Obama’s broken promise has invited terrorism

Look on the bright side. They finally found a WMD. Not in the desert wastes of Iraq, nor in the cellar of one of Saddam Hussein's palaces. Not in an Iranian nuclear facility. But in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underpants.

The would-be Detroit bomber has been charged by a US grand jury with "attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction". Who'd have thought a weapon of mass destruction could be so small? Or that  "mass" could mean something less than a four-digit casualty list?  "Suitcase bomb" used to be about as low as they'd go in dimensions.

Connoisseurs of the ritual known as "Accepting full responsibility" will surely grade Obama a mere B for his performance yesterday at his White House press conference. "Ultimately, the buck stops with me," Obama said, apropos of al-Qaeda's near miss on Northwest Flight 253. "As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility."

First strike against Obama's speech writer is the weasly use of "ultimately", not to mention the mawkish use of "solemn".  Second strike is his habitual dive into "systemic failure", as the president termed it earlier in the week. Everyone knows that systemic failure  – which Obama has been hawking all week – spells out as "No one is to blame. This is bigger than all of us." That's the phrase's singular beauty.

I'd give John Brennan low marks too. "I told the president today I let him down," said Obama's top counter-terrorism aide, who followed his boss at the press briefing. Okay so far. Exciting, even. In medieval Japan he would have stuck a sword in his stomach at this point. Not Brennan. "I am the president's assistant for homeland security and counter-terrorism and I told him I will do better and we will do better as a team."

The all-time champ at accepting, while not accepting, "full responsibility" was Ronald Reagan, shouldering blame for the criminal saga known as 'Iran-Contra' for which he was indeed entirely responsible and for which he should have been impeached and thrown into prison. The 76-year old president addressed the nation on March 4, 1987, after the Tower Commission had issued a savage rebuke to the White House for its guiding role.

Stage one: artful deflection of blame: "First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration," said Reagan. "As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I'm still the one who must answer to the American people for this behaviour. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds - well, as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch."

A small masterpiece, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Stage two: manly openness about some trifling blunders: "One thing still upsetting me, however, is that no one kept proper records of meetings or decisions. This led to my failure to recollect whether I approved an arms shipment before or after the fact. I did approve it; I just can't say specifically when." (A lot better than Nixon's lawyer-speak: "To the best of my recollection I cannot recall at this point in time.") Then Reagan pledged to do better. "Well, rest assured, there's plenty of record-keeping now going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

Stage three: onward and upward! "You know," Reagan concluded affably, "by the time you reach my age, you've made plenty of mistakes. And if you've lived your life properly - so, you learn. You put things in perspective. You pull your energies together. You change. You go forward."  And all this from a man with incipient Alzheimer's.

The problem with all the gabble about systemic failure - and with not making Brennan or at least the head of the US Embassy in Lagos resign - is that it reminds people that Obama hasn't got much of a spine, also that systemic failures are impossible to fix within the system's terms, a judgment wonderfully ratified by Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano's insistence on December 27 that "the system worked".

America's defences against terror fouled up on December 25, 2009 for the same reasons they fouled up on September 11, 2001, even though the 9/11 attacks were followed by vast bureaucratic upheavals and searching scrutinies of intelligence procedures.

Now Obama is listing the orders he's issued to improve inter-agency cooperation: expand the Watch List, enlarge the overall terror database, train up more security personnel at airports. It fulfills the first law of reactive politics - Do something. Issue orders. Look busy. But beyond that, will it stop the next bomber?

It was Napolitano herself, formerly governor of Arizona, who said of the wall being built to stop illegal migrants crossing the southern border from Mexico, "You show me a 50ft wall and I'll show you a 51ft ladder... That's the way the border works."

