For at least 50 American families it was a very rough week. A year ago when I wrote Faces on the eve of the fall of Baghdad there were just 119 families peering into their memories searching for the faces that they would never see again. Today there are more than 664 chairs that will forever remain empty at Easter. All over the world Christians gathered yesterday to celebrate the triumph of life over death in the resurrection of the Christ. For 664 American families that celebration was tempered with the reality that faith could not restore their sons and daughters to them. http://www.lindamclark.net/mingreport/poems/faces.htm

A year ago the Administration told us that its resort to war and the sacrifice of American lives was justified by the specter of an immanent threat posed by Saddam Hussein, his arsenal of fearsome weapons, and his support of international terrorism. Today the Administration is consumed with justifying, not its war policy toward Iraq, but rather its failure to act on the clear warnings that the immanent threat to America came from the Al Qaeda shadows and not Iraq.

The National Security Advisor, considering the failure of intelligence to prevent the Al Qaeda attacks says that the problem is structural. I agree. The problem is structural when an inflexible world view results in inflexible policy. In the summer of 2001 an inflexible assessment of America’s security situation prevented adjustments of policy and reactions to new information that did not support the view of the decision makers. In the autumn of 2002 and the spring of 2003 the inflexible view of Iraq caused America to squander its credibility as one after another of its justifications for the race to war was knocked down. Now, in the spring of 2004, the Administration’s inflexible approach to the construction of a post-Saddam Iraq, ignoring emerging resentment on the ground and discounting the will of the Iraqi resistance has resulted in the “tough week” that America experienced in this Easter season.

The 911 Commission, blessed with the clarity of hindsight, is asking an important question. Why did the resources of government and its intelligence services not detect the widespread and complex conspiracy that came together at New York and Washington? But there is a more important question that needs be asked. What is it about American government in general and this Administration in particular that prevents it from adjusting its policy to ever shifting conditions? Why can’t we see the reef we will run upon if we maintain the course we are on?

It is not, in the case of Al Qaeda; in the case of the Second Iraqi War; and on the ground in Baghdad and Fallujah; that the clues were not there to be seen and acted upon. It is that the decision makers who shape our policy – who chart our course – are blinded to them by their own inflexibility. Until they take the blinders off and open their eyes and minds to the need to adjust the course they charted then America is destined to experience more and tougher weeks.