The Failure of Imagination: From Pearl Harbor to 9-11
In all the many volumes of documents, testimony, and commentary about the intelligence failure of 1941, there are no more telling words than an informal confession made by Admiral Kimmel while the congressional hearings of 1945–46 were taking place.
…The disgraced admiral’s…explanation of why he had been caught by surprise…in a lunch-break conversation with Edward Morgan, a lawyer who eventually drafted the majority report. As Morgan recalled it years later, the exchange went as follows:
Morgan: Why, after you received this “war warning” message of November 27, did you leave the Fleet in Pearl Harbor?
Kimmel: All right, Morgan—I’ll give you your answer. I never thought those little yellow sons-of-bitches could pull off such an attack, so far from Japan.
Although unvarnished language like this did not make it into the transcript of the hearings, the majority report did take care to argue that “had greater imagination and a keener awareness of the significance of intelligence existed . . . it is proper to suggest that someone should have concluded that Pearl Harbor was a likely point of Japanese attack.” Failing to think outside the box is a theme that surfaces and resurfaces in the serious general literature. Gordon Prange, for example, speaks of “psychological unpreparedness”; Roberta Wohlstetter, of “the very human tendency to pay attention to the signals that support current expectations about enemy behavior.”
In a rational world, this should not have been the case. American perceptions of Japan as a potential foe traced back to the turn of the century, when Japan startled the world by defeating China and Tsarist Russia in quick succession (in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5), thereby joining the Western, Caucasian, and Christian expansionist nations as one of the world’s few imperialist powers. Financiers in New York and London had helped finance the Russo-Japanese War, and many Western observers expressed admiration for the doughty “Yankees (or Brits) of the Pacific,” but such support and praise were hardly unalloyed. The obverse side of support and respect for Japan and its spectacular accomplishments in “Westernization” was fear of the “Yellow Peril”—fear, that is, that Asia’s masses would acquire the scientific skills and war-making machinery hitherto monopolized by the West….
Beyond this deep history of mistrust and fear, it might have been expected that the plain nuts-and-bolts of military developments—the huge buildup of warships, aircraft, and ground forces that took place in the years preceding Pearl Harbor—would have made it apparent that Japan would be a formidable foe. This was not the case, and as a consequence it was more than just the unexpected attack that shocked Americans. Even more unnerving was the competence of the Japanese military….
These developments were not hidden, but even the experts failed to see them clearly—or, at least, to see them whole. Thus, the list of Japan’s military capabilities that caught the Americans by surprise seems quite astounding in retrospect. Their torpedoes were more advanced than those of the Americans. (It was last-minute development of an airplane-launched torpedo with fins, capable of running shallow, that made the Pearl Harbor attack so deadly.) Their sonar, which the Americans believed inferior, was four to five times more powerful than what the U.S. military had at the time. Although the high-speed Mitsubishi “Zero,” introduced to combat in China in August 1940, was more effective than any U.S. fighter plane at the time, the Americans underestimated its range, speed, and maneuverability….
Aiding and Abetting the Enemy
Al Qaeda commanded no military machine on September 11. It had been engaged in no negotiations with the United States, nor could it have been, not being a nation-state. Although Osama bin Laden’s ambitions had grown ever more expansive over the years since Al Qaeda’s founding in 1988, and although U.S. intelligence specialists took seriously his vision of a “great Caliphate,” he was not engaged in an escalating quest for autarky—for military and economic domination of a formal, secure, and self-sufficient sphere of influence—comparable to the quest that had obsessed Japan ever since its takeover of Manchuria in 1931.
Even here, however, certain points of comparison merit attention. A full decade of mounting tensions preceded Pearl Harbor, beginning with the impasse over Manchuria. In the case of Islamist terrorism, the first attack in the United States took place in 1993, when the World Trade Center suffered extensive damage from explosives detonated in a parked van. Although later intelligence connected this to Al Qaeda, this was not clear for a number of years. A National Intelligence Estimate distributed in July 1995 predicted future terrorist attacks against and in the United States, but the 9/11 Commission concluded that Al Qaeda itself was not identified in a conspicuous manner until around 1999—three years after the NSC’s Richard Clarke dates this “discovery,” eleven years after the organization was founded, six years after the first attack on the World Trade Center, and only two years before the September 11 attack….
Although there was no comparable economic dimension in the rise of Islamist terrorism [compared to the oil embargo on Japan in 1940], there was an analogous prehistory of support and appeasement prior to September 11. In the closing decade of the Cold War, U.S. strategic planners embraced the prospect of an anticommunist “arc of Islam” stretching east from the Middle East along the underbelly of the atheistic Soviet Union. The policy birthed by such thinking took the form of covert collaboration with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in recruiting, training, and arming radical mujahideen for the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989….
