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 mong
other things, Sept. 11th was a great national humiliation.
To have the
most prominent feature of our greatest city reduced to rubble and
the Pentagon set aflame — with our fearsome military entirely
powerless to prevent it — is simply humiliating. It's the Iranian
hostage crisis and Desert One, wrapped into one, and magnified by
several hundred orders of magnitude. Then, played over and over
again on TV.
This is part
of what accounts for the profound emotional reaction to Sept. 11.
The loss of life was terrible, but, even so, something about the
attacks carried a special sting, dug deeper, touched a chord of
shame in the national psyche.
This is why
we didn't just cry. We waved flags. Why we didn't just get scared.
We got angry. And this is why President Bush, if he is inclined
that way, will court grave political risks if he pulls up short
in the war of terrorism.
For the public,
the war on terrorism will probably be about nothing less than national
honor, and that is not something that can be finessed or negotiated
away in coalition politics.
In his masterpiece,
On
the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, Donald
Kagan quotes Thucydides for the proposition that people go to war
out of "honor, fear, and interest."
The war on
terrorism will involve all three, but perhaps honor above all.
It is an underappreciated
quality in international relations. In the Kosovo war, for instance,
liberals argued that the war was justified by morality, conservatives
that it was necessary to preserve our credibility. But morality
and credibility were really proxies for something else: honor.
To watch a
thug brutalize civilians in the backyard of Europe after we had
warned him against it for about a decade would have been humiliating.
It is in these
terms, Kagan argues, that most democratic electorates evaluate foreign
policy.
This is why
much of the British public recoiled at the betrayal of Czechoslovakia,
not because of strategic considerations, but because it simply seemed
dishonorable.
Kagan quotes
a historian lamenting that the opposition to Munich was made on
moral grounds, instead of hard-headed ones, then disagrees:
In states
where there is direct or representative democracy it is not possible
to exclude issues or morality and ideology from consideration,
for that is how the ordinary citizen thinks about affairs, both
foreign and domestic, and the politician cannot afford to ignore
his feelings. In fact, the politicians, with few exceptions, think
the same way. Arguments about morality and ideology involve what
Thucydides called honor, and nations from antiquity to our own
world cannot ignore it. To exclude such considerations is to engage
in the opposite of "realism." It is likely that the
swing in British opinion away from appeasement to resistance was
moved far more by the proddings of honor than of interest.
A similar dynamic
holds now, which means the stakes for Bush are extremely high. The
war on terrorism can't just be called off when the Pakistani security
service no longer finds it convenient, or when the Saudis decide
it is cutting too close to home. It will have to be prosecuted,
as Paul
Johnson puts it in the latest NR, "relentlessly
and thoroughly."
Honor demands
nothing less.
Lacking
Intelligence
I'm
inclined to believe all the stories about how our intelligences
capabilities have been run down over the years, thanks to various
new regulations and simple bureaucratic inertia. But another factor
accounts for the element of surprise on Sept. 11: human nature.
This is how Roberta Wohlstetter in her authoritative Pearl
Harbor: Warning and Decision sums up the failure to interpret
the "signals" — all the little bits of intelligence
— in the right way prior to December 7, 1941. Her conclusion
surely applies also to our situation now:
The fact
of surprise at Pearl Harbor has never been persuasively explained
by accusing the participants, individually or in groups, of conspiracy
or negligence or stupidity. What these examples illustrate is
rather the very human tendency to pay attention to the signals
that support current expectations about enemy behavior. If no
one is listening for signals of an attack against a highly improbable
target, then it is very difficult for the signals to be heard.
For every signal that came into the information net in 1941 there
were usually several plausible alternative explanations, and it
is not surprising that our observers and analysts were inclined
to select the explanations that fitted the popular hypotheses.
They sometimes set down new contradictory evidence side by side
with existing hypotheses, and they also sometimes held two contradictory
beliefs at the same time. . . . Apparently human beings have a
stubborn attachment to old beliefs and an equally strong resistance
to new material that will upset them.
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