I can’t believe I forgot to blog this today…

We’ve been working closely with Jim Hake, of Spirit of America; Jim has fielded a new request from the 1st Marine Division – you know, the guys and gals in Falluja – they want to help set up a series of low-powerd TV stations, staffed by Iraqis, that will try and counter the two dominant themes in media coverage in Iraq:

* If it bleeds (or burns) it leads;
* If it makes the US look bad, it leads.

I’m not going to comment on how obvious this is, and how, instead of working with one guy in West L.A. and a bunch of bloggers, we should have been doing this as our troops moved North.

Instead, I’m going to comment on the wonderful flexibility of our people over there who will do what it takes to get what they need to do the job.

Click here to see what the Marines need, and help them (and us) out. And thanks to all the other blogs who are working on this as well, and to Jim for letting us help.

(and yes, I know I don’t have a TV set; in this case, I’ll make an exception!)

Sometimes I just god-damn wonder about people.

It’s been a year and a month, roughly, since the start of the war in Iraq, and approximately a year since army-to-army hostilities ended.

And, overall, large groups of people – both within Iraq and the West – are declaring the occupation a failure, and the economy in Iraq collapsed and doomed. And, on a basic level, it’s our fault, because we didn’t have a Plan.

Now I have a number of issues with what has been done, and I’ll set some of those out in a later post, but I want to make one point first as a way of framing the discussion around a basic set of facts.

For many of us, there’s a kind of black hole between Hitler and Eva’s last stand in the bunker and the Porsche 911. Somehow, Germany – without taking a lot of room in history books – went from war, to partition, via the Airlift, to world economic leadership. That’s not quite the case. Let me offer up a few tidbits, so that you’ll understand how hard things were – and how much had to be done – between June 5, 1945 and, say 1950.

Here’s what the economy looked like in 1946 and 1947:

After World War II the German economy lay in shambles. The war, along with Hitler’s scorched-earth policy, had destroyed 20 percent of all housing. Food production per capita in 1947 was only 51 percent of its level in 1938, and the official food ration set by the occupying powers varied between 1,040 and 1,550 calories per day. Industrial output in 1947 was only one-third its 1938 level. Moreover, a large percentage of Germany’s working-age men were dead. At the time, observers thought that Germany would have to be the biggest client of the U.S. welfare state.

and this:

The winters of 1945/46 and 1946/47 were the worst Germans can remember. They were cold, and as many houses were still damaged, there was a lack of fuel (coal) and people were undernourished, many starved or froze to death. The British and the Americans, in their respective zones, did their best to alleviate the situation. The US Red Cross distributed addresses of German families to US citizens who were descendants of German emigrants and, in many cases, relatives of those in need. The American relatives than sent CARE PARCELS containing durable goods extremely scarce in war-torn Germany. The British efforts to prevent the German population from starvation stressed the country’s economy (which had not recovered from 5 years of war either) to the limit. During this process, the population of West Germany began to regard the British and Americans as liberators rather than occupants.

In large part, this was both the result of the extraordinarily destructive war, but also of deliberate policy on the part of the victorious Allies:

With surrender came the time for retribution. In the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Directive 1067 of April 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was instructed to occupy Germany “not…for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation.” Allied occupation was to bring “home to the Germans that Germany’s ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance have destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable and that the Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves.”

…

Such a shift in policy from retribution to rebuilding, from collective guilt to assistance, also meant a renunciation of reparations and of the dismantling of factories: Draining financial and industrial resources from Germany was hardly beneficial to its economic recovery. In early 1946, less than a year after V-E Day, this was a hard pill to swallow for most Americans. But Truman agreed with Churchill, and on May 25, Truman halted all reparations from the U.S. Zone. The punitive Reparations and Level of Industry Plan for the four zones—agreed upon only after months of haggling on March 27, 1946—was quietly scuttled.

To an extent, it was a result of inadequate planning. In his essay rebutting James Bacques’ charges that Eisenhower deliberately starved a million Nazi POW’s, Stephen Ambrose says:

After the first week of May, all of Eisenhower’s calculations as to how many people he would be required to feed in occupied Germany became woefully inadequate. He had badly underestimated, for two reasons. First, the number of German soldiers surrendering to the Western Allies far exceeded what was expected (more than five million, instead of the anticipated three million) because of the onrush of German soldiers across the Elbe River to escape the Russians. So too with German civilians – there were millions fleeing from east to west, about 13 million altogether, and they became Eisenhower’s responsibility. Eisenhower faced shortages even before he learned that there were 17 million more people to feed in Germany than he had expected.

