Arms and influence

The billion-dollar gravestone

IN THE NEWS
Tom Engelhardt's article about the proposed 9/11 memorial--"the largest, most expensive gravestone on earth"--captures many of my own feelings. There are no good choices about how to memorialize the World Trade Center victims; recent history has made these difficult decisions even more painful.

First, it's clear that the World Trade Center memorial is not going to be like the war memorial that marks American triumphs of right over wrong. You can feel sorrow when you visit the Gettysburg battlefield, or the Allied graveyard overlooking Omaha Beach, but the cold, stone markers stand for justifiable sacrifice as much as grievous loss. We beat the slave-holding Confederacy. We beat the genocidal Nazis. The historical and emotional scales dipped in the right direction.

However, there's no triumph to commemorate at Ground Zero in Manhattan. Nineteen terrorists, through a combination of guile and luck, slaughtered thousands of innocent office-workers and airline passengers. It's important not to leave a scar in the earth where the towers used to be; otherwise, you give the 9/11 hijackers and the people who helped them a kind of reverse triumphalist memorial, rubble instead of chiseled stone. Like the dead bodies and smashed buildings that the Nazis left in their wake, the wreckage of the 9/11 attacks need to be cleaned up.

But, short of paving over the original site of the World Trade Center, what should be done? The proposed underground museum, which will recount the 9/11 attacks, is fine, but at this point, hardly necessary. No one in the world, and certainly not in the United States, needs to be reminded of 9/11. Our memories of that day are not faulty; our grief hits us with no less force. Most battle sites lacked official markers or museums for years, sometimes decades, after the actual events. Why, then, the need to rush into construction a museum for the mass grave at the southern tip of Manhattan?

Engelhardt's article makes an important point about our memories and feelings about 9/11: since the Bush Administration worked very hard to connect the 9/11 attacks to the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo Bay, warrantless wiretaps, and other policies, it's nearly impossible to separate our feelings about 9/11 from our reactions to these subsequent events. Perhaps nothing should be done until Bush leaves office, since his legacy of hubris and calamity falls over the World Trade Center site as darkly as the shadow of two airliners slamming into the towers.

Certainly, the 1,776 "Freedom Tower" should not be built (if for no other reason than it gives future terrorists a brand new target). The allusion to the Declaration of Independence is too kitschy and inappropriate for chief target of the 9/11 terrorists. The name itself invites too much angst. Exactly what sort of "freedom" are we talking about? The freedoms that Americans enjoy, but Saudis and Egyptians do not? The freedom to continue living, in a way that the 9/11 victims cannot? The freedoms that Americans enjoyed before 9/11, but have been curtailed since then? Most of all, the name "Freedom Tower" borders on the sort of triumphalism which is exactly the opposite of what most Americans feel about 9/11. More than "Freedom Tower," two verbal points to describe a more complex emotional picture, this excerpt from Bruce Springsteen's "My City of Ruins" might be the constellation of words that better approximates the shape of our feelings:

There is a blood red circle
On the cold dark ground
And the rain is falling down
The church door's thrown open
I can hear the organ's song
But the congregation's gone
My city of ruins
My city of ruins

Springsteen's song (written before 9/11, but which fit into his post-9/11 album The Rising with eerie appropriateness), continues with the sentiment that I think is more fitting to a World Trade Center memorial:

Come on, rise up!  Come on, rise up!
Come on, rise up!  Come on, rise up!
Come on, rise up!  Come on, rise up!

Americans can't celebrate the 9/11 attacks, squeezing some non-existent victory out of that terrible day. We can rise up, in defiance of the sort of monstrous evil that killed the World Trade Center victims. We can abandon momentary despair for confidence, but not arrogance. They can renew their faith in our own country, without letting nineteen hijackers drive us to abandon our own cherished principles and institutions. We can take comfort in the fact that we are not alone (approximately one-fourth of the World Trade Center casualties were not US citizens; the world offered its help immediately after the attacks), instead of charging forth in unilateral rage. We can keep the 9/11 attacks in proper perspective (over 125,000 Americans died liberating Normandy in 1944, of which 1,465 died on D-Day alone), instead of embracing the role of World's Greatest Victim.

