SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 - SURPRISE - AND LACK OF FORESIGHT
“I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies,
but not the madness of people.” Isaac Newton.
Ever since the Arab suicide-murder attacks on the World Trade Center in
New York and on
on the Pentagon Building in Washington last September the American
public, leaders, politicians and
political scientists have asked searching questions about the causes, background and purpose of these and
previous well-planned Arab terrorist acts; and about the failure of the
United States’ civilian and military
intelligence community to foresee and guard against them. The nature,
scope and meticulous planning
of recurrent Arab
terrorist crimes have recalled a similar event: the unforeseen
attack of the Japanese
airforce on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
The Middle East Desk believes that (a) it can contribute to the debate on these two seemingly
unrelated questions: one the spectacular success of surprise attacks,
Japanese and Arab; the other the
lack of foresight;
(b) it should warn the West
to expect more terrorism crimes, now in various stages
of planning and preparation. Today there is no question anymore of surprise and lacking foresight.
The intelligence services of nations West and East are now alert to the
danger.
But Western politicians? An
examination of what happened before September 11, what let the
terrorists take both politicians and intelligence services by surprise
more than once, might help avoid – or
at least lessen - the possibility of future shocks. Lack of foresight
is not a typical American trait. On the
contrary: in the
commercial and domestic-political life of the United States market research,
economic
forecasts, public opinion surveys have become routine commercial and
public relation tools faster and
more common than in any other country. Many business investments that
have gone wrong can trace
their failure to either absence of or incompetent market research, or to having ignored its
findings.
Experience in that line of business teaches: “Good market research doesn’t cost. It pays.”
Lack of foresight in international relations however is as common to
governments, nations,
groups and influential politicians anywhere, as it is to individuals, married couples, friends, business
partners. All of us can cite some surprising disappointments in our
personal life of which we could or
did say later: “I never thought that such a thing could happen”. Common to such experiences are
shock, disappointment, heart-break, damage, often some or all of them.
In relations between
nations however lack of foresight, unfounded trust or dogmatic
illusions can be tragically ruinous.
“Governments, nations, groups…”, we said, are prone to lacking
foresight. We have in mind
in particular
foreign ministries, diplomats and
media commentators. Britain’s
Foreign Office, the U.S.
State Department,
the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, the Foreign Ministry of Germany, and Kremlin leaders
have run up in the
past hundred years an alarming number of misjudgments that have contributed
to the unleashing
of two world wars and several local wars. In the thirties the majority of the
British
and French peoples,
their politicians and press, badly informed – sometimes disinformed - supported
their governments’
fallacious policy of appeasing Germany by far-reaching concessions, hoping to
preserve peace in
Europe.
It was not really Hitler who took them by surprise. What did was their
sudden awakening
to the fact that he demanded, but never intended, to be appeased. “Everything would have been alright
if only Mr. Hitler had kept his word”, British ex-premier Neville
Chamberlain is quoted to have moaned
on his deathbed in 1940.
Some 60 million of men, women and children lost their life as a result
of
political misjudgment in the most destructive and (in his successor
Churchill’s words) “preventable of
wars”.
No one in the Soviet Union was more surprised by the German invasion in
1941 than Josef
Stalin. Foreign sources and his own intelligence services had warned
him early in 1941 that the
Germans were preparing for it.
He was told even the date when the invasion would start: June 22.
Dogmatically convinced that they all were trying to feed him what he
called “disinformatsia” he
suffered a shock when it proved true and was disabled for over a week.
In Vietnam first France, then the U.S. became embroiled in a war they
would have avoided
had they conducted “market research” in an Asian country of whose
population and leaders their
military and foreign service
establishments had only a very inadequate knowledge. The government
of Israel too ignored warnings of an imminent attack of their next-door
neighbours attack in October
1973 and was surprised when it happened. The illusion cost Israel 2700 dead and shattered the widely
held myth of its
invincibility. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein of Iraq ordered his armed forces to
invade Kuwait on
August 2, 1990. A few days earlier
he had calmed a “concerned”, but credulous
U.S. State
Department by telling its ambassador in Baghdad that he had no intention of
attacking
Kuwait. Homer tells
us that the people of Troy dragged the wooden horse which the departed Greeks
had left behind
into their city despite the warning of impending disaster from Cassandra,
daughter of
their king and a prophetess.
