By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, the administration released a summary of the White House review (PDF) of the "failure to connect the dots" that led to the Underpants Bomber scare and a copy of the directive (PDF) President Obama sent out telling everyone what they should do to try to make sure it doesn't happen again. Obama then gave one of his pretty speeches in which he admitted it was all his fault, that the "buck stops here".
And if you look around the web, there's some damn good commentary on all of these. Some focus on what "went wrong", others on what's being done next, others on contrasting Obama's admission of responsibility with Bush's refusal ever to do so. But, being an unsubtle man at the best of times, I'll try to break it all down into it's simplest terms.
The review basically says "sometimes shit happens" and Obama's directive says that "even so, we're going to pretend we can prevent shit still sometimes happening for purely domestic political purposes." But still, shit will continue to happen. No system of protection we can possibly devise will be entirely watertight, especially when Al Qaeda and other groups will be actively looking for loopholes and chinks in the armor. (That determination to upset all our best-laid plans with their own counterplans is why we call them "the enemy".) There will be other attempted attacks and we'll go through all of this again.
Meanwhile, the knock-on effect is to alienate the very people we need not to alienate if we're to sideline Al Qaeda and others while handing AQ a propaganda victory. Two tweeted thoughts from yesterday encapsulate the cost/benefit fail.
@AdamSerwer: Step 1. Obama institutes indefinite detention, racial profiling. Step 2. Obama says terrorists "won't define our values."
@attackerman: Kinda hard to communicate to Muslims al-Q's 'bankrupt ideology of murder in depth' when you're screening them at airports.
It's almost as if no-one thought of doing any kind of cost/benefit analysis except from the point of view of domestic voting in 2010 and 2012...
The bottom line is that no system of protection can be perfect and the one we have is wildly counter-productive. If we civilians can't handle the idea that occassionally the casulaties of war will be our loved ones, our siblings, parents or children, rather than those from military families or those of brown people a few thousand miles away, then maybe we civilians - "we the people" - should re-evaluate whether this war is a good idea or is being conducted in the right way.
"no-one thought of doing any kind of cost/benefit analysis except from the point of view of domestic voting in 2010 and 2012..."
ReplyDeleteI simply cannot believe domestic political considerations play any role in government policy. Impossible!