John Lehman on 9/11

Dr. Lehman was a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission). He gave this talk at the Foreign Policy Research Insitute in November 2004. It is very much worth reading:

Tonight I shall address the good news and the bad news coming out of our 9/11 Commission investigations….

The things that shocked me the most may not be the things you might expect. After being out of the government since 1987, the greatest shock was the tremendous growth of legalism and lawyers at every level of the policy process. This was a new thing. There were plenty of lawyers back in the Reagan administration, but the dominance of the legalistic approach to every policy issue was totally new and, frankly, debilitating to the policy process.

The second most shocking thing to me was the utter failure of the government, our media, and our academicians to grasp the nature of our enemy. Everyone was throwing off terms and talking about terrorism and the threat of terrorism and so forth, but they utterly missed what was going on. They utterly failed to understand the nature of this Islamist terrorist movement. This is not a war against terror, that would be like FDR saying this is a war against kamikazes. Terrorism is a weapon, it’s a method that the Islamist extremists have learned works against free democracies. We’ve utterly failed to grasp the breadth, spread, and depth of the enemy that we allowed to develop around the globe over some 30 years. And it wasn’t because there weren’t warnings. Any traveler, many of you, going out to Southeast Asia or traveling through Egypt or in Pakistan could see, and perceptive people wrote about, twenty or twenty-five years ago, the phenomenon of the puritanical, missionary zeal that was taking over the Salafist religious establishment in much of the Islamic world and preaching an aberrant and extremist-form interpretation of Islam that was built on hatred, that was calling on all Muslims to rise up and to join the war against the infidels, led by the United States. And for 30 years we ignored it….

Read the while thing at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.