KIPLING: ‘Better late than never’ wrong response to terror

Washington – Terrorism of the 9/11-kind American intelligence services have successfully thwarted since 2001 has succeeded like fury in Boston. One week later plans for similar horror were uncovered in Canada.

American political leaders have nothing remotely convincing to say and fall back on assurances that “everything is under-control.” The situation in Canada seems somewhat less embarrassing, at least from the distance. Everything is not under control. The crime at the Boston Marathon on April 15 again notarizes the inconvenient fact that ‘under control’ hides lack of diligence, to put it mildly. The Boston suspected is Tamarlan Tsarnaev, 26, dead, and his seven years younger brother Dzhokhar. He has been charged, read his right to remain silent, and is recovering in prison hospital from multiple police bullets. A week after Boston, the RCMP arrested Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, in Montreal and Raed Jaser, 35, in Toronto and Montreal on suspicion of plotting to wreck the Toronto to New York train as it would be crossing the bridge over the Niagara River gorge. Boston and the train are not connected but they are in the same category of relentlessly expanding terrorism.

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Now to an imagined tally of committed, attempted, planned, and foiled acts of terror put before the public to ponder. Would such a tally generate revulsion at empty assurances, terror fatigue used as excuse, and calculations of impact on elections? I think it would. It would also reconfirm that too many presidents, prime ministers and whatever their titles shun sacrifice to prevent worse. Terrorism is waging war but in Washington and many other capitals few national leaders have the stomachs to fight it. President George H. W. Bush -- the Elder rejected sacrifice to prevent lasting danger when he washed his hands of falling apart Yugoslavia after his attempt to hold it together failed in 1991-9when war engulfed all its former republics but Slovenia. The war pitched Serbia against Croatia and Bosnia the two clashed with each other. The ensuing bloodbath drew Islamic fighters to defend Muslim Bosnia and battlefields became additional brooding nests of global terrorism. How has a president frequently called Prudence Caution reached this Yugoslavia moment? Arguably, closing his eyes to long-run consequences and put his reelection first. Mr. Bush “owned” a war – a victorious one that drove Iraq out of the Kuwait, the emirate Saddam Hussein, its dictator had annexed. Mr. Bush wouldn’t have it. Americans gave the victor nine to naught approval ratings that guaranteed President Bush his second term. He lost to Bill Clinton anyway. An eye down the road on his reelection, surprised President Clinton made the same choices. He sat on his hands as Hutus hacked a million Tutus to death in the Rwanda. He would not “own” a war. Execution by Serbian forces of 10,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, a designated United Nations safe heaven, forced his hand. He could not hold out against outrage at home and abroad. Together with Croatia he brought Serbia to heel. Now what about shortsightedness, soft spines and politics dictating policy even of highest importance? Terrorists tried to blast and burn down the World Trade Center in New York. They killed mainly Australian and European tourists at a resort in Bali, Indonesia. They set up training camps from North Africa to the Philippines. With powerful truck-bomb explosions timed 10 minutes apart destroyed the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar Salaam, capitals of Kenya and Tanzania. The combined death toll topped over 200 American diplomats and locally-engaged staff and some 4,000 killed and wounded in the streets. In a Yemenese port suicide attackers nearly blew the American destroyer Cole out of water, killing 17 of its crew. All the acts of terror happened on Bill Clinton’s watch. What did he do? He sent the FBI to investigate and lobbed a few cruise missiles at al Qaeda Leader Osama bin Laden. Eight months after President George W. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton Islamist terrorists rammed pirated American airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. The fourth plane, heading for the White House or the Capitol, crashed in a Pennsylvania field when a group of passengers fought the suicide terrorists to regain control of the plane. The September 11, 2001 attack gave the world airliner tanks spewing tons of aviation fuel burning hot enough to soften steel girders then folding mighty towers inward like candles melting from the wick out. The anguish of people trapped in the inferno is hard to imagine even a dozen years later. NATO declared the attack an act of war against the United States and invoked Article Five of its founding treaty. Never invoked before, Article Five the one-for-all-for-one rule with all military might assets, including nuclear weapons. Congress established a blue-ribbon commission with subpoena power to investigate all aspects of 9/11. Its core quest was for one answer: Why were America’s intelligence services caught blind? What the Commission uncovered and was that intelligence agencies had hints, indications and disturbing information galore of something afoot but failed to connect the dots. It found lack of diligence. It found that the agencies did not share intelligence information, in some instances because privacy laws prohibiting sharing it. Failure to connect the dots glares as the 9/11Commission’s massive report. Back to Boston. It is not about connecting dots. It is about failing to act on information Russia’s intelligence service gave Washington two years ago, warning to watch Tamarlan Tsarnaev for links to terrorism. The FBI called him in, judged him clean and let him be. The Justice Department explained that putting him under surveillance would have been illegal. Is President Obama even less diligent than his predecessors? It is a fair question.