Connecting the Dots

President Obama reported last week that US Intelligence agencies “failed to connect the dots” that should have prevented Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab from boarding a NW Flight and attempting to detonate a bomb on Christmas day.

“The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list”
Barack Obama, Jan 5. 2010.

I’m not going to pile on the ‘blame Obama’ bandwagon, as if he should have been at the Northwest Airlines gate himself, frisking each passenger before boarding. The problem is more complex than this. If the “connecting the dots” phrase sounds ominously familiar, it’s because it was the catch-phrase of the year after 9/11. Even as late as 2007, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell resurrected the claim saying "9/11 should have and could have been prevented" after all; the authorities simply "didn't connect the dots."

Since finger pointing makes good news copy, we hear a lot more about who to blame for failures that how to prevent them. So we never really spend much time thinking about what it means to ‘connect the dots’. As mentioned in a previous post, we seem much more concerned about protecting the sensibilities of terrorist groups than protecting Americans. Former US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff told National Public Radio:

“Racial profiling in law enforcement is not merely wrong, but also ineffective. Race-based assumptions in law enforcement perpetuate negative racial stereotypes that are harmful to our rich and diverse democracy, and materially impair our efforts to maintain a fair and just society.”

In other words, connect the dots only if it doesn’t inconvenience or offend a specific group. I halfway expect to hear the ACLU protest our prison system because it unfairly discriminates against criminals. Clearly, this isn’t a very realistic way of addressing a very real problem.

One of the key findings of the 9/11 commission is that the US Intelligence community demonstrated a lack of imagination when trying to recognize terrorist threats. President Bush took this advice to heart. In a commencement address to West Point on June 1, 2002, he made this timeless but incredibly under-reported quote:

"If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long…. The work ahead is difficult. The choices we will face are complex. We must uncover terror cells in 60 or more countries, using every tool of finance, intelligence, and law enforcement. Along with our friends and allies, we must oppose proliferation and confront regimes that sponsor terror, as each case requires. Some nations need military training to fight terror, and we’ll provide it. Other nations oppose terror but tolerate the hatred that leads to terror, and that must change. We will send diplomats where they are needed, and we will send you, our soldiers, where you’re needed."

This is how Bush defined ‘connecting the dots’. But Bush’s biggest failure was in public relations. He allowed this critical policy debate to be hijacked by the left, who reduced it to a bumper sticker to make it easier for the mind-numbed public rail against. The Iraq war was not about oil, nor was it about revenge for 9/11, and only partially about WMDs. Although, those are the responses you would hear most often if you surveyed 1000 people about the rationale behind it. The action against Iraq was about connecting the dots. Iraq had a regime that openly sponsored terrorism, that had publicly rejoiced at the American death and destruction of 9/11, that had internationally confirmed supplies of biological and chemical weapons, that had used them against the Kurds and left indisputable evidence of the carnage, that had attempted to assassinate a former US President, and that had defied 17 different UN regulations that required inspections of their weapons facilities. Those are some big dots that can reasonably be connected to define a threat against Americans. And yet we see such vitriol launched against President Bush for doing exactly what President Obama calls for, ‘connecting the dots”.

In hindsight, our spy information was faulty. Saddam Hussein did not have huge stores of WMDs, even though his generals and the rest of the international community believed he did. It was a bluff Saddam staged to scare Iran from picking a fight. Congress (who had confirmed the threat when voting for US Military intervention) later tried to dodge responsibility by creating new bumper stickers: “Bush Lied People Died”, “End This War”, “No Blood for Oil”. They and the media were so eager to stir up a lynch mob that they completely drowned out the public debate that we should have had, and still need to have: How should we respond to the next threat to America? Only the hopelessly naïve would think that 9/11 is the last terrorist act that would ever be planned against the United States. And we can't just dismiss intelligence information that identifies a threat in Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan or elsewhere. But we clearly can't start wars everywhere we suspect something might be happening. What should we be doing? How can we trust our intelligence information? How should we be connecting the dots?

Most political figures argue one extreme or the other, either screaming that the US will become another Nazi regime using the ‘threat of terrorist activity’ as a justification for going to war against anyone we didn’t like, or warning against a naive, pacifist complacency that would embolden our enemies to conceive, train, and carry out attacks of even greater carnage against us. We clearly need something in between. And the real tragedy is that we are so caught up in partisan politics that we only allow ourselves to see what is good for our side, not what is good for America. None of us want to be the next generation of Nazis. And none of us wants to bury friends and family killed by the next terrorist attack that could be prevented if we weren’t so worried about being politically correct. There is a balance to be struck in connecting the dots and our elected officials have lost sight of the real goal. It’s time we reined them in and reminded them why they were elected. Let’s end this childish demagogy agree on doing what is right for America. This issue is too important to be obscured by party politics.