Asymmetrical Information

Very true--government operates by crisis, but so do most businesses. The Director of Plant Maintenance may complain for years about the cheap and inferior gaskets being ordered by Purchasing--but nothing is done to change the policy until one of them fails at the wrong time and shuts down the production line. Then, all of a sudden, "gaskets" become a big issue and the witch-hunt begins.

The things that are tangible and right in front of your face--like overruning your budget--usually claim more attention than the things that *could* happen. It's not quite as bad in business as it is in government because of the Darwinian market tests at work.

This is one of the big problems with government. However what I think both Bush and Clinton could have done was at least publicized the issue a little more. That wasn't done. But I truly believe that with all the finger pointing at these hearings the real finger points at us. For good or ill politicians tend to listen to what voters are concerned about. And one need not look far to see that terrorism wasn't a concern for most people prior to 9/11. Even now only a few years after 9/11 look at how complacent people have become.

I predicted after 9/11 that the fervor would last only a year or two unless there was an other attack. Indeed I honestly thought that an other attack would be necessary to *really* get people to focus on terrorism and security properly. Unfortunately we largely haven't. We're doing more than prior to 9/11 but a lot of it is still a joke. We had best hope that the next attack is small like 9/11 with casualties only in the thousands and not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands with corresponding more devastating effects on our economy.

Even Bush's attempts to react post-9/11 have been largely greeted with jeers. Moderate security measures have frequently been joked about. A standard of threat level has been the butt of ridicule. And we are still wide open for numerous kinds of attacks that perhaps are prevented only because our foes are stupider than we initially thought.

Richard Clarke was asked by a Commissioner whether in Clarke's opinion, 9/11 would have been prevented even if ALL his recommendations had been acted upon - - and Clarke answered "no".

Question. Israel is a tiny state compared to the US. Why do they still suffer sporadic terrorist bombings? Why can't they secure a few hundred lousy hectares? Is it because they aren't trying to stop the terrorists? Is it because they haven't tried hard enough to understand Hamas? Is it because some Israeli officials are stupid or lazy or corrupt? Yeah, I guess so.

with all due respect to samuelson, the issue he neglects is whether or not the government acted with urgency upon the warnings it received--to get at the terrorist threat. if you agree with dr. rice that the warnings were purely historical, then you follow samuelson, i think. if you think that there was current intel, you wonder what would have happened if the bush administration had focused on the problem a bit more.

the claim that clarke just said "no" is simplistic.

Fembup, Israel could reduce (complete elimination is an unrealistic strawman) terrorist attacks but they don't because they have other priorities, such as territorial expansion, which they think are more important.

I favor a fairly strict liability standard for politicians (and other people in high positions). If something bad happens on their watch it should be presumed to have been their fault. It should be up to them (or their supporters) to show that it wasn't. This encourages them to concentrate on doing a good job rather than on explaining away their failures.

I feel the need to disagree with an assumption being made by everyone. People have been complaining about short term vs. long term planning for a long time, but I must disagree with the belief that short term planning is inherently inferior to long term planning.

The problem with long term planning is how do you determine which problem is an actual problem? If a company (government) devotes substantial resources towards solving a problem that isn't a problem, they will operate at a competive disadvantage. Social Security appears to be set to bankrupt the system because of a falling ratio of workers to retired. But how can we be sure that in 20+ years it will actually be a problem? (I personally think it will be, and that SS and Medicare need to be overhauled).

Let's say a company (government) sacrifices the short term for actual long-term benefit. Will they still be in business (in power) in the medium term? (This is an agruement in favor of set elections vs. a coaltion government like the UK's). And this assumes that you can actually tell what is going to be a long term benefit (unlikely).

Byna, thinks that people should act in with the medium term benefit being maximized.

