Forget about the Root Causes, Blame the Bureaucracy, Majid Mohammadi

When you can’t or don’t want to talk about the root causes, blame the bureaucracy. If you are smart enough, you will not blame the bureaucrats that you have selected or have worked with, but the floating, tenacious and omnipresent monster, i.e. bureaucracy, that is supposed to be responsible for what we could not prevent or do. The Report of Sep 11 Commission is mostly focused on the ineffectiveness of information gathering, coordination, and operation of bureaucratic institutions. The Commission, which was created by Congress in late 2002 over the initial opposition of President Bush, was not originally supposed to produce a framework for public debate and dialogue on the basic issues like ideology(s) and strategies behind U.S. foreign policy. Hence, the report is almost empty of critical approach to U.S. policies.
Bush administration even did not blame the bureaucracy. The administration behaved on the basis of this policy that “if you can’t deal with previous grievances, make new ones.” Attacking Iraq can be explained in this line. The other policy of the Bush administration was that “if you can’t have a good intelligence, violate people’s civil rights, citizens or non-citizens.” Patriot Act is based on this policy.

There is almost nothing about the root causes of grievances and feelings in the Middle East with regarding to the U.S. foreign policy in the 9/11 Commission’s report. Now the White House, the Congress, and the voices in political campaigns and U.S. mainstream media are tackling bureaucracy. The presuppositions of this approach are three; 1) “we” are good and we have done nothing wrong in the past to deserve these attacks. There is no need to fix the foreign policy. We need only to make our defense against evil tighter and more effective; 2) “we” have enough resources to prevent any action against us, whether rooting in the justified or unjustified grievances. Unilateralism of bush administration has this idea in the back scene; and 3) if your ideology is right, let’s say believe in democracy or liberalism, all of your policies are correct. On the basis of this third assumption, almost 100 percent support of Israel by the Bush administration, even new settlements in the occupied lands, and support for the region’s dictators is equaled with the democratic and liberal intentions of the different U.S. administrations.

When you have these assumptions, as the Commission as part of the political establishment had, you’ll think about actions like hardening cockpit doors, ignoring the implementations of different reports on terrorist attacks before the 9/11, bringing the law enforcement to the digital era, biometric entry-exit screening system, widening the window of imagination and alike. A 20-month investigation that rewrote the history of the attacks that has pushed President Bush and Congress this summer to weigh an overhaul of the U.S. intelligence agencies lacks analytical understanding of the demands and intentions of the Middle Easterners as the people who are blamed for the attacks.

The commission did not hear any word from other side of the story; independent scholars who have studied the region for decades had no voice in the preparation of the report; the report only reflects the ideas and concerns of “insiders.” Therefore, the Commission’s report cannot answer questions like “why some people hate Americans?”, “why some people sacrifice their life to kill as Americans as they could?” , “how the Americans can do better and reach out to the people’s hearts and minds in the region?”, “why do the schools in the region teach hate- supposedly they do this?”, “what are the messages of terrorism?”, “what are the more tough steps: reorganization or reexamination?”, and “is it probable that we are blaming the victims of our own policies instead of ourselves?”

Commission members testified almost daily in August 2004 before Congressional committees, and will continue to lobby on behalf of the group's recommendations, i.e. reorganization of intelligence and counter terrorism system, to establish a new position called “National Intelligence Director”, alertness of citizens, joint analysis and joint planning, securing water supplies, inspection of containers building safety.
The slogan of the Commission members in the hearings to win the war on terrorism and to make Americans more safe was “think anew, act anew” but the content of recommendations is mostly “act anew”, not “think anew.” The Commission is focused on information about people in action, not on decreasing the causes of hatred.
The Commission now after public hearings, staff statements and final report, believe it has fulfilled its mandate. The final report, released in late July, catalogued intelligence and law-enforcement failures in the months and years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but it did not catalogued foreign policy failures regarding the middle East after WWII and did not call for revision of these policies. Debate continues over whether to create the post of national intelligence director and whether to provide the job with the full budgetary and personnel authority, not over whether and how to be more even-handed with regard to Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to respect other nations concerns and cultures, to educate the country about the root causes of terrorism, to help Muslim nations to implement a rational educational and political system in a non-violent way, and to fill the gap between the North and the South.
Members of the commission have credited much of the success of the panel to the bipartisan spirit of its members; bipartisanship in dealing with terrorism is necessary but not enough. The achievements of this Commission is more expected in the intelligence strategic and operational policies, even recruitment of the members in high-ranking national intelligence offices, rather than revision of the fundamental policies.

Even the Commission’s newly created educational office, known as the Public Discourse Project, is expected to organize the logistics of the lobbying efforts of the panel's 10 members, not public debate and dialogue on the root causes of terrorism and U.S. foreign policies. The Commission lost a great opportunity to push for a national debate of critical issues like unilateralism/multilateralism, democracy/stability, civil rights/protection, preemptive wars/national sovereignty, and other issues of different social movements in the region. If terrorism is the national security challenge of this generation of Americans, now it is the time to speculate, and understand origins of terrorism, and then act.