No food shortage? This is the report of the Military Governor for Germany in July 1945: “The food situation throughout Western Germany is perhaps the most serious problem of the occupation. The average food consumption in the Western Zones is now about one-third below the generally accepted subsistence level.” The September report declares, “Food from indigenous sources was not available to meet the present authorized ration level for the normal consumer, of 1,550 calories per day.”

Mr. Bacque says that the prisoners were receiving 1,550 calories a day, and he contends that such a ration means slow starvation. He apparently never looked at what civilians were getting, in Germany or in the liberated countries. In Paris in 1945, the calorie level was 1,550 for civilians. It was only slightly higher in Britain, where rationing continued. It was much lower in Russia, where rationing also continued. As noted, the official ration for German civilians was 1,550, but often not met. In Vienna in the summer of 1945 the official ration sometimes fell to 500.

There is such a thing as common sense. Anyone who was in Europe in the summer of 1945 would be flabbergasted to hear that there was no food shortage.

As we realized the inadequacy of the Morgenthau plan, which intended to ‘pastoralize’ Germany as a way of ending the militant nature – and capabilities – of the German people. By all accounts, the plan was a disaster in conception and execution.

In reaction, elements of the U.S. Government reacted with their better natures.

I need not tell you that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people. I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. Furthermore, the people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the earth, and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reactions of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world.

In considering the requirements for the rehabilitation of Europe, the physical loss of life, the visible destruction of cities, factories, mines, and railroads was correctly estimated, but it has become obvious during recent months that this visible destruction was probably less serious than the dislocation of the entire fabric of European economy. For the past 10 years conditions have been highly abnormal. The feverish preparation for war and the more feverish maintenance of the war effort engulfed all aspects of national economies. Machinery has fallen into disrepair or is entirely obsolete. Under the arbitrary and destructive Nazi rule, virtually every possible enterprise was geared into the German war machine. Long-standing commercial ties, private institutions, banks, insurance companies, and shipping companies disappeared, through loss of capital, absorption through nationalization, or by simple destruction. In many countries, confidence in the local currency has been severely shaken. The breakdown of the business structure of Europe during the war was complete. Recovery has been seriously retarded by the fact that two years after the close of hostilities, a peace settlement with Germany and Austria has not been agreed upon. But even given a more prompt solution of these difficult problems, the rehabilitation of the economic structure of Europe quite evidently will require a much longer time and greater effort than has been foreseen.

George Marshall – June 5, 1947

And they showed results:

During the last 10 months notable progress has been made in Western Germany, which is apparent to all the world. An entirely new atmosphere of hope and creative activity has replaced the lethargy and despair of a year ago.

Dean Atcheson – April 28, 1949

It took 4 years from the end of hostilities to start the turnaround of the German economy.

We started to implement a plan that would have turned Germany into Southern France, and turned 180 degrees and helped Germany reindistrialize.

That’s how things work in the real world. They progress in fits and starts, change and turn, and most of all, they take time.

The forces that oppose us are convinced that they are more patient than we are. They are convinced that if things in Iraq aren’t perfect – if the power isn’t on and unemployment ended and all the Iraqi women listening to NPR by September – well, it’ll be a quagmire then. And then what’ll we do?

Dean Atcheson and George Marshall were probably worried about quagmire as well. But they simply put their heads down and worked, and experimented, and tried things until – at the end of the day – they outlasted the problem.

They were leaders. We need some too.

[Update: Note that the Seattle Times itself makes the exactly the same point that I do (hat tip to Instapundit)]

Fred Kaplan takes on Condi Rice in Slate. I’m not enough of a judge of inside-the-beltway baseball to have a sense whether Rice is a good bureaucracy wrangler or not. I do fully accept that doing so is a critical part of her job, and is a big part of what she’ll ultimately be judged for, which means in part that I’m reserving final judgment on how she’s done in the job for a bit.

Kaplan makes some arguments about why she isn’t, and you ought to read them and make your own decision.

