The fog of war: how can we tell if we're winning the War on Terror?

Reason, June, 2005 by Stephen J. Lyons

Unfortunately, the book ultimately suffers from its partisanship, offering an essentially political argument that has become common in conservative circles: It scolds an allegedly left-leaning press for failing to cover events favorable to the Bush administration, and it hunts for ways to implicate Bill Clinton in today's problems. An especially outrageous claim is that Bush did not reveal his successes in the War on Terror in the months leading up to his re-election because he put "the nation's security ahead of political gain in an election with razor-thin margins." In fact, Republicans used the threat of another terror attack as a central reason to keep Bush in office.

Miniter's closing diatribe against the press also rings false. "We get only headlines, sound bites, and snapshots," he writes. "No record of victories, defeats, or draws." This critique would be more persuasive if the author's 12 pages of notes were not filled with attributions to most of this nation's major investigative newspapers. The story about the Al Qaeda fleet came from none other than The Washington Post.

Fortress America will not make nervous Americans sleep any better. Matthew Brzezinski, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine (and nephew of Jimmy carter's national security adviser), set out to find this county's vulnerabilities while researching future security measures. In a post-9/11 world, Brzezinski wonders, "what would it be like living in a country bristling with technology and obsessed with security? Would we even want to live in such a place?"

The result is a book theft is expertly reported, though its proposals are somewhat debatable. The security model Brzezinski suggests America might implement is Israel's maximum-security state. The author travels to Tel Aviv with Offer Einav, a security consultant who thinks Americans are "novices at defending against terror." Like most Israelis, Einav knows what it's like to own a gas mask and to feel the next-door threat of a Hamas or a Hezbollah. The difference in everyday security between the two countries is immediately apparent, from vigilant El Al employees who have no qualms about profiling passengers to Israeli children who practice chemical attack drills with the nonchalance of playing hopscotch. "A visit to virtually any mall or restaurant in Tel Aviv," Brzezinski writes, "started with a search outside the main entrance, where uniformed guards behind steel barriers patted down would-be customers, rummaged through handbags, and ran metal detectors over every entrant."

But as Brzezinski admits, comparing tiny Israel to the immense United States is like comparing apples to the Goodyear blimp. "New York's subway system carries almost as many daily riders as Israel's entire population," he writes. "El Al has a fleet of twenty-seven planes, against the nearly seven thousand commercial jets that fly America's considerably busier skies. Borders in Israel are measured in hundreds of miles, not tens of thousands. Everything in Israel is miniaturized when stacked up against the United States, making even the costs of trying to replicate the Israeli model stateside incalculable."