By the same token, show me a top 'red alert' urgent intelligence report and I'll show you 100 other 'red alert' intelligence reports sitting on top of it. Show me the 16 agencies which make up  the "US Intelligence Community" - plus tactical military intelligence and security organisations, plus those responsible for security responses to transnational threats, including  terrorism, cyber warfare and computer security, narcotics trafficking, and international organised crime - and I'll show you bureaucratic rivalry, buck-passing, active sabotage of rival agencies, incompetence, sloth and all the sins and inefficiencies familiar to anyone who has ever read a decent work of history about such matters.

Add to all this the fact that no one "responsible" ever does have to pay any sort of price. A lot of people lost their lives on September 11, 2001 but so far as I can recall no one lost their job for letting it happen. No lives at all were lost on December 25, 2009, but no jobs either, from Brennan on down. Maybe there's progress. The lowly TSA official who didn't notice a man going through the "No Entry" gate to give his girlfriend another goodbye kiss at Newark Airport (total shut-down, mass panic) has been placed on leave.

Personally, I'm not at all dismayed at evidence that intelligence gathering networks are flawed, that bureaucrats pass the buck. Hyper-efficiency in these matters would indicate we had arrived at the perfect police state. Of course there is room for commonsense and elementary vigilance. In the case of the Virginia Tech killer there was plenty of evidence that Cho Seung-hui was a timebomb waiting to explode. Students talked about him as a possible shooter and refused to take classes with him. His essays so disturbed one of his teachers with their violent ravings that she arranged a secret signal in case she needed security during her tutorials.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan's murderous rampage at Fort Hood offers another bracing illustration of the human capacity to avoid unpleasant decisions, like dealing with an Army shrink who had 'Soldier of Islam' on his visiting cards, and discussed openly the ethics of armed resistance to Christian assaults on Islam and so forth.

Now there's an avalanche of punditry about Britain's Islamic minority as the petri dish in which toxic cultures of militant Islam flourish and multiply. At this rate they'll soon be deploying the Delta Force in Tower Hamlets and assassinating imams.

The petri dish for terror is US national policy, abetted by junior partners in the UK, France and Germany: widening attacks on Afghanistan, an unfolding record of torturing captives to death since 2001, full support for Israel's onslaughts on Palestinians and calculated mass murder. It's scarcely surprising that we've had this terror bid in the new Age of Obama and its supposed swerve into rationality. The swerve has been the other way and, guess what, the Muslim world has noticed.
 
What words can a radical imam in the UK or Yemen have to offer as incitement to attack America that would be as vividly persuasive as the policies adopted by Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton - expanding the war in Afghanistan, cheerleading for Israel and, it turns out, initiating a dirty war in Yemen? When the US Congress on November 4 last year voted 334 to 36 to condemn the Goldstone Report for its charge that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, how many young Muslims exclaimed, 'That does it!' and headed for their local terrorist recruiting office?

How the terrorists – al-Qaeda or cognate conspiracies - must be exulting! All they have to do is get someone on the plane with explosive deployed on or in their persons. They don't need even to set the bomb off. Result: political hysteria in the US, and another savage blow to the aviation industry and tourism. The latest US Dept of Commerce statistics show a continued fall in foreign visitors to the US. Since 9/11/2001 there's been a 17 per cent decline – 60 million tourists. A survey concludes that a negative impression of the US is the primary reason for this decline. The new security screenings will accelerate that trend.
 
Back in 1962, Roberta Wohlstetter published Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, a famous reconstruction of the indications and warning process preceding the successful Japanese surprise attack of 7 December 1941. The book was a disingenuous one since part of Wohlstetter's agenda was to discredit the fairly persuasive evidence that Roosevelt was aware of an impending Japanese attack – though not its dimensions – and saw it as something that would finally allow him to trump all opposition to the US's entry into the war.

But Wohlstetter, excavating all the "systemic" obstructions to the efficient use of intelligence before the Japanese attack, did accurately conclude: "We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and learn to live with it".
 
Obama promised change, in his campaign and in Cairo. So far as the Islamic world is concerned, he's betrayed that promise. That's the systemic failure. It's no solution to requisition bigger and better x-ray machines at points of departure and entry. ·