The May/June issue of Foreign Affairs focuses on “The New Arab Revolt” (also the focus of an event at Cato a month ago). Some of the articles have a touch of datedness because they refer to the continuing pursuit of Osama bin Laden. But not so Stephen Flynn’s “Recalibrating Homeland Security,” ($) a terrific discussion of how the federal government’s post‑9/11 policies have failed to meet the challenge of terrorism. Flynn throws a sentence at the living icon of al Qaeda, but the insights of his article are well worth taking in.
Most insightfully, Flynn theorizes just why it is that “nearly a decade after al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Washington still lacks a coherent strategy for harnessing the nation’s best assets for managing risks to the homeland—civil society and the private sector.”
During the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union required “a large, complex, and highly secretive national security establishment.”
To an extraordinary extent, this same self-contained Cold War-era national security apparatus is what Washington is using today to confront the far different challenge presented by terrorism. U.S. federal law enforcement agencies, the border agencies, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are subsumed in a world of security clearances and classified documents. Prohibited from sharing information on threats and vulnerabilities with the general public, these departments’ officials have become increasingly isolated from the people that they serve.
This helps explain TSA’s effrontery with travelers, the “secrecy reflex,” and the ongoing risk of overreaction. Flynn stresses that focusing on resiliency will do our country much better than those brittle, fear-backed political demands for 100% protection.
“Read the whole thing” is a bloggic accolade that I use sparingly, recognizing the limits on readers’ time. At a brief 10 pages, despite the hurdle of having to log in/buy access to the article, Flynn’s “Recalibrating Homeland Security” gets my: Read the whole thing.
