Why America Failed to Protect Itself

by Ken Sanes
October 1, 2001

One of the things we know for certain about the events leading up to Sept 11 is that the attack was only possible because of a profound failure on the part of those who govern the United States. More specifically, the American people were let down by at least two elements of their leadership. First, and most obviously, we were let down by elected officials, who were masters of inaction when it came to the fight against terrorism. Even after studies warned of the danger in stark terms, and even after numerous previous attacks, they allowed anti-terrorism efforts to get lost in the bureaucracy.

We also know for certain who failed to protect us. It was an entirely bipartisan failure involving Democrats and Republicans in both the Congress and the Presidency. The Democratically controlled Senate failed to act and so did the Republican-controlled Senate that was in power before it. As for presidents, the failure to create a system of defense against devastating attacks goes at least four or five presidencies deep, back to Reagan or Carter.

At the same time, it is obvious that Bill Clinton bears a disproportionate share of the responsibility since he was the chief executive for the larger part of the 1990s. When he should have been preventing the development of a global terrorist network and securing the country, he was focusing on domestic policy and absorbed in the various scandals that plagued his presidency. The truth is that neither he, nor most of America's other leaders, were willing to take the political risks and spend the money that would have been necessary to protect the country. 

But America's political leaders didn't fail to deal with the growing threat from attacks of mass destruction in a vacuum. The second element of leadership that let America down is the news media, which failed in a number of ways that will be described below. Some would argue that it is a mistake to dwell on those failures because this is a time for national unity. But we need to understand how we went wrong so we can learn from our mistakes. Since America's prosperity and perhaps its survival are at stake, it is more imperative then ever that we speak plainly about what went wrong in our institutions. 

The first and most important way the media failed was in the lack of attention it paid to the danger. As I described in an earlier column, journalists knew that America faced a serious threat from attacks of mass destruction that could be mounted by terrorists. They knew that we might see no evidence of those attacks ahead of time. But they failed to cover this issue with the sustained attention that is necessary to mobilize public opinion and get officials to act.

To understand how profoundly wrongheaded that was, consider the way the media acts when it believes it has a good story. Look at the overwhelming force with which it descended on Gary Condit or the way it covered the death of Princess Di or, in a more innocent age, Watergate. Those subjects received saturation coverage compared to the inconstant coverage of the danger from attacks of mass destruction.

But why would the news media fail to report such an important story? I suspect one reason is that the country was in a state of denial as it clung to an almost adolescent fantasy of invulnerability. The subject was so terrible that many people didn't want to think about it. Despite various warnings and disturbing stories, the issue had an air of abstraction about it; it was about something terrible that might hypothetically happen but that people wanted to believe never would. 

Most of the news media fit right in to this state of denial because its coverage is shaped more by marketing then civic responsibility. And from a marketing perspective, journalists knew the story was just too scary. The news media does like stories that scare audiences a little bit because it keeps people reading and watching. But focusing day after day on the danger that large numbers of people might be killed had the potential to drive away the audience and open news organizations to accusations of morbidity and being out of touch with practical reality. 

As a result, the media colluded with the politicians in ignoring the danger, while paying lip service to it in occasional articles and public discussions. So long as most politicians didn't challenge the status quo, the media could safely ignore it. And so long as the media ignored it, the politicians felt safe doing so as well. 

We can see a similar failure to face reality in how America has dealt with America’s energy dependence. Like the danger of attacks of mass destruction, America's dependence on foreign oil made it vulnerable to economic collapse and blackmail, and created the perpetual danger it could be drawn into conflicts in the Middle East and Asia. But, once again, denial and short term interest prevailed, as America's economy was buoyed up on a sea of oil imports.

These two issues -- the danger of attacks of mass destruction and of a cut-off of energy imports -- formed a core of urgent foreign threats that America was ignoring. Even after all of OPEC's machinations and the Gulf War, including the warnings that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons, and even after the 1993 World Trade Center attack and the attack on the USS Cole, America refused to recognize how precarious its situation was. 

Unfortunately, there are so many historic parallels to this state of denial and inaction, it is obvious we are looking at a character trait that is endemic not only to America but to the human race. The most obvious historic parallel is our failure to prevent Nazism from becoming a global power when it was still militarily weak and unable to stand up to us.

A more recent parallel is the AIDS epidemic, the last great Damocles sword that has hung over America and other nations. It too was allowed to become a critical danger even after health officials knew there was an epidemic because of early denial on the part of gay rights community, and the prudishness of many people in government and other positions of leadership. The parallels in fact are striking; the orgiastic lifestyles of the 1970s and first part of the 80s, and the economic orgy of the 1990s brought to a crashing halt by a danger that we failed to acknowledge. In each case, people suddenly found themselves dealing with a threat they could neither see nor understand, and that could strike without warning.

But the state of denial described above also had a second element in which the media once again played a central role. In addition to failing to focus on the truth, the media distracted us with stories that didn’t deserve the attention they received. The Gary Condit story is a classic example. Another, of course, is the great shark attack scare, which was hyped by the media to arouse public interest.

