This NY Times article examines an American cultural phenomenon that several historians are noting — that is, a national culture of shifting blame, which is reflected best in American politics.
Along those lines, several friends of this blog have asked why I have not commented on Richard C. Clarke’s testimony earlier this week before the 9/11 Commission. Actually, there are several reasons. First and foremost, numerous other bloggers have already done an outstanding job in tracking the various issues raised by Mr. Clarke’s testimony, notably Glenn Reynolds and Daniel Drezner. I could not improve on their efforts.
However, I must admit that I am somewhat frustrated by the way in which the issues that Mr. Clarke’s testimony raised have played out in the mainstream media. I concede that much of the media storm is a byproduct of the 9/11 Commission hearings and the related television coverage. Regrettably, most folks do not take the time to research these issues on their own, so their impressions and views toward the issues are often formed through television viewing and commentary. That is unfortunate because television, for business reasons, tends to sensationalize news such as Mr. Clarke’s testimony when, in reality, such testimony does not relate anything particularly new. Thus, people who evaluate such issues through the prism of television tend to believe Mr. Clarke is revealing something not previously known when, in fact, he is not.
The fact of the matter is that, long before Richard Clarke’s testimony this week, the U.S. Government and intelligence community’s failure to deal effectively with the actions and threats of Islamic fascists had been well-documented. Gerald Posner’s excellent “Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11” relates how the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks was systematic and had its seeds for failure sown repeatedly in twenty years of fumbled intelligence investigations and misplaced priorities. Similarly, Laurie Mylroie’s “The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge” and “Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror” both describe in excrutiating detail how the U.S. government’s approach to dealing with Islamic fascism has been compromised by restrictions placed on the intelligence agencies and political wrangling. Finally, former CIA agent Robert Baer’s “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism” insightfully relates from the “ground floor” how each administration over the past 25 years allowed the intelligence agencies to become a political football, which directly led to the substandard intelligence that facilitated the 9/11 attackers’ success. These are just a few of the recent books that have examined the same issues that were raised during this week’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
Inasmuch as I have read the foregoing books and several others on these issues, Mr. Clarke’s testimony was not particularly insightful or noteworthy to me. I will read his book eventually to compare his insights to those contained in the books mentioned above, and I will post about it when I am through.
However, in the meantime, to the extent that Mr. Clarke’s position is that the Bush Administration is more culpable for the 9/11 attacks than any one of the previous five (three Republican, two Democrat) administrations, his position is fundamentally flawed. America’s intelligence failures over the past generation have been the result of a litany of bipartisan mistakes. If Mr. Clarke is suggesting that the Bush Administration’s failures in this area are any more egregious than those of its predecessors, then he is doing his country a grave disservice and, in fact, is engaging in precisely the type of political posturing that has been so damaging to the intelligence community over the past 25 years.
Courtesy of Phil Carter and Mark Kleiman, the most insightful commentary that I have reviewed on the 9/11 Commission hearings to date comes from UCLA School of Public Policy professor Amy Zegart, author of “Flawed by Design” that deals with the national security process. Professor Zegart — who had Condi Rice as her thesis adviser — makes the following observations about the national security process, and what happens when government fails to establish clear priorities for the intelligence community:

. . . The [9/11] Commission asked the wrong question. Was terrorism a priority? Of course it was. The real question is how many other priorities both administrations were confronting. I’ll tell you: too many.
Clinton wrote a Presidential Decision Directive in 1995 that sought to establish clear priorities for the intelligence community. There were so many in the top tier, they actually divided them into Tier 1A and Tier 1B. But it gets better (or worse). There was also a Tier 0, apparently for the very very very top priorities. Note to self: when you can’t list priorities with regular numbers, you haven’t really made priorities.
As time passed, priorities were added to the list but old ones were never removed. By 9/11, the National Security Agency had roughly 1,500 formal requirements, and developed 200,000 “Essential Elements of Information.” I’m not making this up. See the Congressional Intelligence Committees’ Joint Inquiry Report, December 2002, p.49. Intelligence officials told Congressional investigators that the prioritization process was “so broad as to be meaningless.”
This is not new. For the past 50 years, there have been more than 40 major studies about the intelligence community. A common theme among them has been the spotty and fleeting attention policy makers have given to setting intelligence priorities. One former senior intelligence official told me that during the Cold War, he was asked about the state of the Soviet economy exactly once, when the Secretary of Defense wanted to convert rubles to dollars for a budget presentation to Congress.

Professor Zegar hits the nail on the head. Rather than finger pointing, the 9/11 Commission needs to recommend a basic procedure by which the government establishes clear priorities for the intelligence community. As Mr. Carter points out, if you prioritize everything, you effectively prioritize nothing. Hopefully, the Committee will rise above the usual political posturing and focus its recommendations on revamping and reinvigorating an intelligence community that we have allowed our political leaders to eviscerate. The success of the war against the radical Islamic fascists depends on it.