[IP] A washingtonpost.com article from: spaf@acm.org:
On Dec. 8, 1941, the Signals Intelligence elements of the U.S. government were in a quandary. How could Pearl Harbor have occurred, given their spectacular success in breaking Japan’s top diplomatic code? The answer was simple: In their zeal to succeed in the diplomatic arena, they had failed to place enough emphasis on Japanese naval traffic, the one source that could have given some warning of the attack.
Although they are more than a half-century old, Pearl Harbor’s lessons are relevant today. Indeed, given the current debate about the role of intelligence in assessing Iraq’s efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction and in disasters such as that of Sept. 11, 2001, history compels us to ask if we are once again allowing technological success to blind us to an emerging threat.
So the Sept 11 report is out and we can all learn about the “failure of imagination” that led to the attacks. It seems to be a nuanced conclusion: we know that the idea of airliners as missiles had been discussed and watched for 5 years earlier. In the run-up to the report, the hearings, testimony, and analysis, I’m persuaded that Bush administration’s neglect of the tactics laid out and successfully pursued by the Clinton administration (yes, I know there were attacks on US forces overseas, but I can’t equate them with the the domestic attacks and anyone who does is an idiot) opened the door for the Sept 11 attacks.
I don’t think a “failure of imagination” is accurate. I think an overactive imagination, one that saw WMDs all over Iraq, that saw Ahmed Chalabi as an honest broker, that assumed the people of Iraq would welcome the troops as liberators, that saw the overthrow of Saddam as the calalyst for a democratic domino effect through the Middle East, is more to blame.