“Decision makers should imagine themselves in a future day when CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping Al Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the United States. … That future day could happen at any time.”
—U.S. Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clark, addressing the Principals Committee, a cabinet-level, interagency national security team, on Sept. 4, 2001.
A moot question: If Principals Committee members could have seen a week into the future, what would they have done to defend America against the 9/11 terrorist attacks?
A relevant question: What should the United States be doing now to prevent future catastrophic terrorist attacks?
According to a staff member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (popularly known as the 9/11 Commission) who spoke at the University Honors College last month, an easy answer would be: Do a better of job of securing nuclear weapons and materials, and create a better-coordinated U.S. intelligence operation.
Warren Bass— nonfiction editor of The Washington Post’s “Book World” and senior fellow of Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a foreign policy think tank in New York City—was a member of the professional staff of the 9/11 Commission and the commission’s lead staffer on National Security Council issues.
Bass said the commission’s work represented “an attempt to bring citizenry into the conversation and to say that Al Qaeda and the war on terror were issues that were far too complicated to be left simply to unscrutinized politicians, generals, spies, and law enforcement officials.”
Serving on the commission provided a rare chance to report, virtually in real time, on the dominant national security issue of the day, said Bass. It was unlike writing about, say, World War II because no one knows whether 9/11will be regarded as “one horrible isolated episode” in U.S. history or as a “much less dramatic episode,” dwarfed by sequels yet to come.
Bass, who earned a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University, equated his commission service to moving “from the ivory tower to the trenches” of foreign policy. He credited the commission with moving 9/11 from “the realm of mythology into the realm of public policy,” where it properly belongs.
According to Bass, an engaged citizenry is required if the United States is going to defend against terrorism and, in the long haul, shut down “the terrorist network that Osama Bin Laden has quite ingeniously built and scattered across the globe.”
The 9/11 Commission exemplified a shift in America’s system of checks and balances, according to Bass.
“You will search in vain in the Constitution for a mention of highly prominent, independent commissions that are working to keep an eye on both the Congress and on the executive branch in its conduct of national security policy,” he said. “What the framers had in mind was that the U.S. Congress should do what we [9/11 Commissioners] were doing.”
Bass encouraged students to read the 9/11 Commission report, calling it a “fascinating window” inside the U.S. government and its handling of national security, “an incredible case study for historians, political science majors, for social scientists of all stripes, for anyone who is pursuing a humanities degree, and anyone who carries an American passport.”
While many Americans attribute 9/11 to fanaticism or blind evil, Bass pointed out that Bin Laden, “evil though he certainly is, is not someone who is a force of pure, unreasoning malevolence.” On one level, Bass explained, Bin Laden is an Arab politician, a Saudi dissident who hates the monarchy that rules Saudi Arabia and condemns it as heretical, impious, and reliant on American troops to retain its control over the country.
“Bin Laden preaches a wider message in which politics and a perverted form of Islam are fused,” Bass said. “He does not recognize the Enlightenment split between the religious sphere and the secular sphere. Rather, he sees it as all woven together, and [his message] has a coherent, however radical, political, and ideological appeal in the wider Muslim world in general, but particularly in the Sunni-Arab core who are the people Bin Laden thinks of as his primary constituents.”
Al Qaeda, which means “the base,” is an adversary unlike any the United States has previously fought and, as a result, the war on terror has taken a different shape than any past war where the enemy was a state with “a return address,” said Bass.
“Bin Laden doesn’t have those same kinds of targetable assets,” he said. Therefore, the foot soldiers in the war on terror are not infantry divisions, but rather the U.S. intelligence community.
According to Bin Laden’s philosophy, death is something to be welcomed, not avoided, and the violence he commits is sacramental—a service to God. This is “a warped and repulsive view of Islam,” Bass said, but one that makes Al Qaeda difficult to deter.