As a symbol of defiance against evil, and remembrance of those who died, one or two spotlights shining from Ground Zero might be a good idea. However, mounting a light on top of a 1,776-foot "Freedom Tower" is wrong for far too many reasons.

EBO in the USA

IN THE NEWS

FX-Based seems to be a blog devoted to the defense of "effects-based operations," or EBOs. To quote from one recent post:

First of all, EBO is a methodology, an approach and a way of thinking used for planning, executing and assessing operations and not a new "theory" of war or a particular strategy. It is not an "easy-win concept", but rather a cross-dimensional, cross-discipline way of thinking that seeks to integrate all the instruments of power to the maximum extent possible.

EBOs, the author argues, are not "miracle strategies," the way some critics have argued. World War II provides some fuel for this debate: was strategic bombing supposed to win the war single-handedly, or was it merely an adjunct to Allied theater strategy?

It would have probably been more costly, in terms of lives and aircraft, to send C-47's full or paratroopers and drop them directly on top of the engine factories and Romanian oil fields. The best way to attack those targets, at the time, was using long-range bombers. Today, we would use stealth bombers with precision weapons and cruise missiles, technologies not available during WWII.

I think it's a mistake to be too humble about what EBO theorists—Duohet and Doolittle before World War II; Herman Kahn, Thomas Schelling, and their brethren during the Cold War; the "military transformationists" behind the American "shock and awe" strategy in 2003—have thought or said. If effects-based operations are nothing more than an adjunct to traditional military strategy, why does they need their own term (and inevitable acronym)?

There's no doubt that strategic bombing played an important role in defeating Germany and Japan in World War II, as did other forms of strategic warfare. Submarines, an old instrument of strategic warfare, had crippled Japan's war economy long before the Enola Gay dropped the next generation's strategic weapon on Hiroshima.

But that's not what Duohet, Wolfowitz, and other members of the EBO school have been arguing. Instead, they've claimed that attacks on the strategic foundation of an enemy's warmaking ability can single-handedly win a war. Conventional and unconventional munitions dropped on population centers can terrorize civilians. Attacks on the engines of the war economy—factories, railroads, ports, etc.—can bleed the enemy dry.  Destroying communications equipment and killing enemy leaders can erase the enemy's C3I. This ambitious vision of modern warfare fired EBO theorists, not some pedestrian acknowledgement the Allied bombing of Schweinfurt and Ploesti made the German economy less functional.

I'm not sure how comfortable some EBO enthusiasts might be in admitting it, but the most successful practitioner of EBO methods in recent history was President Bill Clinton. Air attacks, not a ground invasion, forced the Serbs to end the wars with their neighbors, eventually leading to the Nuremburg-like trial of Slobodan Milošević.

While you might give Clinton and EBO methods some credit for ending the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, there's a lot more to that particular story. Still, it's a case study with a more successful, less ambiguous ending than strategic bombing in World War II, "shock and awe" in Iraq, the terror bombing of populated areas in the Spanish Civil War, or Operation ROLLING THUNDER. In fact, a lot of the hard-nosed people who might be attracted to EBO often make an argument about the Vietnam War that runs contrary to EBO thinking. According to the Harry Summers-esque view, unless the United States had been willing to escalate ROLLING THUNDER to nuclear levels, the United States could not have defeated North Vietnam without a ground invasion. In other words, even some of the most die-hard defenders of a conventional military strategy in the Vietnam War would not embrace EBO as a surrogate.

Be prepared!

IN THE NEWS
Robert Farley has opened a discussion about the "American way of war." Is there a distinctly American approach to warfare? If so, can Americans rightly take credit for great technical innovations?