Why so much misjudgment on motives and intentions of other peoples and
governments ?
And as a result so little caution, so little preparedness? Or none at
all? Ancient and modern history
should teach us not to expect always the best from others, even of
those whom we believe to know well.
A searching look at further examples of misjudgments and wrong decisions based on them shows that
most were the result of either wishful, dogmatic or ethnocentric
thinking, rather than premeditated
deception by the other side.
“We are not misled by others.
We mislead ourselves with regard to them,”
warned the French epigrammatist La Rouchefoucauld (1613 – 1680).
People tend to believe what they are told, if it conforms to their
cherished hopes and beliefs.
Lenin understood it well:
When in 1920 his secret service chief asked him how to sway Western
govern-
ments from their plans for armed intervention in the Soviet Union to
overturn its new and still shaky
Communist regime, he said:
“Tell them what they want to hear”. It is an old, well-tried and
effective
sting. Marriage swindlers
use it to relieve unattached women of their money, confidence men and
financial manipulators to mislead credulous investors.
All the same it remains astonishing that the September 11 attacks took
the heads of the
American intelligence services, civilian and military, by surprise. Why
did they not foresee or even
suspect Arab terrorist acts inside the U.S. ? The disintegration of the Communist regime in the Soviet
Union in the late eighties?
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor? We single out “the heads” of
these services. Outsiders
cannot know for sure if the
decision takers were not warned in time by their
own agents, or by friendly sources in other countries, or both, yet
ignored or misinterpreted them –
as Stalin did in 1941. The
secret services of the U.S.A. are known to be well equipped, well financed
and staffed by people highly skilled technologically and
scientifically. Had during the cold war period
intelligence and espionage been an international championship sport
like basket ball the American
teams would have won against those of the Soviet Union in most years.
THE HUMAN FACTOR
So what went wrong basically?
What is still going wrong in American defence against a few
thousand trained and well-led Oriental terrorists? Historical facts and present-day
evidence suggest to
us that the American intelligence services (and not only theirs) are handicapped by a critical
information
gap: the human factor. We
doubt whether they have fully diagnosed the problem even now. Their
fact-finding efforts, their data banks are confined to mainly
“tangible” things: every bit of
potentially
useful knowledge on our planet: geography, geology, climatology,
oceanography, astronomy, natural
resources, etc; on the
armed forces and training standards,
about the weapons and ammunition made
or bought by nations around the globe; their industrial, transport and
communication facilities; public
health, maps, media, training; their political system, their government establishment and its important
individuals. If it is
technical, ascertainable, measurable, countable, quantifiable facts, we bet they can be
found in those giant data banks which computer clicks can put at the
disposal of the U.S. security services.
We doubt whether the same can be said for the human factors – in other
words the elusive,
vague, imponderable, transient impulses and reactions which determine
human behaviour, individual
and collective, varying under variable conditions. Some psychologists
insist that there is no such thing
as a “typical” British,
French, German, Italian, Oriental etc. character; that you cannot generalize
and on that basis foretell
collective or individual reactions.
We believe that not
only c a n we generalize, but that if we
don’t, we risk running into
trouble. If a fateful decision must be taken, we cannot help generalizing to minimize possible
errors and
miscalculations, loss or even ruin. The disposition of people, their
political culture, are important parts
of a nations’s war potential as much, or sometimes more, than their
land, sea or air forces. True, it
would be difficult to speak today of a “typical” American. The United
States today is still an immigration
country whose population is made up by typical groups – English, Irish,
German, Italian, Jewish, etc. But
it will still take several generations more until joint social life
melts them down into a nation with those
definable, distinct characteristics we call “typical” in older, more
homogeneous nations.
