Week 16

This week we continued the reading on how and why the US, the UN and the Western media ignored the lead up to the September 11th attacks. A major failure of the National Council on Terrorism was to only designate Afghanistan as a sponsor of terrorism and impose economic sanctions instead of putting policies to prevent and punish terrorism. Both the government and the media viewed terrorism as a nuisance that required little attention. It was a mistake to put only counter terrorism experts in charge of counter terrorism. Counter terrorist tactics will not defeat a movement that is grounded in fanatical ideology. We also talked about how diplomacy that is not backed by a credible threat of the use of force will not work, just as the use of force without a clear diplomatic purpose will fail. The Clinton administrations failure was to develop counterterrorism tactics in Afghanistan without a political strategy. The major point of the book we looked at was that the 9/11 attack was not so much an intelligence or military failure as a strategic foreign policy failure. The lesson proposed by the book for the media is the continuing coverage from all over the world where the US does not have an active policy. It is the conflicts in these faraway places that have created the environments for criminals to flourish. In this way, the media will keep the general public informed and will be able to get the government to act on issues that it would otherwise ignore.

1. If the US government and media followed the course of action outlined in the reading, would 9/11 have happened?
2.