Daniel Henninger ponders the lessons of leadership in both the rampant wildfires in California and the global war on terror.
A year before September 11, the Bremer Commission on Terrorism said weaknesses in the U.S. approach to fighting terrorism "should be addressed immediately." In an eerie premonition of the failures leading to the 9/11 disaster, the Bremer report began with a quotation from Thomas Schelling's foreword to Roberta Wohlstetter's classic study of the Pearl Harbor intelligence failures. "Surprise, when it happens to a government," Schelling wrote, "is likely to be a complicated, diffuse, bureaucratic thing. It includes neglect of responsibility but also responsibility so poorly defined or so ambiguously delegated that action gets lost." (Emphasis added.)Posted by Alan at November 1, 2003 10:29 AMIt is too late for Southern California. Forest policy has become such a "diffuse, bureaucratic thing" that the addition of status quo environmental opposition made public leadership impossible. If we have learned anything, again, from this awful catastrophe, it is that not making a decision amid imminent threat is the worst form of public leadership.
With terrorism, it is not too late to avoid the same mistake. With next November's election, the American people have a chance to express their preference for a style of leadership in a complicated and dangerous world.
Ample room exists for disagreement and debate about terrorism and Iraq. But there is a real question to be asked whether modern liberalism has become so tied to belief in the benefits of bureaucratic "process" that the process itself has become an impediment to acting or a pretext for doing nothing, as it did with the fires. The result in either case has proven to be mortal risk for Americans.
When John Kerry, Wesley Clark and the rest are asked what they would have decided differently after September 11, and when in virtual unison they say they would work in partnership and cooperation with the United Nations, we are entitled to wonder why their foreign policy, like their forestry policy, would not place the war on terror into the hands of the exact equivalent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
via WSJ's OpinionJournal