So Where in this Town is Gordon Prange's Statue?
[I had written nearly all of this by last Wednesday (31 Mar 04) but wasn't feeling up to reading it over, and making corrections until tonight. I added a few comments following, on things I noted over the weekend pertaining to this.]
Every so often at the place where I work I see a woman named Marlene Mayo, a history professor. Years ago she was Gordon Prange's assistant, another history professor.
Prange wrote a book. I've always considered it one of the best books I've ever read (nonfiction category): At Dawn We Slept
This is a definitive and exhaustive examination of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. I got the book from my Dad years ago- I passed through Pearl Harbor twice during my time in the Navy, he did as well - in 1946. Even up to the time the book was published in 1981 It was hard to get any two people to agree what went wrong at Pearl. Something slipped through the cracks there [the Japanese Imperial fleet maybe]. Possibly what went wrong was operational - tactical. A failure of the local commanders at Pearl to maintain effective sea and air searches. Perhaps it was more strategic and conceptual. A failure to monitor rigorously the Japanese military and politic-military directorates as Japan and the U.S. drifted towards war, or to imagine the aggressive insightful use of naval airpower demonstrated by the strike. Aside from a few token firings the immediate investigations concluded that no one missed anything. It was just one of those things. It wasn't; though, not anyway you looked at it - particularly occurring a full year after the British attack on Taranto where aircraft from the carrier Illustrious sank three Italian battleships at their moorings.
I was going to say something about when I met John Lehman who is one of the members of the 9-11 panel. Lehman came in as Secretary of the Navy under Reagan (yes, it was that long ago) his office was right around the corner from ours. I had to deliver and pick up a set of daily briefing documents that all the Admirals and important folk got. I remember Lehman shook my hand when I first met him - he shook everybodies hand. He took over a small display case in the hall by his office which had been filled with pictures of sailors, and filled it with pictures of sailors having their hands shook by him. It came about that Muammar Qaddafi, for one reason or another declared a "line of death" across the Gulf of Sidra, a sizable portion of the Mediterranean. The U S sailed ships across it, being by all convention and maritime law, international waters. The Libyans sortied two jets out seemingly to attack the carrier, and were shot down. At some point subsequent to this, Lehman had what appeared to be the printing plates of the next days Washington Post front page mounted on the door to his office. The art of public relating was not unknown to him. Self promoting can hardly be counted a crime in Washington, it shouldn't be used to condemn Richard Clarke
Last week the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States held what was to be their eighth group of hearings. There will be at least one more: National Security Advisor Condeleeza Rice next Thursday. The week was bracketed by former National Security Council counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke's appearances on 60 Minutes and Meet the Press last Sunday. The Commission (a presidential commission) released two staff statements in conjunction with this which should be viewed as foundations for the discussion, while not entirely encompassing it. Along with the political desire to apportion blame, there is an argument occurring on the best approach to Terrorism. A basic dichotomy which seeks to understand terrorism as ultimately being a national or state organized thing or stateless - interstate. Closely related to this is a further argument on the best approach to it: criminal (legalistic) or military (force/destruction). The policy debate has retreated to simplifications, where one side tries to paint the other as over-committed to non-State and criminal, or state based and demanding military action respectively. The State Dept. provides an annual unclassified report to congress
Patterns of Global Terrorism the ones covering the Clinton Presidency are one link further out on an archive page. This is all part of their
Counterterrorism Office suite of Pages. These make a worthwhile set of tea leaves to peruse. You can see the ups and downs of various terror vectors, see the slow upgrading of Usama Bin Ladin, from 17th son of a billionaire, to renegade financier, terrorist enabler, terror planner, to godfather of world terrorism. Through much of his career he rates only a curious sidebar treatment and Al Qaeda only merits listing as a terrorist organization about the time Bin Ladin begins to issue fatwa's to kill Americans in its name. By this time he seems to have been doing so for years. These reports also make clear there are many terrorist organizations across the world and a great deal of terrorist activity.
The Commission's Staff Statements (PDF's available off their front page) give a clearer picture of how terrorism reduction was actually practiced. through steady pressure and using the tools of disruptions, renditions, and extraditions laid out in Presidential Decision Directive 39. This allowed for a program of using the CIA to actively seek out terrorist and terrorist cells, capture the players destroy their communication means and in cases where foreign police captured them to seek their extradition to the U S to stand trial. As military assets were steadily brought into this a further Presidential Decision Directive was written to establish a national coordinator for counter terrorism under the National Security Advisor. That was Richard Clarke's position. The logic to this approach came from empirical evidence of past experience that perceived terrorist organizations, while hard to eradicate, could be run down to small rump organizations which found it hard to coordinate or mount significant operations.
