The Fog of War

How can we tell if we're winning the War on Terror?

Stephen J. Lyons from the June 2005 issue

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The result is a book that is expertly reported, though its proposals are somewhat debatable. The security model Brzezinski suggests America might implement is Israel's maximum-security state. The author travels to Tel Aviv with Offer Einav, a security consultant who thinks Americans are "novices at defending against terror." Like most Israelis, Einav knows what it's like to own a gas mask and to feel the next-door threat of a Hamas or a Hezbollah.

The difference in everyday security between the two countries is immediately apparent, from vigilant El Al employees who have no qualms about profiling passengers to Israeli children who practice chemical attack drills with the nonchalance of playing hopscotch. "A visit to virtually any mall or restaurant in Tel Aviv," Brzezinski writes, "started with a search outside the main entrance, where uniformed guards behind steel barriers patted down would-be customers, rummaged through handbags, and ran metal detectors over every entrant."

But as Brzezinski admits, comparing tiny Israel to the immense United States is like comparing apples to the Goodyear blimp. "New York's subway system carries almost as many daily riders as Israel's entire population," he writes. "El Al has a fleet of twenty-seven planes, against the nearly seven thousand commercial jets that fly America's considerably busier skies. Borders in Israel are measured in hundreds of miles, not tens of thousands. Everything in Israel is miniaturized when stacked up against the United States, making even the costs of trying to replicate the Israeli model stateside incalculable."

To adopt the entire Israeli model is simply not possible, but what is possible--and what Brzezinski would like to see--is measures such as limiting access to airport entrances and tightening the screening of passengers. To Einav, the United States is an easy target. "What if Al Qaeda hit a dozen shopping centers in different U.S. cities?" he asks. "I bet you Americans would demand security then."

Brzezinski reports we are narrowing the gap between our lax security and Israel's lock-down mode, and in doing so we are creating tension between civil liberties and national security. Basic freedoms should not be eroded, he writes, nor should Americans be abused in the "name of defending freedom from terrorism." The author also writes, however, that "as new terrorist scenarios arise, as new extremists crawl out of some cave brandishing new vehicles for mass murder, the government will have to react--and possibly overreact --quickly." Case studies of Muslims in America who disappeared into our prison system immediately after 9/11 demonstrate that the government did overreact, as the new secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, acknowledged during his confirmation hearings. They also show just how easily basic freedoms can be erased during a national crisis.

The threat of terrorism also opens the door for Orwellian surveillance. Use of the creepy technology known as "radio frequency identification" (RFID), implemented through transponder tags coded with information that can be tracked, is expanding. It sounds harmless and useful when applied in commerce to track shipments--some UPS drivers are required to wear RFID bracelets, or their trucks won't start--or in the livestock industry to monitor animals. But when the idea is broached of injecting the tags into political prisoners (as is rumored in China) or convicted sex offenders (as has been proposed in this country) to monitor their exact location, the potential for abuse is clear.

"All that was lacking was the political and social will to bring all this technological wizardry to bear in the war on terror," Brzezinski writes. "It wouldn't happen overnight or without another catastrophic incident, something that upped the ante and put America in the same survival mode [as] Israel: a nuclear detonation, a biological outbreak, a mass casualty event. But if the stakes were high enough, would we be more willing to accept life in a maximum security surveillance state?"

Equally disheartening is the author's visit to the offices of the Department of Homeland Security. At the time, the physical appearance of this $36 billion security nerve center had all the gravitas of a Jiffy Lube waiting room. "My own doubts about whether DHS had been dealt a bad hand were not dispelled when I announced myself on a clunky old phone that hung
next to its gray door," Brzezinski writes. The reception area "had a cheap suspended ceiling of yellowed acoustic tiles and was decorated with a badly mounted blown-up photo of Ridge walking with Bush, both striding purposefully toward the mutual goal of keeping us all out of harm's way."

Complaints of lack of money and equipment were rampant. What money was available was held up by bureaucratic snafus or oddly misdistributed. Quoting a Public Policy Institute of California study, Brzezinski writes, "Alaska and North Dakota get twice as much terror funding per capita from Washington as New York. Wyoming, at $61 per head, gets four times more than California."

Brzezinski concludes his often riveting book with the subject of money-- or more precisely, the lack of dollars to guard our shipping ports and equip our first responders. He places the cost of ridding the world of Saddam "at well over $150 billion." His point is that resources are finite and, in contrast to Miniter, that Bush is mishandling the War on Terror. What is being spent to maintain the war in Iraq comes at the expense of "shortchanging domestic security." The clear implication is that we are still too vulnerable. So how does Brzezinski explain the lack of attacks on our ports and elsewhere? To him, it's a matter of when, not if. At that point, he predicts, "the urge to sacrifice the fundamental values that make America one of the world's freest societies will prove powerful."

Of course, calculating whether the U.S. is too vulnerable is much like calculating whether the U.S. is winning its war. What constitutes definitive invulnerability? What does it mean that something bad has not yet happened? Readers of these books may not get final answers to their questions about the U.S. response to terror, but they may be able to refine their calculations a bit.