Washington's argument for solving the national security issues it's having is weak, and it does not seem to ever get a full grasp of what it needs to do, in order to bring any worthwhile solutions to the global front. Foreign Policy magazine recently interviewed the next administration's choice for foreign-policy adviser, James R. Locher III. He was asked about his assessment of today's global security as being "unpredictable", "non-traditional", and "rapidly changing". Locher compared today's threat to national security as a series of smaller Vietnam-like events, which can characteristically be "incredibly complex and changing very rapidly".
First off, current threats to our national security are today known as terrorism, and granted they may be very difficult to anticipate, but they are not changing at all, and are fairly consistent in strategy. There is no professional justification in historically classifying terrorism as a Vietnam-like event. That assessment alone would show most leaders that Mr. Locher is not a competent adviser, in that he is basing his advice on historical context, in a world where threats to security are new and do not represent any other type of conflict documented in the history books. His statements are basically one comprehensive contradiction.
The failure of recognizing the problem stems from internal incompetence. Washington and all of its bureaucratic institutions have no policy or procedure in place, but instead they hold up a lot of theories about how to deal with current national security issues. If fighting terrorism is so important, then Washington needs to apply firm strategies to confronting it, gathering intelligence about it, implementing domestic policies and procedures, and once and for all dealing with it in real time.
Take for instance the multiple terrorist encounters with police domestically. Two examples are 9/11 conspirators being pulled over for speeding. The first encounter was hijacker Nawaf Alhazmi having been stopped by an Oklahoma police officer for speeding on April 1, 2001. After the officer ran his license to check for any warrants, none appeared, yet the CIA knew of his connection to Al Qaeda, and the police officer failed to check his immigration status, which was illegal since January 2001. A simple check that should have been part of procedure for all police officers. After a warrant was issued for his arrest on June 4, 2001, Mohammed Atta was then stopped by police for speeding in Del Ray, Florida on July 5, 2001. The police failed to run his record from his driver's license, and was issued only a warning, and failed to check his immigration status, which would have showed that his visa status had expired.
These few examples show that their is a rudimentary failure of policy in domestic enforcement, and that shows that there is nothing new and complex about carrying out very basic steps put in place, in order to alleviate the potential for catastrophic threats. If these police officers followed procedures history would have been remarkably different. It does not take an entire nation to enforce routine traffic violations.
Instead of promoting an ever-present danger, and lobbing security theories about, Washington should focus on the fundamental aspects of security, in order to gather small bits of information about terrorism and its organizations. If simply running a brief background check on a traffic violator could provide the FBI with undiscovered information, then the U.S.'s national security focus should be on enforcing that state and local police are doing the jobs they are trained for and expected to carry out. Instead of lumping every single U.S. citizen into the category of a potential threat, by making them pass through long and seemingly endless security checks in airports, police and security personnel should be adequately informed of individuals who are known threats, not by stepping up foreign intelligence gathering to the level that domestic security agents screen every airline passenger. It's really a matter of adjusting focus.
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