Robert uses technical here in a much different sense than I usually do. There's a technical level of strategy that occupies the lowest rung in the strategic hierarchy that I often use to frame discussions here on Arms and Influence. From Robert's post:

In terms of thinkers who have really transformed the way that the world has thought about war, I think that the only American worth naming would be Alfred Thayer Mahan, who was read all over the world at the turn of the last century and is still taken seriously today.

Technical in this context means something like innovative. Adam Kotsko, who started this conversation, uses technical to mean something between innovative and brilliant:

It's indisputable that the US has superior firepower and has for quite a long time -- in fact, although I'm willing to be corrected here, I seem to remember that the US was basically always ahead of the USSR in the arms race. That factor aside, however, is there any evidence that the US has ever actually been good at war on a technical level? Are there any of these moments of strategic brilliance where an amazing victory was pulled off on a shoestring? I know that the US has had successful generals, but have we had talented generals, the kind who will go down in the history of military strategy?

While I'm pointing out the very different meanings of the same word when Adam, Robert, and I use it, I'm not that worried that we're going to get too confused to have an effective dialogue about a fairly important topic. It's more than just the adage about the military being a military of the larger society. The way that countries enter, fight, and exit wars depends a lot on their history, culture, and institutions. "American exceptionalism" aside, there must be some distinctive characteristics of the "American way of war."

This topic gives me an excuse to write about something that has been on my mind for quite a while. (I'll respond to Robert and Adam in a separate post.) Americans seem to do very well at conflicts for which they have prepared, and substantively worse when they are less prepared. While you might apply this adage to any country, the difference between well-prepared and poorly-prepared war efforts is more acute in the American experience. In that sense, there is a distinctly American way of war: we don't muddle through the opening stages of conflicts quite as well as many other countries might. The most impressive applications of American military power have been the ones for which the plans were drafted carefully, the troops drilled thoroughly, the intelligence gathered widely, and the logistics provided amply.

While I haven't done a statistical analysis, war by war, to test this proposition, I can point to some salient examples. D-Day is, perhaps, the signature case study. While most studies of Operation OVERLORD focus on the battle itself, the real story begins years earlier, when British and American leaders began working on a strategy for liberating Western Europe from the Nazis. Commandos, infiltrating French beaches at night, collected information about the geography, German defenses, tidal changes, and beach conditions. American Rangers went through grueling physical training, and they went over the assault on Point du Hoc over and over again. Allied troops drilled over and over again what would happen the moment the ramp of their landing vehicles went down. Allied naval commanders planned their bombardments with the same care that heavy bomber pilots plotted plotted the runs over their targets. Only a few books, such as Stephen Ambrose's D-Day, give full credit to this exceptional amount of preparation for what would prove to be the critical battle in Western Europe.

The same preparation made the 1991 war in Iraq a resounding military success. The success of Operation DESERT STORM turned on the preparations made during Operation DESERT SHIELD. Had the United States and its allies waded into combat prematurely, there would not have been a lopsided victory. The obvious contrast, of course, is Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. The planning, training, and equipping for the occupation was insignificant compared to the same effort behind the invasion itself—with predictable results.

While there are many countries that have proven better at improvising their way through conflicts, perhaps the best counterexample is Israel. Despite the suddenness of the conflict with its Arab enemies in 1967, and the strategic surprise that the Egyptians pulled off in 1973, Israel nonetheless fought its way through unexpected, perilous circumstances to victory.

There are a lot of possible explanations for the poor American record "muddling through." For example, the "citizen soldiers" mindset behind American military policy implies (some appearances to the contrary) that American political culture does not embrace American military culture. Americans see a great deal of virtue in the work of military professionals, but since the American Revolution, they do not see the qualities of being a good citizen in a soldier's life. To Americans, military duty is a noble thing; it is not so valuable, however, to make it the basis for national service. Without the sort of broad military experience that you find in the Israeli population, American military commanders cannot draw on quite so large a pool of expertise at the different levels of the military bureaucracy. The only substitute for experience, therefore, is training. For example, National Guard troops that are thrust into combat the way they were in 1991 and 2003 need to learn how to coordinate their actions with regular units. If you were a captain, major, colonel, or general, would you rather give the Guard units a chance to practice real combat, or expect them to learn on the job?

