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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (48758)	10/2/2002 1:07:45 AM
From: tekboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Yes, everyone knew radical Islamists were the gravest terrorism threat, and bin Laden and his organization were the up-and-comers in that category. But the larger question is where one placed terrorism itself on the general security scene. There was a pretty decent consensus among foreign policy professionals that a combination of new types of terrorists and greater availability of WMD meant that the odds of a catastrophic attack were greater than they had been in the past, and still rising. And there was a pretty decent consensus that other, more traditional threats such as great-power war were less of a problem than in the past. All this indicated that terrorism should be taken more seriously than it had been, and this is precisely why the official resources devoted to counterterrorism increased dramatically during the second half of the 1990s. But the fact remains that aside from a few folks like those in Clarke's office, even most knowledgeable people still thought an actual catastrophic attack was a longshot. Take a look, for example, at Paul Pillar's book "Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy." It's a first-rate analysis of the issue written by the former deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, published in the summer of 2001, and provides an excellent snapshot of just what most of the best professionals thought about the issue before 9/11. Interestingly, much of its wisdom still applies--but must now coexist with a greater sense of the real scope of the dangers. tb@ooops.com