Backcountry Notes

In the blamestorming, faultfinding, and faux-mea-culpa-ing following the Christmas Day attack of the underwear bomber, there are two aspects of the problem which have gotten short shrift in what passes for debate on such matters.  One of these is the emergence of the “lone gunman” paradigm as the primary terror weapon. The other and certainly more important aspect is this: the arguments taking place in the media and on cable news are all based on a false premise – that the Federal government agencies involved somehow failed in their duties and could have stopped the attack in advance. Thus liberals and moderates and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans and independents alike, are mired in the trap of progressivism, believing that the Federal government can get the job done efficiently and effectively.  We should all know better.

The Lone Gunman: Look back over the past months and you will find example after example of “lone gunman” attacks which were to some extent successful.  Some of these were terror attacks, some were nutcase incidents, but in every case the lone gunman made it through at least one layer of defense and in some cases victims died.

This is going to be the new paradigm for terror attacks against the United States.  The Al-Qaeda types learn slowly, but they do learn.  They now know that our security has been focused on two primary items: first, the detection and neutralization of terror cells; second, the detection and neutralization of weapons.  In both cases, the results have been reasonably good.  Terror cells have certain requirements – communications, money flow, living quarters, and so on – which give intelligence agencies opportunities to detect them.  We should give credit where it is due, and in this regard the Patriot Act has worked well.  Likewise, the detection of weapons at chokepoints such as airports has been done reasonably well.

But the government has its limits.  It is nowhere near being efficient enough to catch all terrorists or detect all weapons.  Better sharing of information will not change that – it cuts against the grain of government bureaucracy. The attack of the underwear bomber, thwarted only by a bad detonator and a quick-acting Dutchman, thus is not a measure of the “failure” of Federal security agency efforts.  Rather, it is an indicator of the practical limits of Federal agency success.

The Bureaucrats: Federal agency culture has “designed-in” limits and inefficiencies. These cannot be fully eliminated – they are inherent in the nature of the beast. There is a set of rules of conduct which overlie the mission of any government agency. To the jaundiced eye of a libertarian, the Real Rules go something like this:

    1.  Preserve, protect, defend, and expand the agency budget.

    2.  Preserve, protect, defend, and expand the agency employment base.

    3.  Preserve, protect, defend, and expand the perks and privileges of the agency.

    4.  Uh . . . something about an old document . . . yellowed and hard to read . . . Legal has a copy, if we ever need to look something up.

The nature of the beast was exemplified by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, after meeting with the President, announced with cameras rolling that her agency had followed the necessary procedures (and thus was absolving itself of any blame).  Ironically, in the context of Federal government culture, every word she uttered was true and correct.  Her agency made no mistakes and committed no errors. Instead, the State Department had reached the practical limits of Federal success.

Federal agencies do a wonderful job of slamming the barn door shut once the horses have gotten out.  This has been going on for weeks, and will continue for weeks to come: shutting down the Newark airport when an inattentive guard leaves his post and someone walks through the chokepoint unmolested to kiss his lover goodbye; scrambling F-16s when a drunken passenger gets out of hand on an airliner in flight. SLAM! SLAM! SLAM! (Just what were those F-16s going to do to get that drunk under control? Well, I suppose shooting down the plane would get the job done, but . . . . )

So here’s what we can expect: Barn doors will be slammed shut loudly and often for a while, adduced as proof of agency competence and alertness.  At the same time, more lone gunmen (mostly with bombs, rather than guns) will be sent to make terror attacks.  They will be supported by jihadist organizations bent on designing weapons which escape detection, but they will not be in cells in the United States, and thus they will be harder to detect.

In the short run, there is only one way to deal with the lone gunman – profiling. That’s a dirty word in the political Left.  It marks you as a bigot, or a racist, or a reactionary, or something else nefarious and morally repulsive.  To serve the high moral purposes of progressivism, we must not profile; instead, we must use inherently inefficient and less effective methods like random selection.  You search a Nigerian, you’d better search a Norwegian as well, or you’re politically-incorrect toast.  Muslims coming from Yemen must not be treated any differently than a group of small-town midwestern Methodists returning from a trip to the Holy Land.  Most citizens realize that profiling is necessary, see Rasmussen Reports, 63% Say Political Correctness Kept Military From Preventing Ford Hood Massacre, but the progressivist tail will keep wagging the Federal dog for the time being.

Prior to the Christmas Day attack, most Americans -- Republicans included -- had been lulled or gulled into a pre-911 mindset.  See Gallup (December 2, 2009), Majority of Americans Think Near-Term Terrorism Unlikely.  Ironically, the Obama administration reacted by (1) blaming George Bush and (2) characterizing the attack in terms descriptive of a "lone gunman" in order to minimize its significance. Correct on both counts.  Despite the shoe-bomber attack in 2003, the Bush administration did not push for choke-point profiling of individuals, but opted for making all of us take off our shoes -- the more inefficient choice -- and thus demonstrated unwittingly the practical limits of Federal success.  Many Americans therefore owe their lives to the slow learning curve of Al-Qaeda jihadists.

So here’s what else we can expect: Because the present administration is heavily influenced by the political Left, it will avoid profiling as long as it can.  It matters not that airport profiling has substantial public support.  See Rasmussen Reports, 59% Favor Racial, Ethnic Profiling For Airline Security. And sooner or later, another lone gunman will slip through the inefficiencies of government. We can only hope he has no better a detonator than the Christmas Day bomber and pray that there’s an athletic young Dutchman sitting nearby.