But before you, do, let me alert you to a large steaming prairie platter set in the middle of his argument.He says:

This was one of Clarke’s most compelling points. In his book, testimony, and several TV interviews, Clarke has argued that the Clinton administration thwarted al-Qaida’s plot to set off bombs at Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium because intelligence reports of an impending terrorist attack were discussed at several meetings of Cabinet secretaries. Knowing they’d have to come back and tell the president what they were doing to prevent an attack, these officials went back to their departments and “shook the trees” for information. When Bush came to power, Rice retained Clarke and his counterterrorism crew, but she demoted their standing; terrorism was now discussed (and, even then, rarely) at meetings of deputy secretaries, who lacked the same clout and didn’t feel the same pressure.

This is a key point, and is, in fact the only fact-based argument he makes.

And, from all the information I’ve seen, it’s completely full of it.

I haven’t read Clarke’s book (yet), but I do remember the news accounts both at the time and afterward of the arrest of Ahmed Ressam, was that he had acted hincky when at the border checkpoint, and a normal border patrol officer hunch caused them to pull him in for close inspection. They searched his car – for drugs – and he tried to run and was chased down.

I missed the part in this story where – like at Waco – senior government officials stood by an open phone line and communicated closely with the troops on the ground. No one took credit for it in 2000, when it would have made a difference in an election.

And I’ve got to believe that if Clarke is taking credit for it now – claiming that good senior staff work foiled the Millennium Plot – either he’s puffing like a freaking blowfish, or there’s some data out there that hasn’t made it to the public record.

Here’s the story from the Seattle Times:

The Coho arrived in Port Angeles in the dark, just before 6 p.m., the last boat of the day. Customs inspector Diana Dean stopped each car as it rolled off, asking the drivers a few basic questions and wishing them a good trip.

The last car in line was a green Chrysler 300M with British Columbia plates.

“Where are you going?” “Sattal.”

“Why are you going to Seattle?” “Visit.”

“Where do you live?” “Montreal.”

“Who are you going to see in Seattle?” “No, hotel.”

The driver was fidgeting, jittery, sweating. His hands disappeared from sight as he began rummaging around the car’s console. That made Dean nervous.

She handed him a customs declaration to fill out, a subtle way of stalling while she took a closer look. He filled out the form and handed it back. By this time, Dean observed, he was acting “hinky.”

She asked him to turn the car off, pop open the trunk and step outside. Noris was slow to respond but complied.

At this point, the other customs inspectors were finished and waiting to go home. They came over to help process the last car of the day. Dean told them this might be a “load vehicle” … code for one used for smuggling. Inspector Mark Johnson took over the interrogation.

“Habla español?” he asked.

“Parlez-vous français?” the man replied, handing over his ID. Not a passport or driver’s license, but his Costco card.

“So you like to shop in bulk? You know, the 120-roll pack of toilet paper?” Johnson joked. He escorted Noris to a table, where he asked him to empty his pockets.

Inspector Mike Chapman searched the suitcase in the trunk. As he was doing that, inspector Danny Clem reached in and unscrewed the fastener on the spare-tire compartment. He opened the panel, looked inside and called out to Johnson.

Johnson, grabbing Noris by the shoulders, led him over to the trunk. At a hefty 240 pounds, Johnson had no trouble maneuvering the slim Noris. They peered in and saw no spare tire. In its place were several green bags that appeared to filled with white powder, as well as four black boxes, two pill bottles and two jars of brown liquid. A drug dealer, perhaps?

Johnson felt Noris shudder. He escorted Noris back to the table and patted him down for weapons. Inside Noris’ camel’s-hair coat was a bulge. As Johnson was slipping off the coat to take a closer look, he was suddenly left holding an empty garment. Noris was fleeing.

By the time it sank in, Noris was nearly a block away. Johnson and Chapman took off on foot, yelling, “Stop! Police!”

With his head start, Noris escaped. The inspectors couldn’t find him. Then Chapman noticed movement under a pickup parked in front of a shoe store. He squatted down, saw Noris, drew his gun and ordered him to come out with his hands up.

Noris stood up, arms raised, and looked at Chapman, just 20 feet away with his gun drawn. Then he turned and ran. “Stop! Police!”

Johnson joined Chapman on Noris’ tail. Noris bounced off a moving car but continued running. When he got to the middle of a busy intersection, he reversed direction, headed for a car stopped at the light and grabbed the driver’s door handle. The woman behind the wheel, startled, stepped on the gas, ran the red light and sent Noris spinning. Chapman and Johnson swarmed him.