It is obvious from the nature of these stories that the media, especially television, was frequently deciding what would be news based once again on marketing considerations. If a story appealed to the emotions and played into the fantasies of the audience, it passed the test, while other stories that were more important failed to get attention.

It was precisely this criterion that resulted in shark attacks becoming an ideal story for some in the media. After all, it was scary enough and strange enough to hold an audience. But people also knew, if only in their heart of hearts, that the chance of actually being attacked was virtually nonexistent. That allowed news organizations such as CNN and Time magazine, with its July 30, "Jaws"-like magazine cover, to do for audiences what horror movies do – let them enjoy the excitement of being scared from a vantage point of actual safety.

One might even say that these fake dangers and hyped up stories functioned as defense mechanisms for the collective mind of American society. They allowed us to pretend one set of things was important while we were in denial about what we truly needed to be concerned with. It is a terrible irony that we distracted ourselves with so many fake dangers in both news and entertainment while we ignored the real dangers that threatened our survival.

But the endless focus on Gary Condit and the stories on shark attacks hardly exhaust the distractions we wasted our time on. In retrospect, much of the national debate -- the endless partisan games; the cynical effort to ruin a president; the constant discussion about the balance of power in the House and the Senate -- make us look like a nation that fiddled while Rome burned. 

This brings us to a third failing that left us open to attack, in addition to inattention and the media focus on irrelevancies. It can be found in the fact that the media, along with politicians and their consultants, created an atmosphere of smear and privacy invasion that prevented most of the best people from entering government. As a result, we were frequently left with mediocrity instead of a meritocracy in public office, and it was these less-then-ideal public officials we entrusted with our safety. Granted, democratic government doesn't usually produce meritocracy. But, in an age of high tech problems and solutions, and global finance, and in a nation this rich in talent, far better could have been achieved if people seeking public office were treated with more respect.

Once again, the media bears a share of the responsibility because it successfully propagandized and intimidated judges into making it difficult for people in the public eye to win lawsuits for libel or slander. Armed with the false idea that those seeking office are asking to work for the people of the United States and therefore lose many rights when it comes to privacy and respectful treatment, the media turned the public arena into a killing field of reputations. And why not? It created drama; it drew an audience, and it made those in the media look like powerful crusaders for the public good who were exposing dishonest politicians. Of course, the more the media and politicians savaged reputations, the more the best people deserted public service, leaving the media with political leaders who were easy targets. 

To understand how pernicious this media culture has been, one need only reflect on how some of our greatest presidents would have been treated if the practices of the 1990s existed in their own time. Lincoln, it now appears, would have been outed. The extramarital affairs of Kennedy and Roosevelt would have been an obsessive concern of reporters and pundits. There is a good chance none of them would have entered politics or, if they had, they would not have survived politically or would have withdrawn for family reasons. And what shape would America be in today if it had never been led by Roosevelt or Lincoln?

What we have witnessed with all of these failures has been a process of defining news down. That, in turn, has helped define government down.

But government also did a good job defining itself down. Instead of giving voters a system based on public service, officials used government as a means to their own ends, siphoning money for corporate contributors and pork barrel projects; writing laws that favored the powerful, and building miniature empires in the bureaucracy. 

At the center of this system of corruption is the great campaign fundraising machine which required politicians to engage in in the endless task of hitting on contributors and making promises. This, once again, chased out most of the best people, who weren't willing to devote all that time and energy to raising money. Even as it filtered out the best, it helped select political leaders who were focused on using government to satisfy rich and powerful interests.

I obviously can't say that if we had campaign finance reform in the mid 1990s, we would not be facing the present crisis. But if our elections weren't distorted by the need to constantly fund-raise and make promises, and if they weren't poisoned by smears and the invasion of people's lives, they would have attracted a different kind of candidate who was more oriented to public service, more thoughtful, and more focused on solving long-term problems. 

That is really the essence of it. We evolved public institutions in the media and government that pretended to be engaged in public service while they really served their own interests. Everyone was able to work the system, whether it was the airlines that successfully opposed being burdened with too many security requirements or a president who carried out a holding action against judicial proceedings, recession and war while he was in office.

If we had devised a better system that encouraged us to see the world as it is and elect leaders with some courage and vision, we might have taken a different approach to resolving our problems. We might have engaged Islamic radicalism on its own turf by leading the world not only in ending the violence of terrorism but also in ending the violence of extreme poverty and the oppressiveness of many institutions in the Third World. That would have offered an alternative to extreme political philosophies which, time and again, are nourished in conditions of poverty and alienation. 

Ultimately, what all this comes down to is that we left ourselves open to attack for the same reason many civilizations before us have brought about their own ruin: we made self-destructive decisions based on irrationality and corruption. The task now is to have the will and clear vision to win a war and implement the reforms that are needed, so we can resume our great ascent.