Little Help Going Forward (No 911 report on practices of preemption)

[papau]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22699-2004Jul28.html

Little Help Going Forward


By Jim Hoagland

Thursday, July 29, 2004; Page A23


History professors should give the Sept. 11 commission's final report a solid A as an illuminating chronology pulled together on the gallop. History itself is not likely to be as kind. The report has conceptual holes and works too hard to round off the necessary rough edges of politics and national strategy.

The commission investigating the 2001 terrorist assault on New York and the Pentagon follows the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in pinpointing causes for the woeful performance of the CIA and other government agencies in fighting al Qaeda and other enemies. It also suggests organizational fixes for what it christens the war on "Islamist terrorism."

But both these inquiries step gingerly around a central question that John Kerry is also likely to handle delicately when he addresses antiwar Democrats assembled in Boston tonight. It is the role -- if any -- that preemptive strikes or preventive war should play in protecting the United States from terrorist groups that possess or seek chemical, biological or radiological weapons.

Indulging a blue-ribbon panel's instinctual penchant for the obvious, the commission mandates future administrations to "attack terrorists and their organizations" and permit them no sanctuaries. It adds: "he U.S. government must build the capacities to prevent a 9/11-scale plot from succeeding."

Those conclusions make sense in a report that dwells heavily and persuasively on the failures of the Clinton and Bush administrations to take effective (i.e., preemptive) action to thwart the Sept. 11 plot as it was being refined in the caves of Afghanistan.

But the commissioners are then mostly silent on getting there from here; that is, on specific measures to accomplish those particular goals. They are totally silent on preventive war, a concept that is enshrined in the Bush administration's National Security Strategy.

Commission member Jamie Gorelick told Post editors and reporters that the doctrine and practices of preemption were deliberately kept out of the commission's closed-door discussions in a successful bid to avoid partisan arguments.<snip>