It’s clear we overreacted to 9/11.
by Fareed Zakaria
September 04, 2010
Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.
I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.
The error this time is more damaging. September 11 was a shock to the American psyche and the American system. As a result, we overreacted. In a crucially important Washington Post reporting project, “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William Arkin spent two years gathering information on how 9/11 has really changed America.
Here are some of the highlights. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.
This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.” Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.
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Source: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/04/zakaria-why-america-overreacted-to-9-11.html
by Fareed Zakaria
September 04, 2010
Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.
I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.
The error this time is more damaging. September 11 was a shock to the American psyche and the American system. As a result, we overreacted. In a crucially important Washington Post reporting project, “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William Arkin spent two years gathering information on how 9/11 has really changed America.
Here are some of the highlights. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.
This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.” Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.
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Source: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/04/zakaria-why-america-overreacted-to-9-11.html
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Wiki facts about Fareed Zakaria:
Early life
Zakaria was born in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India to a Konkani Muslim family—though his religious upbringing was secular, including singing Christian hymns and the celebration of both Hindu and Muslim holidays.[2] His father, Rafiq Zakaria, was a politician associated with the Indian National Congress and an Islamic scholar. His mother, Fatima Zakaria, was for a time the editor of the Sunday Times of India.
Zakaria attended The Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. He received a B.A. degree from Yale University where he was President of the Yale Political Union, editor-in-chief of the Yale Political Monthly, and a member of the Scroll and Key society and the Party of the Right. He later earned a Ph.D. degree in Political Science from Harvard University in 1993,[1] where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington (CFR Trilateral Commision) and Stanley Hoffmann.
Career
After directing a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard, Zakaria became managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine in 1992. In October 2000, he was named editor of Newsweek International,[1] and wrote a weekly foreign affairs column. In August 2010 he moved from Newsweek to Time magazine, where he serves as a contributing editor and columnist.[3]
He has written on a variety of subjects for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and as a wine columnist for the webzine Slate.[4][5]
Zakaria is the author of From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton, 1998), The Future of Freedom (Norton, 2003), and The Post-American World (2008); he has also co-edited The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books).
In 2007, Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines named him one of the 100 leading public intellectuals in the world.[6]
Zakaria was a news analyst with ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos (2002–2007); he hosted the weekly TV news show, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS (2005–2008); his weekly show, Fareed Zakaria GPS ("Global Public Square") premiered on CNN in June 2008.[1] It airs on Sundays at 10:00am and 1:00pm eastern standard time.
Views
Zakaria self-identifies as a "centrist",[7] though he has been described variously as a political liberal,[8][9] a conservative,[10] or a moderate.[11] George Stephanopoulos said of him in 2003, "He’s so well versed in politics, and he can’t be pigeonholed. I can’t be sure whenever I turn to him where he’s going to be coming from or what he’s going to say."
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After the 9/11 attacks, in a Newsweek cover essay, "Why They Hate Us," Zakaria argued that Islamic extremism had its roots in the stagnation and dysfunctions of the Arab world. Decades of failure under tyrannical regimes, all claiming to be Western-style secular modernizers, had produced an opposition that was religious, violent, and increasingly globalized. Since the mosque was a place where people could gather and Islam an institution that was outside the reach of censorship, they both provided a context for the growth of the political opposition. Zakaria argued for an inter-generational effort to create more open and dynamic societies in Arab countries, and thereby helping Islam enter the modern world.
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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fareed_Zakaria
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Relationship map: http://www.muckety.com/Fareed-Zakaria/2255.muckety
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