Monsters commonly have multiple creators, but this does not diminish the U.S. role in helping to promote Islamist radicalism early on. Like the Japanese soldiers and sailors who became seasoned veterans in the war against China and initially benefited materially from U.S. support through trade in strategic goods, the mujahideen—once proxy soldiers for the U.S. government and romanticized “freedom fighters” in Washington and the U.S. media—emerged from Afghanistan as hardened fighters primed for new missions. It fell to Al Qaeda, birthed in Afghanistan in 1988, to define that mission for them.
“This little terrorist in Afghanistan”
The stunning “asymmetrical” victory of Afghan and Muslim fighters over the Soviet Union emboldened Islamist radicals to believe they could prevail over U.S. military power as well. In a television interview more than three years before 9/11, bin Laden boasted that the victory of lightly armed holy warriors in Afghanistan “utterly annihilated the myth of the so-called superpowers.” (This interview was rebroadcast on Al Jazeera nine days after 9/11.) By contrast, U.S. policy makers drew few if any counterpart lessons. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the politicized zealotry they had encouraged in Afghanistan no longer attracted top-level attention. Even within the U.S. military, the effectiveness of Islamist insurgency and terror did not prompt serious attention to counterinsurgency doctrine….
Why did top military and civilian leaders fail to take asymmetrical threats from Al Qaeda and the Islamists seriously? As with the earlier failure to take Japanese military capabilities seriously, part of the answer lies in racial arrogance and cultural condescension. When Charles Freeman, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, tried to draw attention to the mujahideen after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, for example, he found no one interested, including top leaders at the CIA. “Part of the attitude in Washington,” he recalled, “was, ‘Why should we go out there and talk to people with towels on their heads?’”…
This was the “little yellow men” mindset transferred to the Middle East. As in 1941, civilian and military planners underestimated the enemy and failed to grasp both the depth of their self-righteousness and their willingness to take enormous risk as well as heavy losses. Most disastrously, they were unable to imagine this enemy possessing the cunning and competence to pull off a complex and imaginative act of aggression. None of his peers challenged Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz when, five months before 9/11, he dismissed bin Laden as “this little terrorist in Afghanistan.”
Once again, as with system breakdown and leadership negligence, the diagnostic language in postmortems of the failure of imagination exposed on September 11 is essentially the same as that which analysts have long used in describing the disbelief that greeted Pearl Harbor: psychological unpreparedness, prejudices and preconceptions, gross underestimation of intentions and capabilities. There is a sense of encountering a pathologist’s repetitive case book, glossing near-identical cases. Thus, to crib from Roberta Wohlstetter: prior to September 11, American analysts (with some marginalized exceptions) and decision makers simply were unable “to project the daring and ingenuity of the enemy.”… Bush administration planners were undone by the arrogance of despising a small enemy. To appropriate Admiral Kimmel’s pithy words: no one in a position of command thought that those little Muslim sons-of-bitches could pull off such a spectacular attack, so far from home….
In a passing comment, the 9/11 Commission also took note of what happens when, after unexpected catastrophe, erstwhile little men prove to be formidable adversaries:
Al Qaeda and its affiliates are popularly described as being all over the world, adaptable, resilient, needing little higher-level organization, and capable of anything. The American people are thus given the picture of an omnipotent, unslayable hydra of destruction. This image lowers expectations for government effectiveness.
What the commission was evoking was what one U.S. counterterrorism official called “the superman scenario.” The shocking success of the little Muslim men abruptly endowed them with hitherto undreamed-of powers and capabilities—to the extent of precipitating a declaration of a global war on . . . what? On a tactic (terror). On a worst-case scenario where Al Qaeda or other terrorists might obtain weapons of mass destruction. Eventually, this paranoia reached such a level that deflating hyperbole became almost a category in itself in the burgeoning popular literature on terrorism. As another counterterrorism expert put it, writing specifically about Al Qaeda, “by failing to understand the context of the organization, its very strengths and weaknesses, we magnified our mental image of terrorists as bogeymen.” Yet another posed the rhetorical question “Are they ten feet tall?” and deemed it necessary to answer this. “They’re not,” he assured his audience.
A comparable cognitive dissonance took place after Pearl Harbor. In American eyes, the Japanese foe morphed, overnight, from little men into supermen. Until 1943 or even 1944, when the war turned unmistakably against Japan, the cartoon rendering of the enemy was often a monstrously huge figure. Like the 9/11 Commission, more sober commentators responded by warning of the danger of exaggerating the enemy’s resources and capabilities to the point where this became demoralizing. A typical essay in the Sunday New York Times Magazine in March 1942, for example, might have served as a draft for post–September 11 warnings about being carried away by the specter of an unslayable hydra of destruction. It was titled “Japanese Superman? That, Too, Is a Fallacy.”