www.thestar.com,
Of all the autopsies performed on 9/11, the most revealing is the one conducted by the commission assigned to dissect it.
More than enumerating the administrative failures that led to the tragedy, and making sensible suggestions to rectify them, the 9/11 Commission has said something more profound:
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America remains ill-informed about the people and places that pose the greatest danger to it.
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War alone will not defeat terrorism.
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That all 19 Sept. 11 terrorists were Al-Qaeda Muslims does not mean all Muslims are Al Qaeda.
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America defeats itself when it abandons its moral core.
The 10-member panel also faults George W. Bush for abandoning Afghanistan too soon.
On Iraq, the panel speaks volumes with its silence on Bush's claim that Iraq is the “central front” in the war on terrorism, which it demonstrably is not.
America must rethink its approach to the Muslim world, especially failing states that can become terrorist havens. Afghanistan was. Parts of Pakistan, West Africa and Southeast Asia are, particularly slivers of Philippines and Indonesia.
All these ideas would be very familiar to readers of this column over the last five tumultuous and tragic years.
Yet the commission does not go far enough. Not so much in faulting Bush more, but in shying away from pushing its own assessments to their logical conclusions.
For example, the spectacular failure of America's $40 billion (U.S.) a year intelligence operations cannot be explained solely by bureaucratic silos and ineptitude or the shortage of spies because of too much reliance on satellites and pilotless drones.
The larger point has to be that you cannot possibly comprehend the intelligence from a country, a culture and a people if you don't have a clue about them or their language. Or you are hostile to them for religious, racial or ideological reasons.
Post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq prove the point.
I will cite other examples as we go through the commission's key findings sideswiped by the ones that were headlined.
Rather than the Bush formula of going guns blazing hither and yon, the commission says we need a “global preventive strategy that is as much, or more, political as it is military.” Amen.
That's exactly what Jean Chr
