When it comes to terrorism, the country of the United States counts on its intelligence agencies to warn them of upcoming attacks. However, having been attacked twice on a grand scale in the past 100 years, questions are raised about the intelligence’s ability to predict upcoming attacks as well as their ability to have prevented devastating attacks such as Pearl Harbor and September 11. The United States, having never been attacked directly prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, made a mistake by assuming no one would ever try to attack. By assuming this, American intelligence overlooked even thinking about an attack. Shelling suggests that when the United States runs into unfamiliar territory, it seems unlikely that it would ever happen to us, which then leads to ignoring that sort of problem. By having this mentality, the United States avoided giving an attack much thought. In Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, he suggests that the possibility of an attack became an unknown unknown to the United States. Being such a powerful nation in the world, the US failed to predict terrorist attacks because it’s experience was inadequate to imagine it.
In the events of the Pearl Harbor and September 11 attacks, Silver gives us clear evidence to believe that American intelligence could have predicted and consequently prevented the attacks. With the help of the Wohlstetter signals that preceded the Pearl Harbor attack and the evident clues leading to the September 11 attack such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice being warned in July 2001 about heightened Al Qaeda activity as well as the arrest of Moussaoui due to suspicious behavior, it’s easy to believe these traumatizing events could have been avoided. However, with the knowledge American intelligence has today concerning the clues they had overlooked in the past, it’s safe to say that we are no longer an unattainable and invincible nation. The United States, no matter how powerful a nation it may be, has to find ways in which they can prevent attacks in the future. Our nation is one that must predict the unpredictable, and in order to achieve this, we must work on our imagination. By imagining and predicting different scenarios we always believed to be unimaginable, we may be able to work on preventing just a few of those scenarios and saving American lives.
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ReplyDeleteYou make a good point by stating that the United States can no longer assume their immunity to attacks and that as a nation we must begin to expect the unexpected. Perhaps the reason that we did not expect the attacks of Pearl Harbor and September 11 was due to an unrealistic understanding that we were too powerful to be attacked. However, as we have learned, in the current international system, survival is the ultimate goal so we must be prepared for any situation.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you both regarding the necessity of "expecting the unexpected," in the realm of international safety. The United States is a world power, and as such, a target for many states. I think it is in our best interest to maintain civil ties wherever possible and keep an exceptional eye on potential hostilities geared towards the United States in order to prevent further casualties and attacks.
DeleteI agree with your statement that the US must use its imagination to prevent possible attacks since every attack on the US has been of surprise. If we are never prepared for possible terrorist attacks then how can the citizens of the US feel safe? Although maybe the fact that the US is such a powerful nation is enough to ward off many possible attacks since not many nations would be able to defend itself against the US.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I agree that the US has trouble imagining themselves as a vulnerable target for attack, they have only been the target of 2 foreign attacks, 1 of them only considered a terrorist attack (9/11). I think that there are a lot more pressing issues that the intelligence agencies could be focusing their time and money on then wondering why they didn't predict these two attacks.
ReplyDeleteYou make many good points in the fact that the US needs to be able to detect threats in a timely manner. However, instead of using our "imagination" to come up with unlikely scenarios, we should abide by the "One Percent Doctrine" issued after 9/11 which states that even if threats to national security have a one percent chance of occurring, we must respond as if the attack is certain.
ReplyDelete@Sam that in my opinion is actually an ok way to look at it; not just spend all the time money and resources on just being all over the place but take into account the past attacks and think through ways that they could be done and just always keep an eye out; then again if they were to respond as if the attack is certain for anything that has an even slight chance of occurring that could be just about anything, the ways that the next attack could happen is unknown and if and when is unknown, so technically almost anything has a "1%" chance of happening in my opinion. Also i think that the US government did not ever think that this could have happened is just the same reason as someone else had stated; since the US is so powerful the government did not take the possibility of being attacked on our own soil as a very great possibility. Nowadays after everything that has happened they are much more aware and have stepped up their responses and also to an extent ditched the god-complex mentality of nothing bad can happen to us on our own land, and are at all times more aware.
DeleteI am in agreement with everyone that it is imperative to understand we are also vulnerable to attacks regardless of our power standing within the international community. However, on the point of using our imagination to attempt to find the sources of the attacks, I think it is important to put the information that could have prevented both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in context with the thousands of other information and threats the United States receive everyday. While it is not an excuse for not taking preventive measures against the attacks, it does seem to put in perspective the difficulty of targeting the ones with actual ability to carry out an attack.
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree that the US should look for more signals when dealing with known terrorist groups, I also believe that there are attacks which cannot and will not be predicted as there are no readable signals predicting them. Would you agree that there are attacks that cannot be predicted? Do you think that there are attacks and events that, even if alluded to, cannot be prevented?
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