A Humiliation
Something about the Sept. 11 attacks carried a special sting.

October 5, 2001 10:15 a.m.

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.