Cas - It's hard to fault the Bush administration for failing to treat the threat as being more urgent than the FBI, CIA, Richard Clarke, et al, did. Bush had to ASK if there were any domestic threats. (His request generated the now famous Aug. 6th memo.) Bush met regularly with the Director of the CIA. You'd think if the Director thought something "urgent" he'd have thought to mention it rather than waiting to be asked. Once asked, if the process of answering Bush's question about a domestic threat revealed an urgent threat that had been previously overlooked, you'd think the person delivering the message would have, you know, mentioned that it was URGENT SOMETHING BE DONE NOW! Since the FBI, CIA, and Richard Clarke, seemed to think things could be taken care of in the normal course of things, were do we get off thinking Bush should have noticed something they did not?

Much more rational discussion here. I have been in favor of Bush's partial privatization of Social Security (privatizes very small portion) a start towards fixing that problem that starts in 2010 (5.5 years from now), but his Medicare change exacerbated the future problem. We need to start helping the populace understand that we don't have all the money to have a utopia. People need to really start socking away for their future.

Savings rates in this country is about 2-3% per year. People should really put away at least 10% of thier income away per year.

For me, it's all about personal responsibility. We never hear this from our elected leaders because we get who we deserve as a nation. We want and elect panderers. We want a nanny state. We want a government that knows all, protects us from all evil, makes it so there is no "rock bottom" so that nobody really has learning lessons....

We can just be all fat dumb and lazy. :) Hope our president and congress cares for us. :)

Addressing the first half of the original post (since the second half repeats more or less the preceding one and is discussed in comments there):

"Even when problems are widely understood, pragmatic politicians avoid unpopular measures. In this they usually reflect public opinion. Everyone knows baby boomers will strain future budgets, yet there's no clamor for corrective policies. We lapse into willful ignorance, hoping -- against evidence and logic -- that what we suspect must happen somehow won't."

Interestingly, this occurs at an individual level as well. Like (not quitting) smoking, or (not doing enough of) dieting and exercise. Only when we find ourselves laid up on a hospital bed do we genuinely implement reform. Did the Roman Empire fall because of rot in its government or its people?

Cas-
In response to this comment: "the claim that clarke just said 'no' is simplistic."

I don't think it's so simplistic. Or perhaps it is, but sometimes simple cuts to the heart of the arguement. The question to which Clarke responded "no" really cut through all the public statements that Clarke has made, accusing the Bush administration of not taking terrorism as seriously as he (Clarke) would have liked, and asked "if he had done everything you suggested, would 9/11 have been prevented?" "No." Completely unambiguous. No. In order for a single word of Clarke's criticism to be valid, the answer to that question would have to be "yes" or at least "possibly" or "we'll never know." Otherwise, it's all just posturing and talk. Simplistic perhaps, but it gets to the crux of the matter.

"I favor a fairly strict liability standard for politicians (and other people in high positions). If something bad happens on their watch it should be presumed to have been their fault. It should be up to them (or their supporters) to show that it wasn't. This encourages them to concentrate on doing a good job rather than on explaining away their failures."

In general a good idea, as far as domestic policy or bad things _caused by government action_ go.

By that standard, of course, FDR was 'responsible' for world war 2 (it started on his watch, after all), Pearl Harbor (ditto), Truman was responsible for the North Koreans invading South Korea, etc, etc. In a shallow sense those are reasonable examples, if you exclude the moral agency of everyone in the world beyond the American people and goverment.

"by that standard"

Er. I meant 'by the standard espoused by Mr. Shearer'.

If something bad happens on their watch it should be presumed to have been their fault.

The problem with this is that it puts everyone in CYA mode. For example, instead of actually doing my job as (say) a counter-terrorism adviser, I will just make sure that I send the President a memo for every possible contingency. When something goes wrong, I will be able to point to the appropriate memo and say, "I told you so!"

There is already a lot of this going on in mid-levels of the government, and in large companies. It ties in with office politics, because you want to avoid giving your colleagues a chance to show you falling down on the job.

But somewhere in a company (or government), choices have to be made. I think a good part of the current budget deficit comes from the Bush Administration trying to avoid making the choices it should, in this case failing to spend some political capital to keep pork barrel and social spending down. They may have learned this from Clinton, who (IMO) seemed to always be preserving his political capital for a rainy day that never came (tho I suppose one could argue that his amassed capital kept him from being kicked out of office).