But to generalize as realistically as possible, we need to study
carefully the history, habits,
manners,
language literature, art, politics
and language of other nations. In the U.S. the first rub is that
not enough
Americans learn foreign languages.
English is understood today in the global circuit more
than any other
language. English-only speakers can tour many foreign countries with it and get
by. We
get a fairly accurate
profile of the “typical” character of the ancient Greeks, Romans or Hebrews
from
their history,
literature, culture, language etc. Some 130 years ago the German psychologist
Friedrich
Nietzsche
complained that the German language spoken in his time sounded to his ears like
commands
shouted at recruits
on the barrack grounds. A nation
speaking with such intonation would soon develop
a martial bent of
mind to go with it, he predicted.
We doubt whether such a bold observation would have been classified as
relevant by any
Western intelligence service.
Or whether the Koran would today be regarded as a source of pertinent
information though its impact changed the minds of millions, the maps
and history of many countries
and affects them to this day.
We subscribe to the perceptive observation of ethnologist Ignaz
Goldziher,
of Budapest University, founder of modern Islamic research, who said
(about 1900) : “He who doesn’t
read the Koran, does not know the Arabs. And he who reads only the
Koran does not know them either.”
Over 200 years ago Goethe drew from Muslim literature a profile of
Islamic culture that is valid to this
day. How many Western
politicians, foreign service and intelligence researchers have read the Koran?
Or could draw a profile of a “typical Muslim” on the basis of Arabic
literature?
The United States has always been a country of immigrants from many
dissimilar countries
and cultures. Many of them or their offspring still speak their native
language. But these people are
not exactly the best reservoir for intelligence work. In both world
wars immigrants of German origin
in the U.S. were caught spying for their native country. In the
thirties some German-Jewish refugees
found shelter in Britain, were suspect and interned as enemy aliens. It
took the intelligence chiefs
time to enlist some of
these presumed enemies, many of them highly educated and motivated, in the
psychological warfare effort against their mother country which had driven
them into exile. The
U.S. intelligence and diplomatic services are short today of people at
home in dialects of China,
Afghanistan, he Middle East and others – another instance of lack of
foresight and preparedness
in the domain of the human factor.
Some examples will illustrate how critical - negatively and positively
-understanding the
character of an enemy can be in planning military operations. In 1808 Napoleon, after brilliant
generalship master of much of Continental Europe, decided to add Spain
to his conquests. His troops
occupied Madrid, removed the king (whom he interned in France) and
installed one of his brothers on
the Spanish throne. Quite unexpectedly the people of Spain spontaneously
reacted with “a little war” –
guerilla in Spanish – of irregular forces with such ferocity that even
the most shocking atrocities could
not suppress it. After severe losses Napoleon had to withdraw his army
and release the king – a lesson
that was lost on him when he decided to take on Russia.
In June 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia at the head of 600,000 men, the
largest military force
Europe had ever seen on the march. He calculated that he would defeat
the Russian army either before
the onset of winter or, if victory were delayed, have his occupation
army spend it sheltered in Moscow.
He did take Moscow as he had planned. But the Russian reaction to defeat and occupation took him
by surprise: they burned
down their own city and denied the ‘Grand Army’ the winter shelter on which
he had counted.
Bivouacking in the open was out of question; he was forced to retreat.
It was on their
way back west that his forces were decimated by Russian hit-and-run
attacks in freezing weather.
It was the beginning of Napoleon’s descent to final defeat,
imprisonment and death on the Atlantic
island of St. Helena. His
phenomenal career and eventual failure show him to have been a great
general, but to have failed as a psychologist with regard to peoples he
did not know as well as he knew his
Frenchmen. Hitler was
similarly handicapped, misjudging the British and the Soviets, lacked
Napoleon’s
military genius, ruined his own country and much of Europe.
