With the urgency of war
Even though the American people on September 11 witnessed the horror of terrorism up close, at home, over and over again on television, they still seem to underestimate this new threat. Our most senior officials tell us that attacks using weapons of mass destruction are inevitable. Not if, but when. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, terrorist networks "are aggressively trying to get nuclear weapons . . . and they would not hesitate one minute in using them." Staying calm in the face of such warnings is an admirable quality of character, but when calmness verges on complacency, we are at risk of disproportionate panic when the next shock comes. It's troubling that only a minority of Americans are worried that they or a family member might become a victim of terrorism. A poll taken by CNN/USA Today/Gallup on May 28-29 showed 22 percent "not worried at all," 37 percent "not too worried." Against that sanguine 59 percent, only 9 percent are "very worried" and 31 percent "somewhat worried."
We are less worried than we were during the Cold War, yet the United States may be seriously more vulnerable today. During such East-West standoffs as the Cuban missile crisis, the threat of invasion or nuclear assault was visible, and it was contained by the deterrent power of our own nuclear and military forces. Soviet leadership was rational enough to understand that millions of their own people would die if they launched an attack. This time, however, the threat comes from a shadow army of terrorist networks whose basic purpose is to kill as many American civilians as possible--not to take over our land but to destroy our way of life. Since these terrorists, in civilian garb, can blend into a polyglot American population, the strategic doctrine of containment cannot work, and the strategic doctrine of deterrence, based as it is on an aversion to dying, has no relevance. In short, the historic invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic terrorism has ended.
Get them first. The president was right to propose a program to reshuffle the government agencies and those dealing with domestic security into one agency and to reconstitute this agency as a cabinet-level branch of the government. Our homeland security director, Tom Ridge, controlled too little money and too few personnel to produce the coordinated action that was needed for defense. Defense, of course, is not enough. The president in his speech this month at West Point articulated another principle--pre-emption: namely, that we must get them before they get us. We cannot rely on the fact that no major attack has occurred since 9/11. Al Qaeda has on a regular basis spaced its major terrorist actions by one to two years, and right now it's quite plausible that it will need more time to plan, given the disruption wreaked by our military actions in Afghanistan. Perhaps one should not read too much into it, but the day after President Bush spoke, an Arabic paper called Al-Hayat said it had received a warning from an al Qaeda terrorist called Suleiman Abu Ghaith promising another large-scale attack on America. The intention, no doubt, is to scare us, so we have to perform the double act of keeping our nerve but building up our defenses at the same time.
A lot needs to be done, moving with all due speed in the face of a clear and present danger. We were unprepared for this new world war. But we were also unprepared for WWI and WWII, and indeed for Korea--and some would say for Vietnam. But Americans are adaptable. We have the capacity to refocus our resources, to reshape our policies, and to reconfigure a variety of federal agencies. We know what is at risk is not just death and destabilization but the demoralization that would come from an erosion of our domestic security and tranquillity. We are quite simply going to have to fight back and devote to this war the same attention we once gave to aggressive communism.
That is why the president's leadership, as articulated in his speech to the country, was so welcome. Our efforts must be focused on three vital fronts:
The first is protecting the framework that holds the country's economy together. We cannot guard every single vulnerable site, every public place, every bridge and tunnel. We have to set priorities (whose details need not be announced for the benefit of al Qaeda). A key is our national networks--such as electricity grids, our oil and gas pipelines, our cybernetworks, our food production and distribution, and the cross-border flow of people, cargo, and conveyances. The right level of scrutiny here will require thousands of state and local government authorities, along with the federal government, and literally millions of individuals who will have to be trained to a whole higher level of alertness. Just think of the international traffic that we took for granted. In 2000, 489 million people, 11.5 million trucks, 2.2 million railroad cars, 829,000 planes, and 211,000 vessels passed through the U.S. border inspection system, in addition to tens of millions of containers. We don't know the contents or even the senders of thousands of these multiton containers, traveling on trucks, trains, or barges. The cargo is cleared not at its arrival ports but at its final destination within the country, generally more than 10 days after the containers have gone through our borders and moved on to major industrial cities. We must develop a system that prescreens these containers before they are loaded on the ships and trucks in foreign parts. We cannot allow death to arrive in a metal box.
