The Richard Clarke firestorm and the public sessions of the 9/11 commission have gripped the nation, redefined the presidential campaign, and left the American people continuing to search for the truth behind the September 11 disaster. The families of the 9/11 victims in particular are looking for answers: how did the United States fail to anticipate and prevent Al Qaeda’s September 11 attacks and who is responsible for those failures?

The work of the 9/11 commission suggests that conclusive answers - and culprits - will be elusive. The public testimony and published findings to date point to an array of factors spanning multiple administrations, from bureaucratic stove piping across FBI, CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies, lack of information sharing, analysis and consolidation, the wall between foreign and domestic intelligence functions, and undermanned and underfunded intelligence services. For many Americans, 9/11 was the result of crossed signals, missed opportunities, and bad luck.

There is a strong argument to be made, however, that the massive national security disaster of September 11, 2001 was not primarily a failure of planning, bureaucratic coordination, or vigilance by either the Clinton or Bush administrations. Instead, the root cause of the American failure on 9/11 was psychological. That is, the American national security establishment simply could not absorb, process, and filter data regarding threats so fundamentally at odds with its post-Cold War mind set and conceptual framework. Perhaps more than anything else, the U.S. calamity of September 11 can be attributed to cognitive dissonance.

National Security Mind Games

Cognitive dissonance is no less a critical concept to the fields of foreign policy, national security and international relations than it is to psychology. In World Politics: Trend and Transformation (2001), Charles Kegley Jr. and Eugene Wittkopf defined it as “the general psychological tendency to deny discrepancies between one's preexisting beliefs (cognitions) and new information.” Defense analysts, intelligence specialists, political leaders and presidents can and do fall victim to pre-conceived views of sources and methods of national security threats. What psychologists call cognitive dissonance can for national decision makers disastrously result in “fundamental surprise”, with the sudden and dramatic recognition of the incompatibility between one's beliefs and reality.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War is perhaps the classic modern case of the calamitous impact of cognitive dissonance for a nation’s civilian and military leadership. Following the smashing victory in the Six Day War, the Israeli leadership shared a uniform view of the nature and manner of the threat posed by Egypt and Syria. Given the superiority of its air force, Israeli war planners took as a given that no future assault on Israel could commence without the mobilization of Egyptian and Syrian air forces and subsequent pre-emptive strikes against Israeli air bases.

The result in October 1973 was that the Israelis completely discounted the threat of an initial Arab ground attack; Golda Meir’s government was stunned by the simultaneous assaults in Sinai and the Golan Heights. Subsequent air attacks by Israel on Egyptian forces led to devastating losses for the Israelis, as the use by Sadat’s forces of the latest Soviet surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems caught them by surprise. Only through the staggering loss of over 3,000 killed and a massive infusion of American arms were the Israelis able to stem and then reverse the Egyptian gains. Israel’s very existence was imperiled by a fixed, unchanging conceptual model of the threats facing that nation, a model that was only shattered by the reality of the battlefield.

History is replete with other examples of national policy makers suffering cataclysmic military defeats and foreign policy setbacks due to unquestioned acceptance of “conventional wisdom” by security establishments. The 1930’s French government staked national survival on the Maginot line designed to repel a German assault on their shared frontier. The massive German invasion in 1940, of course, instead came through the Belgian Ardennes and the French were defeated in six weeks. The Japanese bombardment of Pearl Harbor stunned a United States that had not been attacked by a foreign power on its own soil since the War of 1812. Arguably, even the American tragedy in Vietnam resulted from cognitive dissonance, as Republican and Democratic administrations alike mistook a war of national liberation as part and parcel of a global Soviet campaign for communist domination.

1. National Security Mind Games
2. The American Post-Cold War Consensus: A Broken Model
3. Rational Leaders, Organizational Outputs, Bureaucratic Outcomes