They took him back to the terminal and handed him over to the Port Angeles police, who put him in the back seat of a patrol car.

Johnson took a sample of the white powder from the trunk to test. Was it heroin, speed, cocaine? Negative on each. As he shook the jars of brown liquid, Noris, who could see Johnson from the patrol car, ducked down to the floor.

Within a couple of days, the inspectors would learn that the brown liquid Johnson had shaken was a powerful, highly unstable relative of nitroglycerin that could have blown them all to bits.

Funny, I don’t see Richard Clarke’s name anywhere in that story.

Fred, care to shed some light on it for us?

Bob Kerrey has an oped up in today’s New York Times on his response to Condi Rice’s testimony and on his criticism of Bush’s strategy in dealing with the WoT.

First. let me say what a colossally offensive idea it is to me that someone charged with one of the most serious investigations of my lifetime – more serious in many ways than the Watergate investigation – would , before concluding hearings and outside the context of his fellow committee members – take a public stand like this.

I’ve been critical of these hearings as having been overly politicized, and focussed too much on the good of the respective parties involved, rather than of the Republic and this bit of gratuitous grandstanding validates all of those criticisms.

We need a careful, thoughtful, ruthless examination of the failures in doctrine and practice that led up to the events of 9/11, and based on this column alone, this circus of a hearing isn’t it. The fact that he’s willing to go public with his prejudgement at this point in the process makes a mockery of that process, and in turn damages our ability to look at the real problems that led to 9/11.

But let’s move past my annoyance about the provenance of the document, and talk about it on its merits.

At Thursday’s hearing before the 9/11 commission, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s national security adviser, gave a triumphal presentation. She was a spectacular witness.

I was a tough critic of some of her answers and assertions, though I believe I was at least as tough with the national security adviser for President Clinton. At the beginning and end of every criticism I have made in this process, I have also offered this disclaimer: anyone who was in Congress, as I was during the critical years leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, must accept some of the blame for the catastrophe. It was a collective failure.

Two things about that failure are clear to me at this point in our investigation. The first is that 9/11 could have been prevented, and the second is that our current strategy against terrorism is deeply flawed. In particular, our military and political tactics in Iraq are creating the conditions for civil war there and giving Al Qaeda a powerful rationale to recruit young people to declare jihad on the United States.

I’m sorry – they didn’t have a powerful recruiting presence in 2000? The videos of the USS Cole and the ruins in Manhattan weren’t good recruiting tools? What – you’re afraid they’re going to get pissed off at us? Here’s a question for you, Senator: How would we tell the difference?

Of course the attacks on 9/11 could have been prevented. So could the assassination of JFK, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the battle at Little Big Horn. History is contingent, and the chains that lead to large events are themselves fragile. The problem is that we have only partial information at any time, and that we’re selective in what we look at. Looking forward, we’re usually looking at the wrong information, and don’t have all of it.

How many Arab men flew on 9/11? Which ones do we look at, which ones do we devote resources to, which ones do we detain?

How the hell do we know? Today, we know because we had the passenger manifests (and brave members of the cabin crews identified the hijackers by seat in their calls from the doomed planes). We know because we spent millions of investigator-hours poring over the trails left by those 19 men. But how do we do it moving forward in time?

The case for the first conclusion begins with this fact: On 9/11, 19 men defeated every defense mechanism the United States had placed in their way. They succeeded in murdering 3,000 men and women whose only crime was going to work that morning. And they succeeded at a time of heightened alert … long after we recognized that Al Qaeda was capable of sophisticated military operations.

I’ve said in the past that what we had was largely a failure of doctrine and imagination.

We allowed people to freely fly with knives (I flew with a Spyderco Delica for eight or ten years). The only sophisticated thing they did was to find four people who knew they would die and were willing to learn to fly, and 15 thugs who went along for the ride.

Remember, the attack occurred after President Clinton had let pass opportunities to arrest or kill Al Qaeda’s leadership when the threat was much smaller. It occurred after President Bush and Ms. Rice were told on Jan. 25, 2001, that Al Qaeda was in the United States, and after President Bush was told on Aug. 6, 2001, that “70 F.B.I. field investigations were open against Al Qaeda” and that the “F.B.I. had found patterns of suspicious activities in the U.S. consistent with preparation for hijacking.”

