Correspondence: Sins of Commission? Falkenrath and His Critics

To the Editors:

In response to Richard Falkenrath's critique of The 9/11 Commission Report, we would like to make three points.¹ First, his criticisms, which have mostly to do with whether the commission's recommendations flow from the narrative of 9/11, are well taken. While some of the recommendations do stand essentially ontheir own, Falkenrath is reacting fairly to an overly abbreviated summary of them. The original outline of the report envisioned five chapters of systemic diagnosis, not just two. The commission concluded that the attendant detail would interest only Washington insiders.²

The commission also tried to avoid a "Hickam Field fallacy." In response to Pearl Harbor, one could offer a policy recommendation not to line up planes on the runway at Hickam Field anymore. If all policy recommendations simply react to past foibles, they will defeat, in an imaginative sense, the previous attack. They may not really defeat the next one.

Thus our investigation, as it reconstructed a historical narrative (about which, Falkenrath's comments are gratifyingly complimentary), also yielded an opportunity for broader diagnoses of a disordered system. Policy recommendations flow from looking at the present and future, not just at the unreplicable past.

Second, Falkenrath's critique makes too little allowance for the circumstances in which the report was composed. Keeping peace within a large and diverse staff and avoiding the appearance of partisan tilt sometimes required muting interpretation. While no factual conclusion was ever watered down, the report often does not tell readers how to weigh those facts, and some readers—Falkenrath among them—feel frustrated that the commission did not instruct the American people to agree with their preconceptions. The fact that five Republicans and five Democrats endorsed such a long and complex report without dissent about a single line is important. We live in a period of venomous partisanship, matched probably only by the early national period and that around the Civil War. The 9/11 Commission Report stands as proof that that partisanship can be bridged.

Finally, Falkenrath's critique is too dismissive of the report's diagnostic finding that 9/11 shows the government to have lacked imagination. Making a strong conscious effort to blinker hindsight, the staff and the commissioners simply could not explain tothemselves in other language why options that seemed obvious on the afternoon of 9/11—particularly that of military action against the camps in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden was known to be training thousands of terrorists to kill Americans—had never previously, in either Bill Clinton's or George W. Bush's administration, been a subject for serious staff work. Nor could we explain in other language why there had been only desultory, low-level planning for the possibility of terrorists' using airplanes as weapons. After all, it was their practice to use vehicles as weapons—cars, trucks, boats. Why not airplanes? It had even occurred to some officials to protect the skies over meetings of the Group of Eight and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Why not those over New York and Washington? As the report says, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had traditionally been understood as a failure ofimagination, not intelligence per se. But the key point is that we did not introduce imagination merely as an intuitive talent, unfortunately missing from bureaucracies deficient in creative genius. We noted that decades of work have refined ways to bureaucratize the practice of imagination. Sensible procedures had been developed and applied to reduce the chance of our failing similarly to anticipate what the Soviets might do during the Cold War. Those procedures were not used for thinking about threats from terrorists. We did not fault the absence of prescient genius. We lamented failures by agencies to employ their own painfully learned best practices.

—Ernest R. May

Cambridge, Massachusetts

—Philip D. Zelikow

Charlottesville, Virginia

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