I think there is a rough consensus that nobody "got it right" pre 9/11. It, or something like it, was probably not preventable with pre 9/11 attitudes. Clarke may overreach by claiming that "shaking the trees" or something analogous to that would have stopped the 9/11 attacks. So everybody gets a pass.

It seems though that this is not the real point however. The Bush administration seems to have "raised its own bar" by claiming to have some sort of "special competence" on security issues. Clarke's book, and the 9/11 hearings, make it painfully obvious that they don't.

Just an observation on the whole "boomers are going to be retiring en masse soon and overburdening Social Security" thing. Yes, that's true. And with millions of boomers retiring all those jobs will come open...unemployment in the country is going to start dropping like a rock in the near future.

Maybe that's where Kerry expects his 10 million new jobs to come from...

Completely unambiguous. No. In order for a single word of Clarke's criticism to be valid, the answer to that question would have to be "yes" or at least "possibly" or "we'll never know." Otherwise, it's all just posturing and talk. Simplistic perhaps, but it gets to the crux of the matter.

This is, of course, simplistic. I could ask the same thing of the Patriot Act (and many have)...considering that law enforcement didn't use the tools already available to themselves (including the right to deport the 9/11 hijackers for violating immigration law) would the Patriot Act have stopped 9/11 if it was enacted in, say, 1999?

Would 9/11 have been stopped if US Special Forces destroyed the Taliban in August of 2001? Perhaps not but that's not to say such an act wouldn't have been a good thing.

But Boonton, the US Special forces could not have gone in and taken out the Taliban in August 2001. It took much more in the way of troops than the Special Forces to take Afganistan, and it also took active Pakistani participation. There is no way we could have done this before 9/11 changed the rules.

Or is your point simply that the 9/11 terrorists were independent at that point and even taking out the Al Qaeda infrastructure wouldn't have mattered at that point, i.e., the plot was too far along to stop?

BTW, if the Patriot Act had been enacted in 1999, it might indeed have prevented 9/11. But I would feel more confident about that statement if the Patriot Act had been enacted in 1998. There is a LOT of inertia inherent in beauracracies.

In all fairness, if you had a button that would have caused Clark's suggestions to have been implemented before 9/11 would you push it? Even though Clark feels they wouldn't have stopped 9/11 who can really say for sure?

Even 'prevented 9/11' is too broad. If increased security had stopped one or two hijackings then thousands could have been saved. It's too much to say that 9/11 could have been prevented but it is also too much to say that it couldn't have been prevented.

hi david and nicole,

bear with me a little bit.

"GORTON: Now, since my yellow light is on, at this point my final question will be this: Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based on Delenda, based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern Alliance, which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?

CLARKE: No"

GORTON: It just would have allowed our response, after 9/11, to be perhaps a little bit faster?

CLARKE: Well, the response would have begun before 9/11.

earlier:

"CLARKE: My impression was that fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting Al Qaida, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration -- certainly no higher priority. There were priorities probably of equal importance such as the Middle East peace process, but I certainly don't know of one that was any higher in the priority of that administration."...

"CLARKE: I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue. "

"CLARKE: Congressman, it is very easy in retrospect to say that I would have done this or I would have done that. And we'll never know. I would like to think that had I been informed by the FBI that two senior Al Qaida operatives who had been in a planning meeting earlier in Kuala Lumpur were now in the United States and we knew that and we knew their names. And I think we even had their pictures.

I would like to think that I would have released, or would have had the FBI release, a press release with their names, with their descriptions, held a press conference, tried to get their names and pictures on the front page of every paper, "America's Most Wanted," the evening news, and caused a successful nationwide manhunt for those two of the 19 hijackers, but I don't know because you're asking me a hypothetical and I have the benefit now of 20/20 hindsight."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20349-2004Mar24.html

sorry for the long quotes. what i mean by simplistic is simply (no pun intended) what would have happened had the issue of terrorism been a higher priority for the bush administration than clarke paints it to be. given the bush's approach--as clarke sees it--there is no way he can think that the points raised by senator gorton could--in themselves--lead to an answer of "yes." a "yes" or a "maybe" would have required a more CONSTANT attention to the issue than it received in the first year of the bush administration (if you believe what clarke says). the issue was not one of technology or its application (e.g., predators, etc) for clarke. it was about political will. without the requisite will (my interpretation of these comments suggests that) clarke can never say anything other than "no."

