A very good analysis from "Jane Galt."
Notes from Washington
As readers of some other blogs know, I'm at a seminar in Washington DC this weekend, and so my blogging will continue to be light until tomorrow.
It also means I missed Condoleezza Rice's testimony. From the fact that the results are exactly what I expected--the conservatives think she was on fire, while the liberals think she was an abject failure--I infer that she did just fine, although not spectacularly so.
Nonetheless, I have an opinion to offer you. That is, after all, what Jane Galt's readers expect from her: opinions, whether or not she has any facts to base them on! And Jane Galt is going to provide just that, because that's the sort of chick she is. Jane Galt does not let down her audience just because her hotel's CNN feed is on the fritz! That's not the sort of quality Jane Galt has come to stand for.
My opinion is this: I am disturbed by the tenor of these hearings, and the way in which they will be accepted. Not because the politicians and career civil servants are trying to dodge the blame, while hopefully allowing it to land on someone in the other party--that is what happens in any sort of thing like this. Nor even because Richard Clarke seems to have latched onto the commission for some good old-fashioned score settling. But rather, because everyone, conservative and liberal and Democrat and Republican, seems to be assuming that there is some answer they will find that will tell them how we could have averted 9/11.
The problem in general with commissions is that they find what they are tasked to look for. If you appoint a government commission on fairy rings, they'll do their damndest to dig one up, because after all, fairy rings are the reason we're all assembled in this big, important looking room with the columns and the picture of George Washington. That's the first problem I have with this thing.
The second problem is that we are all seeking some reassurance that we can somehow prevent all this stuff in the future. Everyone is very earnestly asking "What changes do we need to make so that our intelligence doesn't (for example) tell us Iraq has WMD, or not tell us that Al-Qaeda's about to attack us?" Almost no one seems prepared to accept the possibility that the answer is "None. Intelligence just sucks." The energy expended trying to blame this failure on someone--George Tenet, Louis Freeh, Condoleezza Rice, or whoever--goes beyond mere regular partisan bashing. It seems to me to express an underlying conviction that of course someone could have stopped this--it's only a question of who. For the commission, especially, it's an unacceptable answer; they simply cannot turn to a frightened American public and tell them that it's really too bad, but we live in a scary world.
That's not even asking about the potential tradeoffs between costs and benefits. I'm rather more of a purist about civil rights issues, and so on, than most of the American public, so probably this resonates more with me than most, but consider the problem of container shipping. Container shipping revolutionized logistics, allowing goods to be transported faster and more efficiently, minimizing loss, and eliminating an entire job description (stevedores). We could not get rid of it and return to the old days of manually unpacking goods from ships, and repacking them on ground transport, without immense economic loss. Nor can we feasibly decide not to trade overseas. Yet there is a considerably higher-than-zero chance that something horrible--a massive bomb, a crate of anthrax, a suitcase nuke--will be brought into the United States this way. There is simply no way to avoid it without massive cost. And government logic dictates that we will not impose a massive upfront cost to minimize a merely probable threat.
This particularly bothers me as people seek to pin partisan blame on Clinton or Bush for this thing. Yes, Clinton's foreign policy undoubtedly contributed--in the same way that Bush's would have, if the attack had come on 9/11/2002, instead of 9/11/2001. But there was no political will to do anything more than he did, and conservatives now attacking him would have gone ballistic if he'd, say, rolled into Afghanistan with tanks in 1999.
Ultimately, I think there's a lot of hindsight bias operating here. One of the fascinating things I learned in business school was the myriad ways that people systematically delude themselves into thinking that htey understand the universe better than they do . . . and one of the biggest ways they do that is by assuming, after the fact, that they could have correctly predicted outcomes. For example, if you take two similar groups and ask one group to predict the outcome of an event, and tell the other group what the outcome was, and then ask them whether or not they think they could have correctly predicted it, the latter group almost invariably says they could have predicted it. This apparently happens even when the event was fairly random--and those claiming unique perception can generally come up with some pretty fancy explanations as to how they would have know.
Clinton didn't know. Bush didn't know. We didn't know. And the uncomfortable possibility remains that there are more events that we not only don't know about--but can't know about. Deluding ourselves otherwise isn't helping. And if it causes us to take costly, fruitless measures to reassure ourselves, it could actively hurt us. |
