Acting Responsible

Connoisseurs of the ritual known as "accepting full responsibility" will surely grade Obama a mere B for his performance Thursday at his White House press conference.

"Ultimately, the buck stops with me," Obama said, apropos terror's near Christmas Day miss on Northwest Flight 253. "As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility."

First strike against Obama's speechwriter is the weasel use of "ultimately," not to mention the mawkish use of "solemn." Second strike is his habitual dive into "systemic failure," as he termed it earlier in the week. Everyone knows that systemic failure — which Obama has been hawking all week — spells out as "No one is to blame. This is bigger than all of us." That's the phrase's singular beauty.

I give John Brennan low marks, too. "I told the president today I let him down," said Obama's top counterterrorism aide, who followed his boss at the press briefing. OK so far. Exciting, even. In medieval Japan, he would have stuck a sword in his stomach at this point. Not Brennan. "I am the president's assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, and I told him I will do better and we will do better as a team."

The problem with all the gabble about systemic failure and with not making Brennan or at least the head of the U.S. embassy in Lagos resign is that it reminds people that Obama hasn't got much of a spine; also that systemic failures are impossible to fix within the system's terms, a judgment wonderfully ratified by Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano's insistence Dec. 27 that "the system worked." America's defenses against terror fouled up Dec. 25, 2009, for the same reasons they fouled up Sept. 11, 2001, even though the 9/11 attacks were followed by vast bureaucratic upheavals and searching scrutinies of intelligence procedures.

Now Obama is listing the orders he's issued to improve interagency cooperation: expand the Watch List, enlarge the overall terror database, train more security personnel at airports. It fulfills the first law of reactive politics: Do something. Issue orders. Look busy. But beyond that, will it stop the next bomber?

It was Napolitano herself, formerly governor of Arizona, who said of the wall being built to stop illegal migrants crossing the southern border, "You show me a 50-foot wall, and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border. That's the way the border works." By the same token, show me a top red-alert urgent intelligence report, and I'll show you 100 other red-alert intelligence reports piled on top of it. Show me the 16 agencies that make up the "U.S. Intelligence Community," plus tactical military intelligence and security organizations, plus those responsible for security responses to transnational threats including terrorism, cyber warfare and computer security, narcotics trafficking and international organized crime, and I'll show you bureaucratic rivalry and confusion, buck-passing, active sabotage of rival agencies, incompetence, sloth and all the sins and inefficiencies familiar to anyone who has ever read a decent work of history about such matters.

Add to all this to the fact that no one "responsible" ever does have to pay any sort of price.

A lot of people lost their lives Sept. 11, 2001, but so far as I can recall, not one lost his job for letting it happen. No lives at all were lost Dec. 25, 2009, but no jobs lost either, from Brennan on down. Maybe there's progress. The lowly TSA guard who didn't notice that man going through the "No Entry" gate to give his girlfriend another goodbye kiss at Newark Airport (mass panic, total shut-down) has been placed on leave.

Now there's an avalanche of punditry about Britain's Islamic minority as the petri dish in which toxic cultures of militant Islam flourish and multiply. At this rate, they'll soon be deploying the Delta Force in Tower Hamlets, east London, and assassinating imams.

As noted here last week, the petri dish for terror is U.S. national policy, abetted by junior partners in the U.K., France and Germany: widening attacks on Afghanistan, an unfolding record of torturing captives to death since 2001, full support for Israel's onslaughts on Palestinians and calculated mass murder. It's scarcely surprising that we've now had this terror bid in the new Age of Obama, and a supposed swerve into rationality. The swerve has been the other way and guess what — the Muslim world has noticed.

What words can a radical imam in the U.K. or Yemen have to offer as incitement to attack America as vividly persuasive as the policies adopted by Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, expanding the war in Afghanistan, cheerleading for Israel and — it turns out — initiating a dirty war in Yemen? When the U.S. Congress on Nov. 4 last year voted 334 to 36 to condemn the Goldstone Report for its charge that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, how many young Muslims exclaimed, "That does it," and headed for their local Terrorist recruiting office?

How the terrorists — al-Qaida or some cognate organization — must be exulting! All that has to be done is to get someone on a plane bound for a U.S. city, with explosive deployed on or in his person. The carrier doesn't need even to successfully detonate the bomb, just be discovered. Result: political hysteria in the U.S. — another savage blow to the aviation industry and tourism here in the Homeland. The latest U.S. Department of Commerce statistics show a continued drop in foreign visitors to the U.S. Since 9/11/2001, there's been a 17 percent decline — 60 million tourists. A survey concludes a negative impression of the U.S. is the primary reason for this decline. The wearisome new security screenings, with travelers fretting about TSA guards chortling lewdly over full-body scans, will accelerate that trend.

It's no solution to requisition bigger and better x-ray machines at points of departure and entry, to expand watch lists and computer databases. Obama promised change, in his campaign and in Cairo. So far as the Islamic world is concerned, he's betrayed that promise. That's the systemic failure.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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