Once again I know that President Clinton, President Bush and Ms. Rice all faced difficult challenges in the years and months before 9/11; I do not know if I would have handled things differently had I been in their shoes. It has been difficult for all of us to understand and accept the idea that a non-state actor like Osama bin Laden, in conjunction with Al Qaeda, could be a more serious strategic threat to us than the nation-states we grew up fearing.

But here’s the nub of the question: would Al Quieda have been a serious threat as a non-state actor without the explicit and tacit support of states?

But this recognition does not absolve me of my obligation to ask those who were responsible for our national security at the time what they did to protect us against this terrorist threat.

One episode strikes me as particularly important. On July 5, 2001, Ms. Rice asked Richard Clarke, then the administration’s counterterrorism chief, to help domestic agencies prepare against an attack. Five days later an F.B.I. field agent in Phoenix recommended that the agency investigate whether Qaeda operatives were training at American flight schools. He speculated that Mr. bin Laden’s followers might be trying to infiltrate the civil aviation system as pilots, security guards or other personnel.

Yes, and I’ll bet we can find memos from other FBI field agents worried that Aryan Nation supporters are planning to break members out of jail, abortion clinic murders are prepared to attack … and so on. It the process of setting priority that’s critical, and sadly, we’re human and sometimes don’t have the right ones; and when we do have the right ones, it’s often for the wrong reason.

Ms. Rice did not receive this information, a failure for which she blames the structure of government. And, while I am not blaming her, I have not seen the kind of urgent follow-up after this July 5 meeting that anyone who has worked in government knows is needed to make things happen. I have not found evidence that federal agencies were directed clearly, forcefully and unambiguously to tell the president everything they were doing to eliminate Qaeda cells in the United States.

As opposed to all the other competing priorities (white supremacist cells, organized crime, drug smugglers, etc.) which were as high on the radar before 9/11? In reality, at that time the Bush administration was focussed on the ‘long game’ in taking the attack to Al Quieda, from what I’ve read. It was one of many foreign policy issues cooking in the background, and yes, the failure to move it up was a horrible one – but as Greg Easterbrook pointed out – I’m not sure it’s one that could have been changed.

My second conclusion about the president’s terrorism strategy has three parts. First, I believe President Bush’s overall vision for the war on terrorism is wrong. … military and civilian alike.

OK, here’s a conclusion. Let’s see where it goes.

Second, the importance of this distinction is that it forces us to face the Muslim world squarely and to make an effort to understand it. It also allows us to insist that we be judged on our merits … and not on the hate-filled myths of the street. Absent an effort to establish a dialogue that permits respectful criticism and disagreement, the war on terrorism will surely fail. The violence against us will continue.

Yes, that’s absolutely true. We need to be judged on our merits; but the state controlled and sponsored media, and the state sponsored religious institutions are the ones spreading hatred about us. How does he suggest that we pick that puzzle apart?

Such a dialogue does not require us to cease our forceful and at times deadly pursuit of those who have declared war on us. Quite the contrary. It would enable us to gather Muslim allies in a cause that will bring as much benefit to them as it does to us. That’s why President Bush was right to go to a Washington mosque shortly after Sept. 11. His visit … and his words of assurance that ours was not a war against Islam but against a much smaller group that has perverted the teachings of the Koran … earned the sympathy of much of the Muslim world.

One of us – he or I – is completely wrong in our understanding of the nature of the Arab and Muslim political world right now. In my understanding, the governments in the much of the Arab (and non-Arab Muslim) world are faced with increased pressure from fundamentalist religious movements that want to see sh’aria imposed and see the Muslim world in a conflict with the secular West. Who, exactly, does he think he can gather in to think kind of constructive mutual dialog?

How do we have such a dialog with diplomats from a country where we are pursuing ‘those who have declred war on us’? When the act of pursuing them is itself an act of war on the host country?

That the sympathy wasn’t universal, that some in the Arab world thought the murder of 3,000 innocents was justified, caused many Americans to question whether the effort to be fair was well placed. It was … and we would be advised to make the effort more often.

Third, we should swallow our pride and appeal to the United Nations for help in Iraq. We should begin by ceding joint authority to the United Nations to help us make the decisions about how to transfer power to a legitimate government in Iraq. Until recently I have not supported such a move. But I do now. Rather than sending in more American forces or extending the stay of those already there, we need an international occupation that includes Muslim and Arab forces.

