No Stone Left Unturned

Election Day

Tuesday, November 2, 2004, 8:18am

Our stop at Framingham this morning is brief and I have a hunch the engineer is trying to make up time where he can. The train is running only five minutes off-schedule, and if he can shave a minute at each station and make good track speed in between he should be caught up by Route 128.

Norm tells me that yesterday’s missing train suffered a “malfunction” – a description I find a tad vague compared to what I normally hear from him, and can only guess that he’d prefer not to spread the reason around too much – like a wheel fell off one of the cars, or something like that.

I suppose no photography out this dingy window today. Just outside stands a sturdy sign with painted purple letters spelling words each about six inches tall – “West Natick”– and yet I can barely read this at all.

Underway, a warm glow reveals broken places in an otherwise solid gray cloud deck. For a moment the sun sneaks a peek through one small opening before clouds and carriages move in different directions. I normally prefer the north side away from the glare of the morning sun, but on a cloudy day like today it doesn’t matter.

Indeed today is Election Day, and I find it preposterous, yet true, that vast numbers of people will base their decisions on what most alleviates their sense of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Osama bin Laden of all people put his finger on it in a video tape released yesterday – al-Qaeda need only create a stir somewhere in the world and the Americans will spend tens of billions trying to quell a threat which does not exist – and I suppose by logical extension – elect those willing to chase such windmills.

Right after 9/11 I predicted zero, nada, nothing in the way of new attacks for years to come – not so much because of the security response – rather because the point of attacking the World Trade Center and Pentagon didn’t seriously hope to destroy our institutions. The point was to get our attention and send us into a mindless rage. Osama does not need an army. He needs only a video camcorder and a fast horse. Only when this country stops bombing Muslims will he need to attack more directly once again.

People are somewhat tolerant of uncertainty, but institutions abhor it and will spend themselves silly trying to wipe it out. So the way to hamper an institution like the United States government is to create a threatening situation that can never be wiped out, and then wait for the thing to entangle itself into a Gordian knot of its own making.

That is the tendency at least, though in the end cooler heads tend to prevail because faced with an uncertain threat versus the certainty of fiscal self-annihilation, somebody will usually say “enough!” After all, if organizations could never tolerate danger in any form, there would be no commerce in places like Israel.

The first mission of any organization is to survive. Yet few institutions understand how danger can never be driven to zero and how the only path through the valley of the shadow of uncertainty is to shift the odds towards safety within reason. Most instead fall prey to an inflexible orthodoxy and batter away at an impossible sense of security.

And this sort inflexibility always comes at a steep price.

Suppose we spent five trillion dollars on the fight against terrorism and placed every man woman and child to the task. Suppose also that we locked up every remotely suspicious character and built fortress walls around any asset of value. Even still, there would be an uncertain threat because somebody out there could attack by some cleaver method we had not considered. So we’d be back to square one with respect to an absolute sense of security while at the same time every other type of threat would be flourishing due to our neglect.

In the end the overall danger would be a whole lot worse.

And so given preferred objectives versus actual results, here’s the score thus far…

Osama  1

George 0