In 1917 the German, French
and and British forces had fought each other to a standstill in
northeast France. Recurrent attempts of both sides to end mutual
attrition by a decisive breakthrough
failed. The introduction of poison gas by the Germans was answered in
kind and both sides used gas masks
to protect their soldiers. John Monash (1865-1931), an Australian who
had studied humanities, then
engineering, enlisted in
1914, distinguished himself as an officer and was promoted to the rank of
general and commander of the Australian forces in France. He ordered
one of his frontline units to fire
gas shells at the Germans every midday, getting the Germans used to
putting on their gas masks as a
routine precaution. With a gas mask on his face a soldier is limited in
his capacity for close combat.
One day the Australian unit’s artillery fired its usual midday ration
of shells, but without gas. The
Australian infantry, wearing no masks, attacked the surprised Germans
wearing their masks, broke
through their lines and punched a deep and decisive hole into the
German defences. It was the start
of
the German defeat on their western front. The Australian was decorated
for his ingenuity and success.
Some of the worst foreign policy blunders were made by the U.S.
government towards the
end of World War Two, especially at the Yalta Conference and
later. President Roosevelt,
already
ailing, General Eisenhower, Secretary of State E.R. Stettinius jr. and
some of their advisers, all men
of goodwill, but with limited experience of foreign mentality and policy experience, were no match
for the crafty and unscrupulous Stalin and his foreign minister
Molotov. The Americans’ conciliatory
concessions to
these two men, made in an eager quest for a peaceful world after the war, often
against
the warnings
of U.S. ambassador in Moscow Averell Harriman, of Roosevelt’s
personal advisor Harry
Hopkins, and the
far more perceptive British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, were not only
wasted,
but roundly
abused. They led to the Cold War
between West and East after 1945 and to the dangerous
and costly contest
for supremacy by the two superpowers.
For several centuries Europeans thought and wrote of the Orient as “the
mysterious East.”
We suggest that a strong case can be made for referring to “the
mysterious West” which mystified a
an alien
civilization instead of conducting sober political-psychological market research on it. The
misinterpretation begins in basic concepts and assumptions that vary from one society to another.
Terms like life,
death, religious faith, family, marriage, justice, war, peace, agreement, crime -
all these call up
different associations and valuations in different ethnic and social units,
often even
within the same
nation. When the differences
become unacceptable to one or more groups violent
clashes occur, from
unrest to revolution, or civil war. All the more between different cultures,
like
those between the West
and the Islamic countries, partly because they are not well understood.
A few examples of different
meanings and values of basic terms must suffice. Justice:
Slavery still
exists in countries in which Koranic law is applied. In Sudan Western humanitarian
societies buy the
freedom of black Christian slaves from their owners. In Pakistan the rape of a
woman can mean
punishment (even a death sentence)
for her and impunity for the rapist. In
Saudi Arabia an
unmarried young woman and her lover tried to leave the country without the
sanction of her
family and the authorities. They were caught, tried and executed in public.
Convicted thieves
may lose one or more of their limbs. Honour: In the courts of Israel, a country
with a Western code
of criminal law, every year a few Muslim Arabs are tried for murdering a
sister or daughter
on a charge of ‘tarnishing the family honour’ and disobeying the ancient
customs which
restrict a woman’s freedom. In the
Arab countries such killings are not defined
as premeditated
murder.
Suicide killings – a psychological riddle to the rational West which
assumes that “life” is
a built-in instinctual priority.
It isn’t in the East, a fact inexplicable without reference to an
overpowering motivation by a religion, an ideal, doctrine or an
individudal emotion (love, hatred,
jealousy, etc.) “We Arabs
love death more than the Israelis love life”, commented a spokesman of
a terrorist organization.
Religious beliefs, social and political dogmas, charismatic leaders, have inspired groups,
classes, castes, nations and motivated them to surrender their critical faculties and follow them,
sometimes at the cost of their lives. Religious, nationalist, fascist, socialist, communist ideas and
ideals have won followers through various periods of recorded history and have changed its course,
like those of Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Ladden. The power
and influence of such
infectious ideas deserve the close attention of the political scientists,
planners
and practitioners,
especially those of the military and the intelligence services. In simple
language:
Ideas and words
can be weapons no less destructive than arrows, bullets or guided missiles.