OK, so the UN has been a cesspool of corrupt (or inept while others corruptly took advantage) oversight of the Iraqi export economy for the last decade. In addition, it is essentially the creature of forces who see themselves in opposition to or desiring to extract something from the West – an international version of the ‘poverty pimps’ of the urban programs of the 1970’s. And we’re supposed to hand the keys over to them?

Their effectiveness in Palestine aside, let’s add Bosnia, Rwanda, and a number of other spots on the tourist maps in Hell as places where the blue-helmeted smurfs have shown themselves to be at best ineffective and at worst, a fig leaf for disaster.

Time is not on our side in Iraq. We do not need a little more of the same thing. We need a lot more of something completely different.

Time only isn’t on our side if we say it isn’t, and so demonstrate to the world that we can’t stick with this long enough to win. Pronouncements like that are basically idiotic. Should we broaden diplomatic efforts both within the West and outside it? Of course. But our basic diplomatic position should be borrowed from the Civil Rights days, when people sang “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

More later…

Over at Political Animal, Kevin Drum is properly ridiculing Jay Nordlinger for claiming that “those who despise Wal-Mart are the very ones who may not be so crazy about the United States.”

I’ve got a better criticism right here, from last week’s Business Week magazine which had a great article comparing Costco and Wal-Mart.

This fits into the ‘Good News’ category because it pretty conclusively shows you can do well by doing right.

A bad cop, with the likely connivance of a bad D.A. arrested 45 poor black defendants on trumped-up drug charges in Tulia, TX. They sued and ultimately got justice.

Now, the wheel turns.

The district attorney who prosecuted a succession of defendants arrested in a since-discredited drug bust in the west Texas town of Tulia now faces possible disbarment for his conduct during the trials.

In a disciplinary petition filed by the State Bar of Texas on Wednesday, Swisher County Dist. Atty. Terry D. McEachern is accused of failing to tell defense lawyers about the criminal history of his star witness, undercover agent Tom Coleman.

Note that they’re not talking about firing him from his post as D.A.; they’re taking about disbarring him, which would (rightly, it appears) end his career as an officer of the court.

I’ve commented in the past that righting these wrongs – that we live in a society where these wrongs can get righted – makes me happy.

I’m interested in why it is, when we correct the injustices of the past, and devise tools to ensure that it will be difficult to make the same mistakes again, we are dwelling on the “Oh, no, we were so bad” rather than the “we’re getting better”. See, I think that real liberalism…the kind that builds schools and water systems and improves people’s lives…comes from a belief in progress.

We aren’t perfect. No one is or ever will be…to quote William Goldman, “Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.” But we can either keep trying to get there or sit on the floor dwelling on our shortcomings. Which one would you rather do, and why?

Just when I was hoping to forget about constructively criticizing Kos and struggle with how to constructively criticize LGF, Stirling Newberry, over at Daily Kos lays a huge egg.

Here’s what he says, in criticizing Rice’s testimony today:

The picture that emerges is that Rice believed that dealing with terrorist threats was a matter that little people on the ground who were “alert” would catch the people responsible, freeing the people at the top to talk about the “structural” changes to America.

Yes, in fact, that’s how it’s supposed to work. The people on top think up strategy and policy and the folks on the street carry it out.

And, in fact, how it did work. In fact, it has worked without the benefit of policy direction or grand strategy.One Border Patrolwoman stopped the Millennium Plot to blow up LAX:

At Victoria, U.S. immigration pre-clearance agents were mildly suspicious of Ressam. They made him open his trunk, but saw nothing. He presented his fake Canadian passport, and the computer check turned up no previous convictions or warrants in the name of Benni Noris. Ressam drove his rental car, with its concealed bomb, onto the ferry heading for Washington state. Upon his arrival at Port Angeles, a U.S. customs agent became suspicious of his hesitant answers to her questions, and she asked for identification. Agents began searching the car. As they discovered the explosive materials — which they at first took to be drugs — in the trunk of the car, Ressam tried to run away. He was caught and arrested.

Flight 93 did not hit the Capitol because the passengers – the ‘little people’ Kos dismisses – stopped it.