Before delving into other possible explanations, I'd like to first throw the basic idea—Americans fight wars most capably when they have a chance to prepare for them—out for discussion. Does this rule fit the broader history of America's wars? Or has the two wars with Iraq skewed our perception of "the American way of war"?

Militarizing the border

IN THE NEWS
Why would George W. Bush want to use the US military to police American borders? It's hard to feel good about any of the possible reasons:

• Our borders are genuinely insecure. To put it more accurately, terrorists plotting 9/11-style attacks may cross the borders without challenge. If that were true, why has it taken the five years since 9/11 to get worried about any alleged problem?
• The deployment of the National Guard in this role is not a problem. Even if Iraq were not overstretching the US military, the shift of the Guard's duties to border security makes it harder for the National Guard to respond.
• The urgency of the problem demands that we take immediate measures. According to political precedent and US law, the military is not supposed to be used in a police role except in times of national emergency. However, there is no genuine emergency afoot, so there's no justification to use the National Guard or any other military units to patrol US borders. Once again, if there really had been a national crisis of border insecurity, what was the federal government doing for the last five years?
• The Border Patrol [remember them?] has clearly failed. Of course, they haven't been given the chance to fail. While the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to create an across-the-board increase in the size and efficiency of its constituent parts. Unfortunately, the Border Patrol and Customs have seen only token increases, nothing like the billions of dollars you'd expect to see allocated for a serious problem. In 2004, the merged Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) had a budget of $5.9 billion, and a staff of nearly 39,000. In 2006, the CBP budget was $6.7 billion, for a total of nearly 41,000 employees. A 9% increase in budget and staff doesn't seem like a full court press, exactly. In fact, the situation with the CBP budget is even worse: according to the DHS' Inspector General, the CBP's operations are hampered by budgetary confusion and shortfalls.
• It's an election year, so just expect symbolic measures like this one. Clearly, the Republicans have been gearing up to use illegal immigration as a campaign issue in the mid-term elections. Unfortunately, border security is too important to be used and abandoned as a campaign tactic--unless, for some reason, Americans are not really worried about foreign terrorists slipping through border checkpoints, or domestic terrorists looking for asylum outside the United States.
• We have the money, but not the will, to deal with border security. Unfortunately, the federal government seems to be saying that it has the will, but not the money. According to the Bush Administration's proposal, state governments, not the federal government, would shoulder the financial burden of this plan.

Of course, there may be other, far darker reasons for this proposal. However, it's worth saying that even the best spin on the militarization of US borders is pretty disturbing.

Meanwhile, it seems to be up to immigrants rights groups, not the Democratic opposition in Congress, to loudly oppose this measure. Rather than dealing with it in the terms I've described, the press is depicting this proposal as part of the immigration debate. From the Washington Post article:

The militarization of border security would be a dramatic -- and controversial -- gesture in the ongoing political war over illegal immigration.

This proposal may be part of the immigration debate, but it's also part of the national security debate. In fact, the Administration itself is trying to sell the militarization of American borders in exactly those terms, even though it invites criticism about the Administration's lackluster efforts at "homeland security." However, both Democrats and Republicans are steering the debate into the realm of immigration reform, to win votes from two different constituencies. Neither the political leaders of this country nor the press should be discussing the issue as narrowly as that.

Wrong and ineffective

IN THE NEWS
Poliblogger's post on the vast NSA database of everyone's phone calls is really good...But it's not enough. The argument has to be made that these policies are not just morally and Constitutionally indefensible. To land the rhetorical punch, you have to also make the argument that they are not effective.

I wish Americans had enough faith in their own institutions that the burden of proof didn't include explaining why the Framers created the system of government we have. I also wish that 9/11 had prompted enough people to review the history of counterterrorism, in the United States and elsewhere, to the point where the general public already knew that a big pile of information doesn't make you safer. But, we're here now, where it's not enough to say that the NSA wiretaps and archive of phone records are just illegal and unconstitutional. It's also important for the reading public to know, they're also practically useless--at least for catching terrorists. What other purposes they might serve is a separate question.

