Iraq War Hasn't Made United States Safer, Author Says

"Although the CIA has concluded that the most likely way weapons of mass destruction (WMD) would enter the United States is by sea, the federal government is spending more every three days to finance the war in Iraq than it has provided over the past three years to prop up the security of all 361 U.S. commercial seaports."

Flynn accuses the administration of a "myopic" focus on conventional military forces at the expense of domestic security. He draws this comparison: "In fiscal year 2005, Congress will give the Pentagon $7.6 billion to improve security at military bases. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security will receive just $2.6 billion to protect all the vital systems throughout the country that sustain a modern society."

I called Flynn this week to ask him if the nation's priorities were so horribly skewed, why hadn't America been attacked again? And perhaps couldn't it be surmised that the terrorists attacked Madrid and London instead of, say Washington or New York, because it was easier to do so?

Flynn argues that this would be an improper conclusion to draw.

Here's the gist of the argument he gave me: Al Qaeda and al Qaeda-inspired terrorists are patient. They seek maximum bang for the buck, so to speak. As they did in Madrid and London, the terrorists build a three-cell unit. The first is the leadership or operations cell. The second is the reconnaissance team, which scouts potential targets for risk and reward. And the third is the action cell, which carries out the attack.

Building this sort of operation can take many years, and the risks are high. And once the action unit attacks, it creates an instant forensics trail that "creates an operational security problem. If you use it for a relatively low-end thing, you put your organization at risk for little gain and you have to start over again."

In London, investigators learned much about the attackers quickly, just as American investigators did after 9/11. It could take the terrorists years to recover in London, as it has in America. But they will be back, Flynn argues, because there will always be enough "angry young men who can possess powerful weapons of destruction" to target a nearly endless supply of soft targets.

Iraq has not changed that equation one bit, Flynn argues. It has only diverted resources from the more pragmatic approach of targeting and hunting down terrorists around the world and, even more important, bolstering domestic security.

Flynn does not argue that every soft target could ever be protected by the government. But he does say that the administration has done shockingly little to prioritize threats and protect such resources as nuclear plants, domestic military bases, the electric grid, the water supply and private-industry chemical plants near major metropolitan areas.

Flynn is not antiwar. Afghanistan was a proper target, he said, because terrorists were running their operations there and the government was protecting them.

The U.S. administration and its hawks are stuck in a "state-centric perspective, cold war idea that deterrence is about overwhelming power and offense. But that has nothing to do with the overwhelming reality of this threat."

In his Foreign Affairs article, Flynn wrote that "the United States is fighting the war it prepared for in the twentieth century, rather than the one that is being waged upon it by al Qaeda ... the Pentagon is executing its long-standing forward defense strategy, which involves leapfrogging ahead of U.S. borders and waging combat on the turf of U.S. enemies or allies. Meanwhile, protecting the rear -- the American nation itself -- remains largely outside the scope of national security even though the September 11 attacks were launched from the United States on targets within the United States."

Bush's critics argue that Iraq was made politically possible by the natural urge to punish someone for the travesty of 9/11. Iraq might have sated an emotional response, but it did little to address the pragmatic problem of how to make America safer.

For a long time, many Americans believed that Iraq was directly involved in 9/11, and that the war was a part of the effort to vanquish the terrorists who attacked us that day. The fact that few people believe that today may have much to do with the president's declining popularity and the declining confidence in his honesty.