The September 11, 2001, attacks by al-Qaeda were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W Bush’s response to the attacks compromised the United States’ basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.
The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to al-Qaeda - as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive - orders of magnitude beyond the $60bn claimed at the beginning - as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation.
The first thing required was a change in the mental model that our top officials in the White House were using to address threats to the nation. Years of preoccupation with state-sponsored threats of nuclear missile attacks would be hard to set aside. Second, we needed a new institutional capacity for dealing with the new terrorist threat. Should this capacity reside primarily in the White House, or in Congress? Without a convincing change in its threat model, the White House, I argue, was unable to mobilize support for allowing it to control the effort, and control passed to Congress. But so many interests were impacted by such a huge project that it became unwieldy. …show more content…
The many organizational difficulties we will examine that flowed from the central control format, coupled with distracting wars and lack of urgency, make the failure of the reorganization seem almost
The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to al-Qaeda - as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive - orders of magnitude beyond the $60bn claimed at the beginning - as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation.
The first thing required was a change in the mental model that our top officials in the White House were using to address threats to the nation. Years of preoccupation with state-sponsored threats of nuclear missile attacks would be hard to set aside. Second, we needed a new institutional capacity for dealing with the new terrorist threat. Should this capacity reside primarily in the White House, or in Congress? Without a convincing change in its threat model, the White House, I argue, was unable to mobilize support for allowing it to control the effort, and control passed to Congress. But so many interests were impacted by such a huge project that it became unwieldy. …show more content…
The many organizational difficulties we will examine that flowed from the central control format, coupled with distracting wars and lack of urgency, make the failure of the reorganization seem almost