Missed Opportunities: The 9/11 Commission Report and US Foreign Policy

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (better known as the 9/11 Commission) released its report to much media fanfare in late July 2004.¹ The massive (567-page) report covered an array of issues and offered extensive recommendations to reform the bureaucratic apparatus responsible for intelligence gathering, intelligence evaluation, and counterterrorism measures. It was cautious, thoughtful, and eminently bipartisan. Many of the organizational reforms were soon widely endorsed, although Senator John Kerry, the Democratic Party's 2004 presidential nominee, went much further than most members of the political establishment when he pledged to implement all of the recommendations in the report if he became president. President George W. Bush praised the commissioners and expressed general support for their product but refrained from committing to a wholesale adoption of the recommendations.

Much of the document analyzes the failures of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other agencies to anticipate and thwart the devastating attacks that al Qaeda launched on 11 September 2001. Some of the criticisms (the lack of communication between key agencies, the absence of effective screening mechanisms at the borders, and the missing of key clues that a major attack on American soil was imminent) were warranted. Other criticisms were classic exercises in twenty-twenty hindsight. Bits of intelligence data that stand out in retrospect were just a small portion of a barrage of data at the time, and the commissioners failed to adequately take that inherent problem in intelligence gathering and evaluation into account.

Most of the media and public scrutiny of the report focused on the recommendations for bureaucratic reform—especially the proposal to create a Cabinet-level intelligence czar to bring more order to the disparate components of the US intelligence community. Although that recommendation attracted considerable political support, some intelligence professionals argued that such a reform might make the intelligence rigidities and failures that led to 11 September and the miscalculations about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction even worse.² In particular, centralizing intelligence evaluation threatened to exclude dissenting views even more than they are now, leading to an exacerbation of the groupthink phenomenon that plagued the analysis of both the al Qaeda threat and the Iraq crisis.

The most serious deficiency in the report, though, has nothing to do with the analysis of intelligence and law-enforcement failures before 11 September or with the dubious nature of some of the proposed reforms. Rather, it was the failure of the commission to adequately address the most crucial foreign policy issues pertaining to the threat that radical Islamic terrorism poses to the security of the American people.

Iraq and al Qaeda

In fairness, the commission did examine some of the larger policy issues, and most of its judgments were reasonably judicious rather than inflammatory. For example, the report examined a series of contacts between the government of Iraq and al Qaeda operatives since the early 1990s. Its conclusions did not fully support the case of those who have argued that there was no connection between the government of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. But neither did the analysis and conclusions support the charges leveled by neoconservative activists that Baghdad and al Qaeda had a close relationship and may even have jointly plotted the 11 September attacks.

The commissioners document that there were a number of contacts between Iraqi officials and al Qaeda operatives during the 1990s but conclude that those contacts were sporadic and mostly low level. It was notable that Saddam's regime apparently rebuffed Osama bin Laden's request for space to establish training camps as well as assistance in acquiring weapons.³ The members of the commission concluded that "reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides'" hatred of the United States. "But to date we have seen no evidence that these or earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out attacks against the United States."⁴

Although the...