John Rapley - FOREIGN FOCUSIN THE late summer of 2001, America could have been forgiven for feeling smug. 'Victory' in the Cold War was a decade old, and in the period between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new millennium, the country's technological edge over its rivals had widened. Her military dominance rivalled that of Britain in the late 19th century. The ease of her campaigns subduing Iraq in a matter of weeks, bringing Slobodan Milosevic to heel without a loss of American life testified to a supremacy nobody could contest. The world quaked before US might, and as President Bill Clinton had testified in his 1992 acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, the world was America's oyster.
Then, in the early hours of September 11, 2001, that hubris and worse yet, the sense of invincibility died a sudden and horrific death. A handful of fanatics had achieved what no empire had ever managed: to temporarily decapitate the command centre of the US. The worst foreign attack on US soil signalled that the US, once inviolate, had discovered the vulnerability and insecurity that was the lot of lesser nations.
KUBLER-ROSS' THEORY
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross once theorised that there were five stages of mourning after the loss of a loved one. The first was denial. Observing the activities of the 9/11 commission in Washington, I cannot help but wonder if America, in mourning the loss of her invincibility, is still stuck in denial.
The apparent premise of the commission is that 9/11 could have been prevented had the US been more vigilant. The task is to determine who was asleep at the switch. Virtually everybody in Washington seems to agree that the US fell down on the job, and the debate is merely over who should take the fall for it.
Yet another possibility is that 9/11 was simply a deviously brilliant act of terror, precisely because it turned America's strengths, such as her openness and freedom of movement or her reliance on electronic rather than human surveillance, to her disadvantage. But to admit that possibility is to admit that America is, after all, vulnerable. Scarcely anybody seems willing to do that.
And so the nation persists in a blame-game that can strike the outsider as irrational at times. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a statistician who has made a career of using mathematical models to try to predict the behaviour of the stock market, wrote a telling column in the New York Times last week that spoke to the flaws in this logic. In taking on those who argued that more vigilance on the government's part could have prevented 9/11, he wrote "infinite vigilance is not possible. Negligence in any specific case needs to be compared with the normal rate of negligence for all possible events at the time of the tragedy including those events that did not take place but could have. Before 9/11, the risk of terrorism was not as obvious as it seems today to a reasonable person in government (which is part of the reason 9/11 occurred). Therefore the government might have used its resources to protect against other risks with invisible but perhaps effective results."
In theory, therefore, the US government might have been able to prevent 9/11 from occurring had it poured all its resources into connecting the dots, few and far between though they were, in its intelligence-gathering. But as it did so, neglecting other concerns, maybe trains would have derailed, the light would have gone off, the economy would have sunk further into recession. Only in hindsight does it become clear that al Qaida was about to blow up the World Trade Center. If one puts aside the benefits of such hindsight and reads the notorious August memorandum to President George W. Bush, for instance, it seems implausible that this act could have been foreseen under all but the most abnormal of circumstances.
The root causes of global terror an egregious gap between rich and poor that has given anti-American militants a 'space' in which to operate freely remain. Until America emerges from her state of denial that nobody can hurt her, she can only hurt herself she will fail to make headway in the war on terror.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
