CIAO DATE: 9/01

From CIAO's Board: Commentary on the Terrorist Attacks against the United States

1. One thing that I see here is a huge information systems failure. Many government agencies run very old and customized software (we found outsomething about the scope of that in the Y2K fixings). One huge unspoken problem is that those systems are incompatible and cannot talk to each other effectively. So the FBI has a name of a suspected terrorist in one database and the CIA has it in another database and when that person applies for a tourist visa to enter the US or signs up for commercial pilot lessons, guess what. The INS system doesn't talk to any of these systems and none of them talk to the others. That is a fundamental reason why the one hand doesn't know what the other is doing or more importantly in this case, what the other hand knows. Of course there are huge privacy and civil liberties issues that are at play, but having incompatible information systems is not the most efficient way to protect the rights that we want to protect. Maybe I'm giving in to my parochial interests in software, but I think there could be a major drive in the next few years to re-engineer these systems. This could have interesting lead-use stimulating effects on technology (as did government r+d for microprocessors and packet-switching). It will also require us to face straight on and clearly a set of decisions about privacy, rather than hide behind screwed up capabilities (I think this is a good thing).

2. I really think some of the intelligent media is doing a huge disservice by flattening out the past and making it seem 'oh so simple' while the future is supposedly so complicated. Yes the future is complicated and uncertain but it always is; the nostalgia for the past is dysfunctional because the past was just as hard. If you read Kennedy's op-ed in Sunday's times you know what I am talking about. To say that our military capabilities are "all but useless" is way over the top. To say that this threat is completely unprecedented and challenges american society more than anything ever has before is rank sensationalism. I would like later today to find some op-eds from December 1941 where I suspect I'll see stuff like this: America has been attacked by an unprecedented enemy. We face people who live by different sets of rules of civilization, who want to take away our way of life, a shadowy alliance between fascists and communists, they control a good chunk of the Euro-Asian landmass, they are coordinated with each other as never before, they will stop at nothing. I don't mean to imply that this is the same as 1941 but it seems to me that one role of academics in this process is to tamp down on that kind of sensationalism and 'newism'. This is not entirely new. Fighting a terrorist network is a challenge for military strategy but it is not an unprecedented challenge.

Commentary

Stephen M. Walt
Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Bruce Jentleson
Professor of Public Policy, Duke University
Director, Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy

Response by Etel Solingen
Professor of Political Science
University of California, Irvine

Response by Stephan Haggard
Professor, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies
University of California, San Diego