Sometimes a poetic truth captures only … well, only the poetic truth. And then sometimes a poetic truth turns out to be the real thing.
We’ve been describing for some days now the backdrop — well-known then but somehow forgotten — to Richard Clarke’s accusations against the Bush administration. Namely, the fact that the Bush administration came to office with a fundamentally flawed conception of the threats facing the United States.
Transnational terrorist groups were almost off the radar. The real near-term threats were rogue states which could hit the US with WMD-bearing ICBMs — longer-term the threat was China. And thus the centerpiece of our new national security strategy — and the target of the biggest funding — would be national missile defense.
Now in a front page piece in Thursday’s Washington Post we learn that on September 11th, 2001 Condi Rice was scheduled to deliver a major foreign policy address on missile defense as the centerpiece of a new strategy to combat “the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday.”
Then reality intruded.
As the Post explains, the speech contained little real discussion of terrorism. The only mentions were swipes at the Clinton administration’s supposed over-emphasis on transnational terrorism at the expense of more important priorities like missile defense.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but let’s say it: It was as obvious four years ago as it is today that the most potent threats to America are asymmetric threats, particularly forms of attack that cannot easily be tied back to particular states which we can punish with our conventional military superiority.
In plainer speech, the biggest threats we face today are ones that don’t come with a return address.
An ICBM, which has a launch point that can be determined down to the yard and requires a vast apparatus to get off the ground, really doesn’t fit into that category.
In any case, this is just another example that they simply failed to understand where the real threat was coming from.
That in itself is forgivable. The problem is that they tried to shoehorn 9/11 into their existing paradigm rather than rethink that flawed analysis.