In his interview in the Atlantic, Security expert Bruce Schneier points out that

“The trick to remember is that technology can’t save you,” Schneier says. “we know this in our own lives. We realize there’s no magic anti-burglary dust that we can sprinkle on our cars to prevent them from being stolen. We know that car alarms don’t provide much protection. The Club at best makes burglars steal the car next to you. For real safety we park on nice streets where people notice if somebody smashes the window. Or we park in garages, where somebody watches the car. In both cases people are the essential security element. You always build the system around people.”

(emphasis added)

There are a lot of things to criticize the Bush Administration for. There are a lot of things to criticize Condi Rice for.

But Kos has picked the wrong horse here.

The reality is that we would all be better served by pushing down the role of securing our country against terrorism to the ‘little people’, rather than to large, rigid, unresponsive policy-driven organizations.

Go read the Atlantic article for more on why, or better still go read Schneier’s book, ‘Beyond Fear‘.

Back to Kos, I think, simply that the root issue remains that Bush et al decided to respond to the sponsors of the terrorist acts, rather than the individual actors. That’s a legitimate policy distinction, and one where, as I’ve said in the past, I fall on the side of the White House.

But to somehow assume that the President and National Security staff will personally foil every plot (although the image of Condi Rice dressed up as Wonder Woman might be pleasing to some) – or even manage the response to every plot is ludicrous.

It’s up to us; not as vigilantes or even armed defenders, but just alert neighbors. And baggage handlers.

One approach to the War on Terrorism is to built giant formally structured security systems, backed by massive, centralized technology, and as the complex, ‘wicked’ world keeps asking questions the system can’t ask, add pages and pages to the three-ring binders of regulations and policies the minimum-wage front-line employees must follow. You can hire and retain them based on their ability to follow the rules, even when it means taking the wire clippers away from a uniformed Special Forces soldier—who has his mouth wired shut because he’s wounded, and needs the cutters to cut the wires in the event he has to throw up. Or who want to take away the Congressional Medal of Honor from an 80-year old man flying to give a speech at the Air Force Academy.

It will involve a massive investment in machines that will be rushed into production and still be obsolete long before we have finished paying for them.

I obviously don’t think much of this model in this application. I think it is based on old, Taylorian models in which you attempt to break the process into a finite series of discrete steps, and train the human portions of the system in performing these exact steps as precisely and efficiently as possible. It also removes the necessity for any kind of judgment or expertise on the part of the employee.

Update: Praktike busts me for not reading the byline, and thinks I’m completely wrong

Go read Tacitus “In Search of Lost Time,” about events in Iraq. Now.

I pretty much agree with everything he’s saying, especially this:

“In fact, fellow American, there are only two things in the world that can stop them, and make their earnest sacrifice for glory or for naught:

You and me.

UPDATE: I’ll add a comment from Clint Smith that seems somehow appropriate as well: “A gun isn’t a magic wand that will make your problems disappear when you wave it.” The same is true of armies.

I watched a bunch of the Rice testimony at the gym this morning; sadly I didn’t hear much of it, since 3 grown adults couldn’t figure out how to turn on the closed-captioning on the TV sets there; we obviously needed a kid to show us how.

I’ve read a bunch of it, and found it sadly predictable. Both that the partisan ‘blame game’ was really the context of the discussion, and that neither side was willing to take the blame for the true causes of the failure.

I’ll skip over the whole issue of historicity; that the infallibility of prediction only works in one way – backward.Conservatives are strongly lined up behind the “we never knew!!” and were shocked, just shocked, to find that the reports that terrorists planned something in the US were true. Of course, Rumsfeld had stopped flying commercial by that point, so someone in the security apparat took it seriously.

The reality is that Bush and his team weren’t looking for this, and so as the pattern emerged, they didn’t see it. It is human nature to look for patterns, and particularly to look for patterns we have already observed. While sitting at the side of the track, I read a wonderful book called ‘Complications,’ by surgeon Atul Gawande. In it, he tells the harrowing story of suspecting and then diagnosing flesh-eating streptococcus in a young woman’s leg, and then saving her leg through heroic surgery and treatment.

He suspected it only because he had just participated in another, failed surgery, in which a man infected with this disease died, so he was obsessed by this disease.

But let’s share the blame.

The left and the Democrats are also to blame for 9/11, and not because it was the culmination of eight years of events under Clinton’s administration (although in the histories, that has to be considered as well).

