The Obama administration’s bad spin and sleepiness — as represented by Home land Security chief Janet Napolitano and President Obama respectively in the first days after Christmas — is over. But results may be another story.
On the day of the release of a preliminary report on the failures leading to the Christmas Day plot, the president stepped before the cameras and delivered a stern, forceful statement. He punctuated it with a line that could have been written by Dick Cheney and was almost certainly prompted by his criticism: “We are at war. We are at war against al Qaeda.”
Obama gets compared to FDR by his supporters and Jimmy Carter by his critics, but on this day he tried to channel Harry Truman: “Ultimately, the buck stops with me,” he said, in a 12-minute talk replete with the language of accountability. He was unsparing about the “failure to connect” the different leads about Umar Abdulmutallab and sounded determined that they’ll be fixed, or else.
Obama’s posture is a vast improvement over his immediate post-Christmas detachment, and he’s avoiding President George W. Bush’s mistake of throwing a protective blanket of loyalty over whatever failings occur in his own bureaucracy. (“Heckuva job, Brownie” distilled for the ages in one phrase Bush’s characteristic chin-up boosterism.)
But what will Obama’s expressed commitment to getting it right ultimately bring?
National Security Council Director James Jones previewed the report earlier in the day by warning it would “shock” people. That overplayed it, since we already knew we had all the information we needed to stop Abdulmutallab before he got on the plane. The report’s recitation of the sources of that failure is less shocking than dispiritingly familiar.
Again, the dots weren’t connected, only in a slightly different way. This time (unlike pre-9/11), the info was shared between agencies and available to all parties — just not acted on or understood properly. We knew al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was a growing threat, but didn’t focus on the specific plots it might be generating against our homeland.
After the report of the 9/11 Commission, Congress created with great fanfare the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center — i.e., more bureaucracy. “The intentional redundancy in the system should have added an additional layer of protection in uncovering a plot like the failed attack on Dec. 25,” the report says. As we now know, redundancy’s not the answer.
Obama said he’s directing the intelligence community to assign specific responsibility to following leads from high-priority threats; to distribute intelligence reports more widely; to strengthen its analytical process, and to get more people on the no-fly list. All to the good, no doubt — but any sprawling bureaucracy can only be made so smart and supple.
And, by the end of his conference, Obama was vitiating his talk of accountability. He signaled that no one will be fired, because it was a “systemic failure across organizations and agencies.” In other words, so many people made mistakes, none of them can be held accountable.
He gave no indication that we’ll adopt a more intelligence-oriented approach at the airports, focused more on finding bad people than contraband nail clippers. He invoked the $1 billion the administration has already poured into more screening technology, which may be necessary but will never be sufficient unless we become as hard-headed as the Israelis about devoting more attention to passengers who represent the greatest potential risks.
In the end, the most important line of the speech is that “we are at war.” Those four words should sink deep down into his administration and permeate all that it does.
We’re never going to eliminate human error or get the bureaucracy exactly right. Which is why we have to be aggressive in taking the fight to the enemy overseas and not leave intelligence on the table, as we did by making Abdulmatallab a civil defendant, or free terrorists back into the field, as we’ve done with foolish Gitmo releases.
Whether he likes it or not, Obama is a war president. If he talks like it more often, who knows? Word might even filter down to Janet Napolitano.
comments.lowry@nationalreview.com