Boonton - Most of Clarke's suggestions WERE adopted before 9/11. He wanted the Predator armed so it could be used to kill terrorists remotely. (It was under development and was ready soon after 9/11.) He wanted more pressure placed on the Taliban. (Increased diplomatic pressure WAS being placed on the Taliban via Pakistan.) He wanted military action against the training camps. (That contingency, in case the diplomatic pressure failed to deliver the desired results, was in the planning stage.) Etc., etc., etc.

The problem with Clarke's suggestions? There was no deadline attached to them. Clarke thought there was enough time to work through diplomatic channels to pressure the Taliban (there wasn't), so why was it unreasonable for the President to agree? None of the President's advisors, Clarke included, was saying "We need to do X right now or people will die next week." Like they are surely now saying about North Korea, they were saying then about bin Laden (and North Korea, and Iran, and...) "Here's a serious problem that needs to be dealt with SOMETIME." Not NOW, but sometime.

How do we know that the President's advisors were not recommending urgent action? Because we know what some of the recommended policy choices were and many of those recommendations would have taken years to implement and bear fruit. So the President's advisors did not recognize the problem as urgent. Serious, yes. Urgent, no.

Besides, if we are going to say the Bush administration should have done something in the short time they were in office, don't the Democrats get to share part of the "blame" for not approving Bush's appointments more quickly? Many of the national security related appointments had not been confirmed until summer. It's a lot harder to protect the country if you don't have your full team in place. Yet, the Democrats were dragging their feet in approving appointments. Why, cause they didn't think the country faced any urgent threats, either.

Sebastian, by "their watch" I meant their domain of responsibility. So if you are governor of New York and something bad happens in Kansas this would not be presumed to be your fault. Now the president of the United States has many and varied duties but he is not responsible for everything. Additionally some of his duties are clearly less important than others. So for example even if one grants Clinton had some responsibility for events in Ruanda this is so peripheral to the main duties of his office that I would give little weight to his Ruandan policy when evaluating his performance as president.

As to your examples bearing in mind I am not a historian. FDR was not responsible for WWII. Perhaps he could have done more to keep the US out of the war but it is not clear this would have been desirable. As commander in chief, FDR was ultimately responsible for any damaging lack of vigilance at Pearl Harbor. However I believe the defeats in the Philippines were worse.

As for Truman he erred in not making clear before the North Korean attack that the US was committed to the defense of South Korea. Perhaps the North Koreans would have been deterred if they had realized they were getting into a war with the US. A more serious error was the overreaching which led to the Chinese intervention and subsequent bloody stalemate.

As for Bush and 911, this was a damaging defeat for the US (worse than Pearl Harbor in my opinion) and occurred on Bush's watch. However I blame him more for the ongoing mess in Iraq.

I favor a fairly strict liability standard for politicians (and other people in high positions).

Strict liability arises in legal contexts where someone has to pay for the consequences of someone's misfortune (e.g., paying for the care of someone injured by an inherently somewhat dangerous product, such as private aircraft, chainsaws, etc.), and society doesn't want to be on the hook. So we hold the manufacturer, say, to a strict liability standard. This doesn't mean we necessarily consider the manufacturer morally responsible, just that we consider him best able to bear the costs arising from his product because he can include those costs in the price.

A strict liability standard for politicians is ill-advised for several reasons. First, as pointed out above, it is an invitation to CYA when something happens, and worse, a clarion call to put off dealing with a growing problem in the hope that the problem won't actually erupt until the next guy's watch.

Second, and even more invidiously, most people take strict liability as a reckoning of moral responsibility, rather than financial. Implementation of a strict liability standard for politicians would mean even more witch hunts in the future.

For these reasons I think strict liability is not a sound idea in the political context.

The healthy perspective on 9/11 is that no one anticipated this outrage, that with the information in hand at the time no one could have foreseen, much less prevented it, and that no one is to blame - apart from the terrorists.