The CIA's Counter Terrorism center began to see Usama Bin Ladins organization as being different at a fairly early juncture (1996) and established a special sub-unit to focus on it. Interestingly the statement notes it was originally called the TFL (terrorist financial links) station before being named the UBL station. It was (and is) a question of just how different and more ambitious al Qaeda is from previous terrorist endeavors. It is also a question of their motives. I believe that bin Laden expected that he, al Qaeda, and the Taliban would survive the repercussions of the 11 Sept. 2001 attacks intact. Two days before, the Northern Alliance leader, Massoud,on whom the U S reluctantly pinned hope of engaging bin Ladin directly had been killed by two suicide bombers posing as documentary film makers. This was at a meeting of the leaders of all the various assorted forces in the Northern Alliance. The news reports I read before the events later in the week overwhelmed it said witnesses claimed that the faux photographers repeatedly pressed for the entire conference leadership to assemble for a group photo, but only Massoud who among them most resembled a politician came out. It always seemed that this was a combined operation: a mass emotional stroke against the the heart of the west with a practical strategic move to throw into disarray the thin ranks of useful allies the west might have. It was meant to be the opening round of a war to remove the middle east from the west's effective sphere of influence.
This level of ambition seems to have out-stripped the policy judgments of the incoming administration. For all the smoke and heat of their counter-offense against Clarke for his book and testimony they made very little headway against the substance of what he - and the 9-11 commission itself were saying. What little they could manage was undercut by their own statements and record if not by history itself. They let their distaste of the Clinton administration,
Bush's catastrophic allergy to Clinton | Slate, prejudice them from any serious consideration of the previous administration's approach and gradual appreciation of the danger. Their approach such as they had one was notable only for its desire to exist in contraposition. A strategy looking towards a military understanding of the problem and a grand military solution. Unimplementable in its map spanning nation eliminating scope (in testimony even Wolfowitz admitted this), and therefore an impractical semi-idea. This reality forced them to "park" the issue and essentially do nothing. Much like someone needing to fix a broken window who concocts a scheme of home improvement and extension so involved and expensive it can't be undertaken and the window is left un-repaired. It isn't immediately clear between the Administration's statist understanding of geopolitical dynamics and the hob goblin of their imaginations Saddam Hussian that they realized that al Qaeda represented danger as well. Nothing In National Security advisor Rice's undelivered, and unreleased speech
Washington Post- Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn't on Terrorism ; Rice Speech Cited Missile Defense indicated that at all. There is another side, as yet unexamined, implicit in that speech of Rice's. The mass emphasis on missile defense and "star wars" programs signaled a defacto abandonment of the non proliferation effort. Pakistan's nuclear bazaar seems to have been open for business under their very noses. There is a shift from preventing acquisition of nuclear weapons to defending the U S by "shooting them down". This is little more than preparation to fight the last (the cold) war. It did not seem to occur to them until after 11 Sept. 2001 that nuclear or similar weapons could walk in to this country as well as ballistically fly.
The White House admitted "
President Asked Aide to Explore Iraq Link to 9/11 Attacks after first denying any such conversation took place. Their focus on the threat of rogue states continued almost unaltered. The depiction you would get from those inside and close outside the administration is one where these states - the axis of evil - would be seen by turns as brutalist pathetic hollow shells ready to collapse, and wellsprings of an almost superhuman anti-american effectiveness; presented on a single breath. Terrorist organizations were conceived as agents of these states. The many parts of al Qaeda and militant resurgent Islam are more nearly Frankenstein monster's of both these states and ones we embrace than agents of them. Long since fled out to the wilderness of the world to examine and fulfill their own debased destiny among us.
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As I get around to posting this finally. I am struck by not only the peculiar oddness of the White Houses insistence that President Bush not speak to the 9-11 commission unless Vice President Cheney is by his side. Maybe even more unhappy is the President's statement yesterday that he lacked the information to prevent the attacks on the world trade center
Yahoo! News - Bush Says He Lacked Info on Sept. 11 even as the the heads of the commission speculated we probably did know enough
Leaders of 9/11 Panel Say Attacks Were Probably Preventable. What George W. Bush doesn't know, or doesn't want to know simply can not be the issue. It's a profoundly bizarre statement. As I said before concerning intelligence. It is a matter of spending money until you know. Reading the 9-11 Commission staff statements I was often struck by the fact that they weren't doing as much as I assumed they were doing - particularly after the attack on the USS Cole.
There is a tremendous amount from the Bush administration's perspective riding on NS Advisor Rice's testimony
The Rice stuff: Is it enough? | csmonitor.com, oddly I find myself hoping the plan isn't to kick her out to the mob and pull up the drawbridge behind her back.
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further addendum: While reading through NS Advisors Rice's statements before the 9-11 panel and all the reaction to it, I realized I had left one link out of this post I had wanted strongly to include
Does policy structure need update? | csmonitor.com. It all about team-based management in the end.
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