Analysts call the calculations inherent in the Madrid attacks an “offense preference equation.” Defense against such attacks is so disproportionately difficult that even setting up costly protection does not assure success. The attacker has the advantage. In such circumstances, security officials cannot just play defense. They must not wait to pick the terrorist out of the crowd at Grand Central Terminal in the minutes before he sets the timer. Terrorist cells must be infiltrated overseas. Terrorists have to be picked up at the border or found among the hundreds of millions of people on our streets.
Unfortunately, the CIA and the FBI have found al-Qaeda a hard target to infiltrate. Worse, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld mused in an internal Pentagon memo, radicals who hate America are being turned out faster than we can arrest or kill them. Whatever we do to the original members of al-Qaeda, a new generation of terrorists similar to them is growing. So, in addition to placing more cameras on our subway platforms, maybe we should be asking why the terrorists hate us. If we do not focus on the reasons for terrorism as well as the terrorists, the body searches we accept at airports may be only the beginning of life in the new fortress America.
The bold text explains why simply ignoring the question is folly.
Edward wrote (quoting Richard A Clarke):
Actually, that is not what Rumsfeld wrote:
Claims such as “radicals who hate America are being turned out faster than we can arrest or kill them” are not supported by any actual facts as the SecDef pointed out, we don’t have any metrics to know this one way or the other. Clarke is mischaracterizing Rumsfeld’s memo in trying to change a question he wanted his staffers to address at a meeting into an expression of what Rumsfeld’s opinion was.
Thorley makes a good observation about Clarke’s conclusions from the Rumsfeld Memo. Rumsfeld does not answer his own question.
At best it stands as an open question. Even if the answer is no, however, does that argue against Clarke’s conclusion that “maybe we should be asking why the terrorists hate us.”
I know I didn’t give a damn why they hated us in the days and months after 9/11…I simply wanted them dead…but if the answer to Rumsfeld’s question is Yes…the current approach seems doomed to fail.