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Ridge is up against one of the toughest problems a leader can face.
How to defend a free and open society against enemies determined
to destroy it? As he browses through the vast literature on the
subject, he will find an endless litany of weaknesses. From our
communications system to our electrical-power grids and generators,
from our airports (as distinct from our airplanes) to our train
stations, from our malls to our theaters, we are exposed to attack.
Indeed, most modern technology was designed on the assumption that
our country was not only free, but peaceful, and that assumption
was false.
How far should
we go? This is not, as it is usually presented, simply a matter
of finding a balance point between freedom and security, between
privacy and the government's freshly urgent need to discover nasty
schemes before they are hatched. It is also a technical problem.
Take the airports, for example. Most of our airports face access
roads with vast expanses of glass. Terrorists in an automobile can
pull up in front of the airport and start shooting and lobbing grenades,
as they did at the Vienna Airport in the 80's. I don't know a single
airport in America with armed guards standing outside, ready to
respond. I don't know a single airport that slows down arriving
cars and forces them to ride over or through some kind of detection
system, or even to permit an alert, highly trained guard to look
inside the cars before letting them enter the airport complex. Do
we need such a system? Are we prepared to pay for it, in money and
time and nuisance? And, if we create such a system, are we prepared
to carefully watch the armed guards to make sure that THEY are not
in cahoots with the terrorists, or are recruited to carry out terrorism
themselves?
Ditto for shopping
malls. Israelis routinely submit to handbag checks and metal detectors
in their malls, and even that has proven imperfect. What about restaurants?
Movies? Sports events?
It's a nightmare.
That is why the best defense is a strong offense. We have to go
after them, on all fronts. So Ridge's most urgent task is getting
the law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to work more effectively,
and to coordinate better with one another.
Both are easier
said than done. People who took security seriously were sneered
at by the Clintons. Bubba's White House was a security shambles,
with East Wing summer interns — their Washington vacations
too short to permit adequate background checks — having access
to classified West Wing computer files. Even the Director of Central
Intelligence, John Deutch, took his laptop home from work, loaded
with details of U.S. clandestine operations, and logged onto the
Net, exposing the nation's secrets to any hacker quick and good
enough to strike. Meanwhile, over at State, Madeline Albright, who
will go down in history as the first secretary of state to proudly
dance with a dictator (in North Korea, yet), presided over one security
debacle after another. Rooms were bugged, files and computers disappeared,
perhaps into the same black hole as the Rose Law Firm records having
to do with Ms. Hillary's billable hours.
All this takes
a terrible toll on the system, and Ridge will not find it easy to
instill a proper respect for proper secrecy, even in his own offices.
It takes quite a while to stamp out corrupt habits of mind and action.
But the hardest
task is the most urgent: Getting the various units to cooperate.
The last great chief of the CIA, Bill Casey, saw the necessity of
creating a counterterrorism center where all the information came
into a central location and was analyzed in toto. He entrusted the
task to Dewey Clarridge, also the last of a breed, and Clarridge
cracked his very active whip over the analysts, greatly improving
the quality of our intelligence, even with the now infamous restrictions
put in place by presidents Ford and Clinton. So it can be done.
But it requires a top guy with real power and total support from
the president, and it requires men and women at the working level
who not only have the resolve and the courage to do it — laying
waste to dead wood as they go — but who know the system cold,
know how the bureaucratic games are played, and know which walls
have to be broken down.
That's asking
a lot. In practice, it's unreasonable to expect this of a professional
civil servant unless it is clear that there's an unbreakable mandate
for the mission. There is only one way to demonstrate that: to remove
the people who have failed in the past. Of late, we have begun to
hear calls for the resignation of George Tenet, and certainly someone
should be held accountable for the colossal intelligence failure
that made life easy for the September 11th mass murderers. But it
is important that President Bush not single out one or two individuals,
and then pretend that a couple of new people can turn the whole
thing around. He (or Ridge, on the president's authority) should
ask for the resignations of the whole lot of them, from the (Clinton-appointed)
FAA chief to the heads of the various counterterrorist units and
the counterintelligence top guys as well. If Louis Freeh were still
at FBI, he should go along with the others (hell, he should have
gone once the Hanssen treason was discovered).
Yes, it's bloody,
and yes, it runs counter to some of the early themes of compassionate
conservatism. Some will urge the president to let these people redeem
themselves, a process in which he strongly believes, having experienced
it personally. But that is a doctrine for normal times, and he does
not have the time to determine who can be redeemed, and who will
simply fail again. This is time for the old motto, "kill them
all, let God sort 'em out."
New times require
new people with new standards. The situation requires it. The American
people, who have responded magnificently to this horror, richly
deserve it. The entire political world will understand it and applaud
it. And it will give Tom Ridge a chance to succeed, and us to prevail.
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