Poetry corner

IN THE NEWS
I've never published poetry on this blog, and I've never published anything here that I haven't written. Today is a bit of a landmark, therefore. Someone sent me the following poem, which I thought deserved publication. (Once you read it, you can see why the content is appropriate for Arms and Influence.) The author wishes to remain anonymous.

It's come
by Anonymous

It's come

It's finally come

It's finally come to this

The whisper that might be something else

maybe not so bad

a filthy shadow rushing through the trees

a bad spell, everyone just temporarily mad.

Now panic's breaking through, if only for a flash,

the anesthesia's coating, the screaming,

then the crash.

Go back to sleep, the trembling in the fingers,

the tightening in the gut, just can't be real.

It's just
a dream, my darlings. Nothing here to see, nothing to
conceal.

But when you wake

the idiot clown face, once glimpsed from afar (was it really
him we saw, walking down the sidewalk, riding in that car?)

is standing in the living room, lying in your bed, going through your
underwear, reading what you said.

He's finally come,

He's really here..

He's finally come for me.

The dismantler

IN THE NEWS
Back in 2000, pundits trying to size up Candidate Bush often described him as "a small government Republican." Later, these same pundits, watching President Bush in action, linked some of his policies to a "starve the beast" strategy that seemed consistent with their original interpretation. While not exactly above-board, the "starve the beast" approach (engineer a budget crisis that would force drastic reductions of the federal bureaucracy) at least seemed like "normal" politics.

Small government Republicans espouse a philosophy that borders on libertarianism: the government should only have enough resources to defend our borders, enforce contracts, and police the streets. The usual targets of small government Republicans are agencies like the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts. "Common goods" like mass education and public funding for the arts lie outside this neo-Lockean version of the social contract.

In other words, you'd expect the agencies responsible for national security and public safety to be protected within the small government Republican version of the social contract. President Bush, if he ever was a small government Republican (many Republicans now have serious doubts on that question), has behaved otherwise. The Bush Administration's response to 9/11 has crippled the agencies responsible for handling natural disasters, gathering critical intelligence about our enemies, and fighting America's wars.

By the late 1990s, the new management of FEMA, with the help of Congress and the White House, had turned the once-troubled agency into a success story. While far from perfect (some problems in the emergency response to the 9/11 attacks, such as the problems with overlapping radio frequencies, would have occurred if Gore had won the election), FEMA was an agency clearly on the mend. Washington decision-makers had a fairly clear idea what FEMA needed to do, and the steps needed to make it capable of discharging these responsibilities. FEMA's seat at the President's Cabinet table marked the agency's coming of age.

Of course, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security changed all that. FEMA was lost in a newly-formed agency with a larger version of FEMA's earlier problems: unclear mission, often unprofessional management, inadequate funding, and confusing lines of responsibility and authority. FEMA, an immature bureaucracy that had painfully cast aside its troubled past, was suddenly thrown into the bureaucratic equivalent of juvenile hall. If FEMA lapsed into old, bad habits, it should not be a surprise.

What is astounding is the recommendation, apparently taken seriously by the Bush Administration, that the executive branch should dismantle FEMA altogether and build a new disaster relief agency from scratch. In normal circumstances, a President would re-think the way the DHS re-shuffle crippled FEMA, or hang accountability around the necks of the individuals involved (not just Michael Brown, but also DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and his predecessor, Tom Ridge). Both tactics would give FEMA a chance to reform itself again. Of course, these are not normal times in Washington, so now we face the prospect of some anxious interregnum between the collapse of FEMA and its unspecified replacement.

The CIA is next on the demolition list. Bush's White House was already populated with people hostile to the CIA, and eager to place it (as they did the Department of State) under the budget and indirect control of the Department of Defense. People with no experience with national security mistake the CIA's analytical caution for equivocation, and its frankness for disloyalty. The Bush Administration's vendetta with the CIA went far beyond inexperience, however. Top officials with long histories in the national security bureaucracy, such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had other motives.

