Letters

National Interest, The, Summer, 2002

For the Wechsler proposal to have a chance, the President would need to take on the mattress mice and announce a team even before securing the reforms. He might, for example, name the heads of the new three agencies on the day he announces the initiative to create them, relying on people who have already proven they can do the work. One effective team, for example, might consist of FBI Director Robert Mueller to head the new FIA, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge at BEA, and General Wayne Downing, currently the NSC's counter-terrorism chief, at the FPA. The President would present his restructuring as part of an emergency authorization to respond to terrorism, ask the Congress to vote it up or down in a fast track, and then use his anti-terrorism credentials to get his initiative through the ensuring bureaucratic food fight. No one should imagine, however, that reforming Federal law enforcement will be as easy as merely overthrowing the Taliban.

JONATHAN M. WINER

Washington, DC

Wechsler replies:

I share Bill Olson's dissatisfaction for what has passed for law enforcement reorganization, and can understand Jonathan Winer's pessimism at the prospects for real change. Every Federal law enforcement agency has a narrow but strong incentive to keep things as they are, even if that means that the country as a whole is poorly served. Nevertheless, I hold out hope that leaders in the Executive and the Legislative branches will rise above parochial interests and political concerns, and begin a serious debate on the organization of Federal law enforcement--as previous generations did with the U.S. armed forces.

Sadly, however, neither branch currently seems up to the job. The Congress appears to be focusing its investigation into "what went wrong" almost entirely on the foreign intelligence community despite the fact that the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks planned and committed their crimes here, at home, within the purview of the domestic law enforcement agencies. And on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, President Bush has sat quietly by while his homeland security chief Tom Ridge has lost bureaucratic battle after battle to the law enforcement community. The American public is left to wait for real leadership on this issue to emerge--perhaps after the next terrorist....

The Other Orientalism:

Charles Horner has written an excellent piece introducing the separatist problem in Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang), and noting the possible limits of what Samuel Huntington once feared would be a Confucian-Islamic alliance against the West. While the Tibet issue is rightly raised by human rights groups and the mainstream media, Eastern Turkestan is likely to evolve into the knottier international headache, since it is a place where aggrieved ethnicity, Islamic neo-traditionalist ferment, China's uncertain ability to contain violent dissent, and the fate of China's nuclear proving grounds all come together. Chinese official discourse has adopted Chinese equivalents of the term "fundamentalist" to describe this ferment, and has tried to link it to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda network in order to justify its severe policies in the area.