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Defense Writer Gold Got It Right Before 9/11

With all the recent media attention that has been given to the G-men memos, secret intelligence reports that vaguely or clearly detailed the terrorist action that came to be known as 9/11, it gives me great pleasure to point out an unknown local author named Philip Gold who also predicted the catastrophe.
Here in Seattle we have a man who, in a pair of pieces for Washington Law & Politics last year, predicted September 11 with chilling precision. The columns warned against the rise of militant Islam and correctly predicted the advent of mass terror on American soil as a result of two incompatible interests/ideologies meeting head on.

This coming conflict, Gold said, “may not pose a mortal danger by the standards of the Axis or the old Soviet Union,” but the threat was real and imminent nevertheless. And “trials and treaties, press releases, self-righteous rhetoric and an occasional symbolic retaliation” weren’t going to cut it or stop the conflict from blowing up into “something far larger and far worse.” Gold concluded the second column, published in August 2001 (about the time Bush learned of a possible terrorist plot while on vacation in Texas), by saying, “And as we fill the body bags, what next?”

As Gold’s new book, Against All Terrors: This People’s Next Defense, demonstrates, this was at a time when the consensus America was drifting toward was that terrorism is what happens to other people. Former State Department official Larry Johnson penned an op-ed for the New York Times in July of 2001 arguing that “Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism,” and unnecessarily so. It was “not the biggest security challenge confronting the United States and it should not be portrayed that way.”

In a parenthetical remark, Gold notes that Johnson “became a post 9/11 television commentator” on national outlets from PBS to CNN. To call this surprising would be an understatement. It’s a bit like turning to Y2K doomsayers (like Paul Schell) for insights into future trends in technology. That Gold himself, a fellow at Seattle’s Discovery Institute, has been relegated to occasional slots on KING 5 and NorthWest Cable News has got to rank as some kind of bizarre historical injustice.

It’s also a shame because Gold just might be worth listening to. Unlike many conservatives, he doesn’t worship the military or have messianic illusions about what it means to project power abroad. And unlike most commentators, he tends to know whereof he speaks.

For instance: Remember the Gulf War military? The force of strength that hawks pine for a return to? It’s useless, says Gold, or at least horribly overwrought. The U.S. Army could have handled Iraq’s army with “five armored brigades of a few thousand men each, not five divisions totaling a hundred thousand or more.” What’s worse, the Army “knew they could. But to admit it would be to justify further cuts to an Army whose strength dropped by half during the nineties.” Before September 11, even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was fighting Pentagon brass over this very issue. Congress’ shoveling of more money at defense than the Bush administration says it knows how to spend has not made this reform any easier.

Make no mistake, Gold is by no means a peacenik. He wants a military capable of delivering crushing blows to whatever and whomever threatens his country’s interests, and he wrote Against All Terrors in the hope that he could help the uninitiated understand the issues that will be encountered as we transition to this next mode of defense. In a word, Gold has real substance, and is worth reading because some of his ideas actually penetrate the darkness of this new and unknown territory called the 21st century.

“We are enamored. Self enamored. And throughout the Wasted Nineties, there raged and sputtered a debate of sorts over America’s ‘Purpose’ now that we’d become omnipotent,” Gold writes with a wry twist. Now that we know otherwise, it would be nice if the national media could be roused to recognize the man who got it right, and the crystal ball he rode in on.