Jim Hoagland: The 9-11 Commission Report Will Not Be Well-Regarded by History

Jim Hoagland, in the WSJ (July 30, 2004):

History professors should give the 9/11 Commission's final report a solid A as an illuminating chronology pulled together on the gallop. History itself is not likely to be as kind. The report has conceptual holes and works too hard to round off the necessary rough edges of politics and national strategy.

The commission investigating the 2001 terror assault on New York and Washington follows the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in pinpointing causes for the woeful performance of the CIA and other government agencies in fighting al Qaeda. It also suggests organizational fixes for what it christens the war on "Islamist terrorism."

But both these inquiries step gingerly around a central question that John Kerry and the Democrats assembled in Boston are slighting as well. It is the role -- if any -- that pre-emptive strikes or preventive war should play in protecting the United States from terrorist groups that possess or seek chemical, biological or radiological weapons.

Indulging a blue-ribbon panel's instinctual penchant for the obvious, the 9/11 Commission mandates future administrations to "attack terrorists and their organizations" and permit them "no sanctuaries." It adds: "The U.S. government must build the capacities to prevent a 9/11 scale plot from succeeding."

Those conclusions make sense in a report that dwells heavily and persuasively on the failures of the Clinton and Bush administrations to take effective (i.e., pre-emptive) action to thwart the 9/11 plot as it was being refined in the caves of Afghanistan.

But the commissioners are then mostly silent on getting there from here; that is, on specific measures to accomplish those particular goals. They are totally silent on preventive war, a concept that is enshrined in the Bush administration's National Security Strategy.

Commissioner Jamie Gorelick told Washington Post editors and reporters that the doctrine and practices of pre-emption were deliberately kept out of the commission's closed-door discussions in a successful bid to avoid partisan arguments.

The description of private harmony from Democrat Ms. Gorelick and Republican Slade Gorton stood in contrast to the knife-between-clenched teeth approach of many commission members during the public sessions I watched. Might it have been better if the commissioners had argued out the big questions of the principles and tactics of national security in private and sought common ground there? I happen to think so.

But the larger point that is ducked by the Senate and 9/11 reports comes from an unwillingness to look directly at the consequences that flow from their two most important findings.

Both reports find that the U.S. does face a severe threat from global terrorist networks -- and does not have in place an intelligence organization capable of providing the clear, unequivocal intelligence on the threat that any leader would want in making a mass life-or-death decision.

The reports are nonetheless useful debunking tools. They puncture the exaggerated claims that the intelligence failures on 9/11 and Iraq were a result of political manipulation and pressure by either the Clinton or Bush White Houses, or by Iraqi exiles. The true culprits were "group think" and other forms of faulty reporting and analysis by the agencies themselves on Iraq, and our government's appalling internal inability to share and track information on al Qaeda before 9/11.

But having diagrammed the past with lucidity and skill, the 9/11 Commission cast surprisingly little useful light on the future. Its call for a National Intelligence Director to overhaul the mess -- heartily backed by Mr. Kerry and gaining favor with the White House -- could actually make things worse.