This is hardly an idle concern. Last October a suspected al Qaeda terrorist was found inside a container at the southern Italian port of Gioia Tauro. This container was fully equipped with food, water, and a makeshift bathroom; an aviation mechanic certificate; a laptop computer; and airport security passes--everything a terrorist would need to cross the Atlantic. This discovery sparked more inspections, which led police to several other containers similarly outfitted.
Second, the president was right in calling for key government agencies to change their modus operandi. The relevant agencies failed to coordinate and failed to put the pieces of the lethal jigsaw together. In terms of public confidence, it was the missteps and missed clues in our security agencies, especially the FBI, that were most damaging. Would better coordination have forestalled one or more of the 9/11 attacks? It's impossible to know, but clearly too many clues fell through the cracks, and there are way too many cracks.
The FBI is our lead domestic law enforcement agency dealing with bad guys at home. The CIA is our leading national security intelligence agency that is supposed to recognize and deal with bad guys abroad. But the two agencies have completely different approaches. The CIA fosters aggressive, active intelligence-gathering in anticipation of a threat before it arises and the planning of pre-emptive and preventive action against suspected terrorists. The FBI reacts after a crime, making arrests ex post facto and then seeking information to provide the evidentiary basis for long and arduous jury trials governed by specific rules of evidence and the protection of the rights of citizens. So when the CIA passed on information to the FBI, people at the FBI failed to follow it up because they did not think in terms of preventing attacks. Now the FBI director has announced the reorganization to quash a growing criticism, but the burden will be on him as to whether he can accomplish this job, given the close-minded, self-satisfied culture of image over substance that has typified the FBI in the past.
Connect the dots. For years, the directors of the CIA and the FBI literally didn't talk to each other. This will have to change. The dots will never get connected if they don't get collected in one place. We need a synaptic point, an agency where all of our intelligence reports can be sifted and organized for action. Americans have always been leery of creating such bodies. The premier hero of espionage fiction, after all, is an Englishman, James Bond; Americans have never liked real-life spies.
The president was right to propose a new specialized domestic agency as a part of homeland security with the specific purpose of gathering all our intelligence in order to develop effective counters to terrorism. Congress needs to support the president by providing the necessary authority to correct these vulnerabilities, rather more than it needs public hearings that will distract the top leadership of the CIA, FBI, and other relevant agencies. Let's quietly find out what went wrong, so we can fix it. There is too much work to be done to waste time on recriminations.
The third area of urgent concern was highlighted last year by a bipartisan task force, which asserted "the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen, sold to terrorists or hostile nation states, and used against American troops abroad or citizens at home." What does this mean? It means that al Qaeda or some similar group could obtain just a small amount of highly enriched uranium, 40 pounds or less, or even worse, plutonium. This would enable such a group to produce a nuclear device in less than a year. Even more easily, they could then produce a radioactive dispersal device, wrapped around a conventional bomb, a so-called dirty bomb. This nuclear material would be small enough so that it could easily be sneaked into this country. It is critical that we work with the Kremlin to prevent this from happening.
What Americans--and the fence-sitting Europeans--must accept is that this is again a world war, a war that cannot be fought in half measures or by leaders paralyzed by hand-wringers. We must understand that America is the No. 1 target. Wartime conditions have often required temporary changes in our system in order to provide the security America needs. Now, it is not an issue of law enforcement or of liberty. It is an issue of the survival of our way of life. In wartime, we have in the past given government the power to do the job. During WWII and the Korean War, the government was able to draft people into the military, removing them from their civilian life and putting them into harm's way. We accepted this because we knew that when the war was over the nature of our society and the values on which it is based were so strong that we would be able to return to our normal, civilized lifestyle. That strength has been demonstrated again since 9/11 and makes it possible again to give government the powers to do the job.
But we should never again have to worry about what the president did not know and why he did not know it. Now, to quote Winston Churchill, "it is not enough to do our best; sometimes we must do what is required."
This story appears in the June 17, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.