The CIA was already vulnerable, having made some grievous mistakes of its own in the 1980s and 1990s, and also having suffered a bit too much as a result. The CIA had missed the signs that "the main enemy," the Soviet Union, was on the verge of collapse. The Agency spent the better part of the 1990s trying to figure out its post-Cold War mission. Silly proposals, such as making the CIA the tip of the spear for espionage against foreign competitors to American businesses, were sometimes the result. The CIA also became obsessed for a brief period with the oil-producing potential of Central Asia, but it failed to build effective spy networks in many important countries in that region and the neighboring countries of the Middle East—most notably in Iraq.

Most damaging, however, was the Aldrich Ames spy scandal. Not only did Ames help cripple CIA operations, but the FBI's investigation of the CIA deepened the Agency's crisis of faith. (For an insider's account of this dark period, see Robert Baer's See No Evil.)

The 9/11 attacks should have been a vindication of the CIA, when it most needed a boost in morale. However, the common interpretation of events was that the CIA had somehow missed the mounting threat. While the CIA may not have predicted that a specific set of Al Qaeda members were planning an attack on a specific day against a specific set of targets, it was warning that Al Qaeda was planning some sort of attack on the United States, likely using airliners as a weapon. For a variety of reasons, including CIA Director George Tenet's misplaced belief that his personal bonhomie with the President would protect his agency, the CIA got the lion's share of blame for 9/11. It might just has easily turned to its bureaucratic rival, the FBI, and said, "We told you that an attack was coming. Why didn't you catch the terrorists who were planning it?"

The reorganization of the CIA under the new National Director of Intelligence accelerated the decline of the CIA, just as the reorganization under the Department of Homeland Security worsened FEMA's problems. The moment when the CIA's doom was sealed, however, was the appointment of Porter Goss as CIA director. A Congressman who had pursued a long, vitriolic, and uncompromising campaign against the Agency was suddenly in charge of it. Not surprisingly, seasoned CIA professionals from both the intelligence and operational sides left in droves, their seats often filled with people too green to effectively replace them. Meanwhile, the CIA is deeply involved in the morally, legally, and practically dubious program of indefinite detention for terrorist suspects. While the CIA spent its resources on secret prisons, the Iranian government advanced its nuclear program. While you might blame the CIA for not having a better HUMINT capability against the Iranians (or engaging in frighteningly risky ventures like Operation MERLIN), you can't blame the Agency for having misplaced priorities, or insufficient resources to do the job. It's the people to whom the CIA reports in the executive branch who bear that responsibility.

In other circumstances, the appointment of a military officer to head the CIA might provide "top cover" for the Agency during this crisis period. However, General Michael Hayden is not just any person in uniform. Aside from being the person who oversaw the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, he also is clearly one of the very small circle of "made men" whom the President trusts. The remaining CIA veterans have every reason, therefore, to doubt that Hayden will provide the kind of protection the Agency needs to recover.

Finally, the Iraq War has damaged American ground forces, the US Army and the US Marines, beyond anything seen since the Vietnam War. In fact, the crisis now is arguably worse than the post-Vietnam hangover. Recruitment has plummeted, at a time when there is no draft to compel replacements. Without a larger potential conflict, such as war with the Soviet Union, the military can't save itself by pointing to bigger conflicts that it might have to fight in other theaters. Instead of making the mistake of fighting a counterinsurgency war with too many resources, the Army and Marines are fighting with not enough units, and not enough basic equipment.

Since the Bush Administration has not changed the formula for fighting the Iraq War, US ground forces are clearly fighting on borrowed time. Not only will the budget deficit eventually reach levels where the Iraq war becomes unsustainable, but the Army itself is watching its very foundations erode. The volunteer army proved to be professional, skilled, and adaptable because the volunteers wanted to be in their jobs. Of course, the picture changes completely when there are not enough volunteers. Without a draft, the US military could mobilize for a major war because it had the "strategic depth" that the Reserves and National Guard afforded. Unfortunately, this arrangement only worked when the Reserves and Guard were deployed for a limited amount of time, such as in Operation DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM.