The reality is that had Bush responded to the warnings, the logical responses – to preclude Arab men from flying, from taking flight schools, or to have disarmed them (note that pre-9/11 it was perfectly legal to fly with a 3-1/2″ Spyderco Delicia, as I did on every flight. I pretty much have one around all the time; they are quite useful).

So, imagine of you would, the response from Senator Kennedy, from the academic Left, from the ACLU.

On vague, unspecified intelligence, we would have detained, inconvenienced, embarrassed, and enraged any number of men – mostly innocent.

And the odds are that most of the 9/11 hijackers would have been able to fly – and act – unchecked.

If not that day, than someday soon when the intense pressure from the Democratic side had forced this ‘profiling’ program to stand down.

So while we’re apportioning blame for 9/11 – and, personally, I’d like to see the entire national leadership stand up and take some – let’s do it correctly.

There’s been a lot of discussion on oil-for-food. In today’s LA Times, the French Ambassador responds, and raises at least one factual point (re banking) that should be addressed. Over to you, Roger!

First ‘Freedom Fries,’ Now Oil-for-Food Lies: Give France a Break

By Jean-David Levitte, Jean-David Levitte is the French ambassador to the United States.

…I have been deeply surprised in the last few days to see a new campaign of unfounded accusations against my country flourish again in the media. These allegations, being spread by a handful of influential, conservative TV and newspaper journalists in the U.S., have arisen in connection with a recent inquiry into the “oil for food” program that was run by the United Nations in Iraq during the final years of Saddam Hussein’s government.

These allegations suggest that the government of France condoned kickbacks — bribes, in effect — from French companies to the Iraqi regime in return for further contracts. They say Paris turned a blind eye to these activities.

Let me be absolutely clear. These aspersions are completely false and can only have been an effort to discredit France, a longtime friend and ally of the U.S.

As the former French ambassador to the U.N., let me explain how the oil-for-food program worked. Created in 1996, it was intended to provide Iraqis with essential goods to alleviate the humanitarian effect of the international sanctions that remained in place. The program authorized Iraq to export agreed-on quantities of oil, and allowed money from the sales to be used for food and other necessities. The program was managed by the U.N. and monitored by Security Council members.

Between 1996 and the end of the program in 2003, every contract for every humanitarian purchase had to be unanimously approved by the 15 members of the Security Council, including France, Britain and the U.S. The complete contracts were only circulated to the U.S. and Britain, which had expressly asked to see them and would have been in the best position to have known if anything improper was going on. Though a number of contracts were put on hold by the American and British delegations on security-related grounds, no contract was ever held up because malfeasance, such as illegal kickbacks, had been detected.

Was there corruption and bribery inside the program? Frankly, I don’t know. Iraq was not a market economy; it was under sanctions at the time. Customs experts had little choice but to assume that the prices set by outside companies were “reasonable and acceptable,” a criterion of acceptance used by the U.N. secretariat, and they had no way of checking whether some contracts were overpriced.

That is why France fully supports the independent inquiry set up by the U.N. The truth must come out.

Was France a major beneficiary of oil-for-food contracts, as several conservative columnists have claimed recently? Definitely not. From the beginning of the program to its end, French contracts accounted for 8% of the total. We were Iraq’s eighth-largest supplier.

In addition, throughout the program a sizable proportion of the contracts dubbed “French” were in fact contracts from foreign companies using their French branches, subsidiaries and agents. Among them were U.S. firms providing spare parts for the oil industry (including several subsidiaries of Halliburton). They submitted contracts through French subsidiaries for more than $200 million.

It is also suggested that the money from the oil-for-food contracts passed exclusively through a French bank, BNP Paribas. Wrong again: 41% of the money passed through J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, which, like BNP, was contracted by the U.N. with the approval of Security Council members.

This leaves us with one remaining accusation: that the French positions on the oil-for-food program and Iraq in general were driven by the lure of oil. Yet France was never a major destination for Iraqi oil during the program. In 2001, 8% of Iraqi oil was imported by France, compared with 44.5% imported by the U.S., which was the No. 1 importer all along.

At a time when the U.N. is considering a return to Iraq, and we all agree on the need for close international cooperation to help a sovereign, stable Iraq emerge, I don’t understand this campaign. Or the hidden agenda behind it.

No tome to research and comment now, but I’m sure a few of you folks have some time on your hands…