And as for the terrorists, "strict liability" would be a euphemism for what I would hold them to.

Jason,

I hope you see this post. At first glance one might think that there will be less unemployment as the baby boomers retire and draw social security.

Upon further scrutiny here are some other factors to consider....

When baby boomers retire their whole way of life changes. They aren't needing to keep a new car to get to work and they aren't going out to lunch every day (maybe) with their work buddies and/or buying as much stuff in general. Their amount of spending will go down unless they've socked away enough to keep spending as much as they're used to.

Given that spending will go down, the amount of goods a services purchased will go down. Companies that produce and service will not need to produce or give as much services. There will be a downturn in the economy, a downsizing of the private sector, and a reduction of private sector jobs. (Govt can only create public jobs and/or help make a business frienly climate so that job creation can happen faster).

There may be increases in the health care field because baby boomers will demand more health care services.

But, the way I see it is, it will not be easy for the govt to raise social security taxes on the non-baby boomers to give the same social security benefits to the baby boomers that previous gererations received.

Given this information and 5.5 years to go till the trend starts occuring. What will we all do and what will the government do.

Past indicators show that the governmetn will do nothing until the crisis emerges. :)

PJ/Maryland I don't see how my standard encourages people to write CYA memos since I would presume them responsible regardless. Of course there is no responsibility without authority so if middle level people have no power to do anything but write memos then the responsibility falls on the people who are authorized to act.

Off topic digression: IE is not remembering my info for comments to this blog (it does for other blogs). Is this just me or a general problem?

It seems to be holding mine. Maybe try clearing your Internet cache?

Cas-

Your point seems to be that Clarke answered no to a question about beefing up technology, but what he really thinks would have stopped 9/11 was more political will. Maybe this is true, but as Jane addressed in a previous post, political will is largely a function of what your constituents will bear, and any heavy-handed actions that could have prevented terrorism would have been met with outrage. Further, if that's Clarke's point, he hopelessly obfuscates it by trying to lay the blame solely at Bush's feet. If he were saying "both Clinton and Bush lacked the political will to deal with terrorism before 9/11" that would seem entirely reasonable. Instead he's trying to support the ridiculous claim that Clinton had the will and Bush didn't - if that were true, Clinton had eight years to deal with Al-Qaeda, if all it takes is will, then it would seem he would have stopped 9/11.

But I don't believe that. I don't believe either president had terrorism at the top of their agenda. And I have yet to see anything that leads me to think that their stance unreasonable at the time, particularly when placed back in the context of all the other things the President must deal with (as opposed to Clarke, whose sole job was to focus day in and day out on counter-terrorism). I have seen nothing to indicate that either administration should have made the priority out of counterterrorism that it has rightly become since 9/11. And I have seen no evidence that should have made it glaringly obvious what was going to happen.

It's useful to evaluate what we could have done differently so that we might be able to stand a better chance of preventing future attacks, but not to try to blame anyone. Because the person to blame is not Bush, it is not Clinton, it is Osama bin Laden and the 19 hijackers. And none of us needed a commission to tell us that.

hi nicole,
thanks for the reply. "political will is largely a function of what your constituents will bear, and any heavy-handed actions that could have prevented terrorism would have been met with outrage." i wonder if you would accept that political will can be expressed in different ways--internally and externally. invading a country or using predator drones is an external maifestation of will in my thinking. calling daily meetings coordinating various gov't departments to "shake out" intelligence would be an internal manifestation of will. they both show intentionality. it is that the direction of the intentionality is different. if this seems like a reasonable distinction to you, i think that clarke's point of view (as i understand it) still holds its ground.

"would the Patriot Act have stopped 9/11 if it was enacted in, say, 1999?"

It might well have. The Patriot Act changed the requirements for getting a warrant under FISA, so the FBI would have been able to search Moussaoui's computer in August. That might have allowed us to catch Mohammed Atta.

Had Jamie Gorelick not sent that memo stressing the need to keep intelligence and law enforcement separate, we might have been able to search the computer also.

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