GEORGIE ANNE GEYER Intelligence: Where's the imagination?

WASHINGTON -- In the meticulously detailed pages of the just-issued "9/11 Commission Report" -- which will be carefully studied by students of terrorism, national identity and American responses to change for many years -- I came upon one page that led me into a theater of thinking that I had frankly given up on here in Washington.
Look at Page 344, and then wander on for some pages. The title of the section is "Institutionalizing Imagination: The Case of Aircraft as Weapons," and it begins: "Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies." (You can say that again!) It notes that before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government had excellent intelligence that a Japanese attack was coming -- but it could not "imagine" that the attack would come in Hawaii and not Southeast Asia.
The immense value of the report (which is unusually well-written) lies in tracing the confusion among the military and diplomatic ranks after the end of the Cold War: how virtually no one at the top could grasp the reality that the world had dramatically changed. We had NORAD bombers in Europe "protecting" us from Soviet bombers long after the Soviet collapse in 1991.
Islamist radicals had attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, but even though there was report after report to the United States of Al-Qaida plans to hijack planes, fill them with explosives and crash them against American buildings, once again the American "imagination" was AWOL, frozen into past realities, unable to grasp that other people were different.
Crucial finding
When the report reviews the failures during the 1990s of government agencies to come up with modulated, workable policies in Afghanistan, once again it comes back to the same abstruse, but crucial, finding: "These policy challenges are linked to the problem of imagination."
But in the rest of this valuable work, one finds no real recommendations about that core question. So I went to former Illinois Gov. James R. "Jim" Thompson, one of the commissioners, and asked him about this specific, but somehow incomplete, topic of the commission.
"Yes, we spoke about it a lot," he told me, "but institutionalizing imagination is a very difficult concept to advocate and to understand -- much less to institutionalize. Look at the last three years: Most of our attention has gone to airline security, but who says that it is going to be an airline that is bombed next? You don't have to kill 3,000 people; all you have to do is achieve nationwide panic.
"We've GOT to be more imaginative," he went on. "It is very American to be always fighting the last war. Our institutions are so operationally focused, they don't take time to sit back and think imaginatively. Look, the arrest of the one hijacker who was taking flight training goes all the way to the top of the CIA and the director reads about it -- yes, George Tenet read the story of the 'Islamic terrorist who learned to fly' -- and nothing was done.
"In our commission meetings, we talked a lot about these things, and we were constantly shaking our heads."
Gov. Thompson's belief is that, even in the amorphous and treacherous area of "institutionalizing imagination" in our bureaucracies, the answer is that it must start from the top. He supports the idea of an "intelligence czar" who would control all intelligence analysis within one office. That is the only way, he says, "to break with the past" -- to have one person in charge, instead of having intelligence work split off competitively among different squabbling agencies, with the Pentagon in control of the mass of the money.
I'm not sure. This man or woman would have to be a combination of Sigmund Freud, Agent 007, Lee Kuan Yew, Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Dalai Lama. I suppose it could happen, but I wouldn't count on it.
It would be better, I think, to form a group of leading scholars, historians, innovative political thinkers, philosophers and real people on the ground, such as foreign correspondents and international businessmen, into an advisory group to the president, the intelligence chiefs and the Pentagon. I would call them "The Unthinkables."
Real analyses
These kinds of real analyses -- of guerrilla groups, of terrorist mythologies, of new forms of warfare, not to speak of a genuine reading of Iraqi history -- are what those of us out in the world are thinking about -- and predicting -- all the time. (As early as 1985, I was predicting in my columns that the form of the new world would be the "disintegration" of nation-states. It didn't take much to figure that out at the time, but it was considered quite wacky by the frozen bureaucrats.)
Of course, no solution is perfect. Even when you get the best in a discipline, you can find someone such as Professor Bernard Lewis, long considered one of the great scholars of Islam, who sold out on the Iraq war because of his personal agenda on the Middle East.
Inner chaos
Instead of warning of the historical and inevitable inner chaos of Iraq, because he was linked politically to the neoconservatives' special agenda for the Middle East, he told countless meetings here that the Iraqis would welcome the Americans -- and democracy. When asked about this, he said that he had once had four Iraqi graduate students who were very talented. (And in the war-crazy fall of 2002, no one even challenged him.)
Still, our best strategy to change the mind-sets and bypass such special interest agendas is to bring real thinkers into that elusive, but crucial, process of institutionalizing the imagination. We cannot afford to proceed with the frozen bureaucratic tunnel vision that this report -- and our own experience -- illuminates.
Universal Press Syndicate