Sunday, March 28, 2004

My hair is on fire Friedman, Friedman, Friedman. The World's Smartest Man In The Realm Of Foreign Policy (as determined by a poll of one, with an error margin of +/- 100 percent) starts his column today thus: I have a confession to make: I am the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and I didn't listen to one second of the 9/11 hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them. Not one second. Not one story. Lord knows, it's not out of indifference to 9/11. It's because I made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We could have had perfect intelligence on all the key pieces of 9/11, but the fact is we lacked — for the very best of reasons — people with evil enough imaginations to put those pieces together and realize that 19 young men were going to hijack four airplanes for suicide attacks against our national symbols and kill as many innocent civilians as they could, for no stated reason at all. Imagination is on my mind a lot these days, because it seems to me that the only people with imagination in the world right now are the bad guys. As my friend, the Middle East analyst Stephen P. Cohen, says, "That is the characteristic of our time — all the imagination is in the hands of the evildoers." Maybe The World's Smartest Man In The Realm Of Foreign Policy should have watched the hearings. It would then have become apparent that Richard Clarke was exercising impressive feats of imagination in anticipating and predicting the depth of the threat posed by al Queda, and how and where its next acts might happen. Perhaps The World's Smartest Man In The Realm Of Foreign Policy should spend less time toking from hookahs in remote bazaars and focus more on the countless faceless bureaucrats in Washington, those in charge of imagining threats, of taking slivers of questionable intelligence and imagining the consequences we may be facing, and imagining effective responses.. The problem has never been that we couldn't "imagine" enough; the problem is that we have an administration that imposed a layer of policy pre-disposed intelligence vetters ordered not to use any imagination, or let that of the smart, experienced people filter through. 9:13:27 AM    Comment []  trackback []

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