Sunday, May 19, 2002

A Failure to Imagine
The failure to prevent Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination. It was a failure of imagination. Even if all the raw intelligence signals had been shared among the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the White House, I'm convinced that there was no one there who would have put them all together, who would have imagined evil on the scale Osama bin Laden did.

Osama bin Laden was (or is) a unique character. He's a combination of Charles Manson and Jack Welch — a truly evil, twisted personality, but with the organizational skills of a top corporate manager, who translated his evil into a global campaign that rocked a superpower. In some ways, I'm glad that America (outside Hollywood) is not full of people with bin Laden-like imaginations. One Timothy McVeigh is enough.

Imagining evil of this magnitude simply does not come naturally to the American character, which is why, even after we are repeatedly confronted with it, we keep reverting to our natural, naïvely optimistic selves. Because our open society is so much based on trust, and that trust is so hard-wired into the American character and citizenry, we can't get rid of it — even when we so obviously should.

So someone drives a truck bomb into the U.S. embassy in Beirut, and we still don't really protect the Marine barracks there from a similar, but much bigger, attack a few months later. Someone blows up two U.S. embassies in East Africa with truck bombs, and we still don't imagine that someone would sail an exploding dinghy into a destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole, a few years later. Someone tries to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 with a truck bomb, and the guy who did it tells us he had also wanted to slam a plane into the C.I.A., but we still couldn't imagine someone doing just that to the Twin Towers on 9/11.

So I don't fault the president for not having imagined evil of this magnitude. But given the increasingly lethal nature of terrorism, we are going to have to adapt. We need an "Office of Evil," whose job would be to constantly sift all intelligence data and imagine what the most twisted mind might be up to.

No, I don't blame President Bush at all for his failure to imagine evil. I blame him for something much worse: his failure to imagine good.

I blame him for squandering all the positive feeling in America after 9/11, particularly among young Americans who wanted to be drafted for a great project that would strengthen America in some lasting way — a Manhattan project for energy independence. Such a project could have enlisted young people in a national movement for greater conservation and enlisted science and industry in a crash effort to produce enough renewable energy, efficiencies and domestic production to wean us gradually off oil imports.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/opinion/19FRIE.html?todaysheadlines

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