Recently, in defending Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, President Bush described himself as "the decider." Looking at this extraordinary record of crippling (and in at least one case, perhaps destroying) not one, but three federal bureaucracies, Bush might also adopt the moniker, "the dismantler." Unfortunately, these bureaucracies are the ones that nearly every American can agree that we need, to handle natural disasters, gather information about our enemies, and use military force to deal with our foes.

Lost initiative

IN THE NEWS
Nadezha provides this excellent summary of the swirl of tense diplomacy around Iran's nuclear program. The punchline seems to be, The Iranians continue to hold the diplomatic initiative. Plus, the Iranian government seem to be able to effectively exploit the not-too-subtly-disguised rift between Russia, the self-styled leader of the League of Disgruntled Nations, and the West.

Warp and woof

IN THE NEWS
Thanks to Queenmommy and Kid Terrific for reminding me of a few more ridiculous plot elements from this season of 24. In the warped world of 24, the United States might be better off turning the government over to the terorrists, if they run on a campaign of, "We can't possibly do worse than this list of compressed catastophes." I've marked the additions with a classically cheesy piece of clipart:

• Los Angeles, again, is the stage on which all post-9/11 terrorism occurs. (Memo to the President: Stay away from Los Angeles. In fact, just evacuate it, bulldoze it, and sow salt over the ruins.)
• Los Angeles is under martial law.
• The fictional Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) is, once again, rife with moles and spies. (Another memo to the President: Abolish CTU already.)
• Terrorists seized the Ontario Airport.
• Russian mobsters released a deadly nerve agent in a populated area.
• The Russian president and his wife were the target of an assassination attempt.
• The President's chief advisor committed suicide.
• The First Lady is clinically depressed, and borderline delusional.
• The head of the President's Secret Service detail is missing, presumed dead.
• Paramilitary units are whizzing across Los Angeles County, in search of terrorists and traitors.
• The President seems to be isolated in a dimly-lit Crowne Plaza Hotel, with no sign of his Cabinet or the Congress in sight.
• A former President was assassinated.
• Two former CTU officials (a former married couple, yet) met violent deaths.
• The Secretary of Defense deliberately drove his car off a cliff.
• A passenger jet landed on a Los Angeles freeway.
• The President, under orders from his secret masters at EvilCorp, was mere seconds away from committing suicide. 

Remember, all of these events have occurred in a 24 hour period.

Why I haven't seen United 93

IN THE NEWS
After reading Robert Farley's reaction to the movie United 93, I'm even less inclined to see it than I already was. A technically proficient depiction of events I've replayed in my head, over and over again, for the last five years probably won't help me glean any new insight into the 9/11 attacks.

It doesn't help that I knew Todd Beamer in passing. He and I worked at the same company, and we had occasion to collaborate on a couple of projects. (I was helping him craft a sales pitch to potential customers of the software we were developing.) As was the case with many people watching the 9/11 attacks as they unfolded, at least one person I knew died in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or an empty field in Pennsylvania. Do I need to relive Todd Beamer's death?

I'm no wimp when it comes to watching fairly depressing movies and TV shows. In the last couple of weeks, I've watched documentaries about mental illness in American prisons, the imprisonment of American GIs in a Nazi labor camp, and the Chinese government's campaign to erase the Tiananmen massacre from public memory. My DVD collection contains such light-hearted fare as Glory, in which all the major characters die at the end.

However, I'm just not interested in replaying the 9/11 attacks, for the sheer sake of admiring someone's skill at doing so. I'm more keen on seeing Americans get a more realistic perspective on 9/11, not as the "day everything changed," but as "the day some Al Qaeda terrorists got unspeakably lucky," or maybe, "the day Americans woke up to a threat that was already there." I'm not sure if United 93 helps or hurts that effort.