Several years passed before our government realized that the end of the Cold War had unleashed a set of new realities, realities containing both new dangers and opportunities. The U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century was empanelled in October, 1998, to assess these and to recommend reforms in our national security structures to deal with them.
Though later described as a "terrorism commission", our mandate was much broader, and in the course of pursuing that mandate we realized the depth and immediacy of the terrorism threat and warned against it in these words: terrorists "will acquire weapons of mass destruction... and some will use them. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers." (September 15, 1999)
Tragically, few in government or the media paid attention when our final report was issued on January 31, 2001, and the results, a decade ago, are well known. As a result, our way of life has been dramatically altered.
National commissions come and go, most with little attention. Attention should have been paid in our case if for no other reason than that we undertook the most comprehensive review of U.S. national security since 1947, the eventful year in which we created the national security state.
Ten years later only one of our commission's fifty unanimous recommendations, the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, has been adopted. The other 49, still current, still significant, remain unattended by both the second Bush and the Obama administrations.
The new realities we identified and addressed included failed and failing states, the rise of non-state actors, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the rise of economic competition that would erode our ability to finance our own protection.
We saw education, scientific research, innovation, and productivity as national security issues. ("Second only to a weapon of mass destruction detonating in an American city, we can think of nothing more dangerous than a failure to manage properly science, technology, and education for the common good...") If our economy lags, the financial and technological resources to mount a defense of our nation are diminished.
We also saw our executive and legislative branches bogged down in Cold War bureaucracies, including dozens of unnecessary Congressional committees and subcommittees, that were irrelevant to 21st century realities.
Perhaps most significantly, our commission saw opportunities to reduce threats by pro-active policies. Traditionally, the United States has waited for external threats to arise, as in two world wars, and then mobilized its resources to overpower them -- at great cost. But shortened warning and response times now reduce that luxury. In this century, we reported, we must be smart enough to see over the horizon, identify latent threats, and use our considerable economic and political resources and new alliances to contain and possibly eliminate these threats before they become viral.
There is a cost to passivity, inaction, and inattention. Post 9/11, we have been expensively engaged in two long wars that, in addition to loss of young Americans, have seriously contributed to our current financial woes. Our civil liberties have been eroded. Our standing in the world, so soaring in the days following 9/11, has suffered considerably.
The mark of a mature society rests in lesson learned. The key to our security in this century remains in anticipation and pro-action. Even more than a decade ago, reduction of threats should replace containment of communism and war on terrorism as our central organizing principle. Combining "soft", economic and political, power with "hard", military, power, we can quarantine, diminish, and shrink latent threats -- from terrorism to pandemics -- before they escape our ability to combat them.
In a word, security in the 21st century will rest more in intelligence, in the common as well as the security sense of the word, more than raw power. The nature of conflict and warfare is changing. As our current two and a half wars confirm, traditional nation-state warfare is being overwhelmed by unconventional, irregular conflicts.
Lesson learned from the last decade include these: anticipate tides and trends, such as the "Arab spring", before they occur; understand the mind of the antagonist; invest in a productive economy as the base of national security; broaden our understanding of the meaning of security to include non-military concerns; restructure our traditional military forces, including smaller combat units, for a more basic kind of conflict; and network our security resources, for both military and non-military hazards, through new security alliances.
Had we adopted a more strategic appreciation of the new realities of the 21st century, had we taken al Qaeda more seriously and acted more anticipatorily, 9/11 could have been prevented. And when fourteen Americans with considerable experience spend two and a half years studying these new realities and issuing both warnings and prescriptions, perhaps attention should be paid.
The authors were co-chairs of the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century and are former United States Senators from their respective States of Colorado and New Hampshire.
Eliot Daley: Can 9/11 Prompt a More Peaceful World?
Let's go back to that.
Execute an unarmed nonresisting Bin Ladin
Torture Bin Laden's men
No torture or interrogation of Bin Ladin
No Bin Laden Body
WMD that did not exist
Habor the enemy the USA put into Afghanistan
How can you POSSIBLY compare the terrorist tactic of 9/11 to the MILITARY establishing of a NO FLY ZONE by a bona fide military of a sovereign and well armed nation in the midst of what was already a world war.
Of course, what with so many wars going on now, one wonders if Washington is not holding World War III and "forgot" to tell us.
'How judicious is your choice of the SAME words' "World War III" to describe you displeasure with the current state of the conflict(s) our military is engaged in ?
And by the way, Japan did not establish a "no fly" zone, they declared war on us. Of course they attacked first, and their diplomats got around to notifying us of the declaration a few hours later.
Yup, we will be paying for this for a long ol' time
You claim our efforts are about safeguarding our security. Actually, they are about much more than that; they are about securing our right to continue to meddle and interfere in distant regions in order to maximize our profits, and secure other monetary advantages.
The greatest tragedy of all is that Americans have been lied to for decades. Sen. Hart, you know as well as I, that we were lied to in Viet Nam. The lies kept the war going for what seemed forever.
In these respects, both of you still seem to be clinging to the doctrine of American exceptionalism. We can terrorize, manipulate, dominate, invade. We can even murder hundreds of thousands of civilians, as in the cases of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. There's a mega twin towers for you.
As has been said, there can be no "effect" without a "cause." What happens to us is a result of our actions. We feel the pain of 911. What we don't feel and aren't aware of, is the pain felt by hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose world was turned upside down by our invasion, and who have been slaughtered in the tribal conflicts that we re-opened by going there.
Oil discovered in Iran, 1908
Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
Kermit Roosevelt overthrows elected government
SAVAK
Islamic Revolution, U.S. embassy seized
Saddam invades Iran, a million die
Saddam invades Kuwait
Gulf War I, U.S. military bases in Saudi
Answer: Virtually none, history flew out of an empty blue sky on 9-11.
They had their minds made up from day one and ignored your warning and all the other warning signs to the detriment of our country.
We are now trying to recover from eight long years, not only of war, but also of the backward thinking anti-science, poor-be-damned gang that should never have been in place.