As
the world awaits the final report of the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, it
is worth looking back on some of the accusations that
have already been leveled against the US intelligence
community, and against President George W Bush,
regarding their actions before, during and after
September 11, 2001, and compare their "failures" to
historical events.
Regarding Bush himself, much
has been made, in Michael Moore's documentary
Fahrenheit 9/11 and elsewhere, of the president's
11-minute "freeze" in a Florida classroom on hearing the
news of the September 11 attacks. As for the US
intelligence apparatus, it has been under fire for its
apparent failures in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and
the 9-11 Commission's report is sure to point to other
failures preceding September 11. Yet such lapses are far
from unprecedented.
In 1967, when the late
Yitzhak Rabin was chief of staff of the Israeli armed
forces, there occurred a rapid escalation of events that
was to culminate in war between the Jewish state and its
Arab neighbors. Just before the outbreak of hostilities,
Rabin suffered a nervous breakdown and spent not 11
minutes, but the opening phase of the Six Day War in
seclusion and under a doctor's care.
At the same
time, some Israelis had serious doubts about the ability
of their intelligence apparatus to cope with the crisis,
and the mood in Israel was deeply pessimistic. The
deeply divergent opinions suggest that in spite of the
presumed prowess of Israeli intelligence and its spy
network in surrounding countries, its specialists made
serious mistakes in assessing Egypt's and Syria's
military forces at the time. In the event, however, the
war was over in just six days, and Rabin later went on
to become prime minister.
In 1973, Israel's
military intelligence and political leaders (some with
heroic military backgrounds, such as Moshe Dayan) again
made a misjudgment - and a far more severe one. Though
both the military and political leaderships were aware
of Egyptian and Syrian military buildups on the borders,
they discounted the advantages of a preventive attack by
Israel. This led to the surprise Yom Kippur assault and
a war that lasted three weeks, in which 3,000 Israelis
died. These failures were serious enough that, had the
errors committed by the Arab side not been even worse,
that war could have ended Israel's existence.
The reason for that is simple: the war was
started on Yom Kippur, rather than a few days earlier on
the Jewish New Year. On Yom Kippur, the most sacred of
Jewish holidays, Israelis stay at home or go to a nearby
synagogue, and the highways and streets are virtually
empty. On other holidays, Israelis are at the beach, or
traveling across the country, and the roads are
congested. Because is was Yom Kippur, soldiers were able
to be mobilized in a flash, and troops and equipment
transported with relative ease and speed. As the
saying in business goes, success at times is not because
one is doing everything well, but because competitors
are committing more serious blunders. The failures of
Israeli intelligence and the political and military
leaders' mistake of underestimating Arab countries'
intentions and abilities, and their decision not to
launch a preventive strike because of fear of weak US
support, almost cost the country its survival. It is not
surprising that since then even smaller actions by Arab
governments have been reacted to vigorously,
re-establishing the doctrine of preventive strikes.
Was it overconfidence that led the Israelis, who
had, no doubt, good intelligence networks in Arab lands
in 1973, to such grave misinterpretations? Maybe;
overconfidence can be deadly. But the point is that
intelligence services, even those arguably among the
best, can make grave errors of judgment - even when they
have extensive networks, even when they live in the
midst of their opponents, and think they understand
their cultures. And when wars start, they do not go as
planned. Sometimes they go far better (as happened
during the 1967 Six Day War); sometimes far worse, as
happened during the Yom Kippur War (until Ariel Sharon's
improvised bridge to the African part of Egypt, and the
Syrians army's voluntary withdrawal, overestimating what
was left of Israel's tank units, turned around the
fortunes of that conflict).
Back to the present.
There have been many articles on the failure of US
intelligence: not knowing that there might not have been
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, overestimating
Iraq's military capacity and underestimating the
willingness of dictators and their entourages to brag
and exaggerate, and inferring links to al-Qaeda where
there were none found. Were these "lies", a pretext for
war, grave incompetence, overconfidence, or could they
have been a sequence of honest human mistakes?
Iraq did possess a few years ago weapons of mass
destruction. It did attack Kuwait, and did fight with
Iran. It did bomb Israel. Saddam Hussein did subsidize
suicide bombers' families, and did not keep such
transactions secret. And though the world agreed on
sanctions against Iraq, it became clear to all that the
sanctions didn't quite work, and that in a country
sitting on vast oil riches, a ruthless dictator would
not be easily deposed. The revenues from oil, even if
somewhat limited by sanctions, were enough to pay for a
ruthless police state or bribe many into obedience and
flattery, and pay for scientists to work on weapons, and
for terrorists to spread them. There would still be
money left to pay for an entourage who would tell the
dictator what he wanted to hear, exaggerating the
country's military prowess, playing poker and bluffing
with a weak hand.
These things have happened
before, with a series of dictators from Adolf Hitler to
Nicolae Ceausescu, until someone dared to call their
bluff. If there was a grave mistake, it might have been
the failure of foreign policy to get across the
principle that one has to rely on preventive care when
one deals with dictators sitting on piles of natural
riches to avoid making the situation far worse. If there
is one lesson that history offers it's that appeasement
in such circumstances has never worked. It did not work
with Hitler, and it did not work with communist Russia,
as the commentaries by Ronald Reagan's friends and foes
alike after his death agreed. Maybe communism would have
been destroyed internally. But it is silly to make
statements such as that in a recent editorial in The
Economist, that it would have taken 20 more years if
Reagan had appeased the Soviet Union rather than speeded
up its demise. One could have made the same observation
on Hitler. But what if Hitler's scientists had stumbled
on the atom bomb first, as they were not far from it?
Could then the intelligence services have gotten
Iraqi exaggerations all wrong, mistaking them for fact?
If they did, it would not be the first time such things
have happened, as the above shows. All this does not
imply that everything is okay, and nothing should be
done to improve intelligence services and the efficiency
of making military and political decisions. But it is
clear that even with the best institutions and the best
communication, even when survival is at stake, political
and military leaders with strong track records can
seriously misinterpret what's happening.
When
the public is in the mood for appeasement, political
leaders can take the road of least resistance and
declare war based on what the public accepts, rather
than getting first into a time-consuming "education
campaign" on the dangers. This may not sound politically
correct, but if faced with the choice of being
politically correct and dead, most would choose the
unarticulated alternative of being alive. In time, a
foreign-policy doctrine of "preventive war" against
dictatorships sitting on vast natural resources may be
articulated.
What has happened over the past
year or so does not necessarily mean that political and
military leaders have been covering up, lying, or
misusing intelligence information to create a pretext
for war. It may mean that the reason for a preventive,
just war wasn't properly articulated. Would some other
leaders do a better job in articulating, evaluating,
deciding, than those of the United States? Maybe, maybe
not. One thing we do know; Israelis voted for Yitzhak
Rabin to become prime minister - even a revered one -
his nervous breakdown when the country was heading for
war notwithstanding.
Reuven Brenner
lectures at the Faculty of Management, McGill
University. He is the author of Betting on
Ideas: Wars, Invention, Inflation and Force of
Finance.
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