Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid

The events of Sept. 11, 2001 shook the very foundations of the US system. Unusually, however, someone has yet to pay the price. The standard practice has been for one official or another to submit his resignation whenever the government falls short of carrying out its job or fending off a catastrophe.

The government should have been taken to task, but Congress is only now forcing high-ranking officials to testify about what they knew or could have known about the attacks in New York and Washington in sometimes secret sessions.

No high-ranking official resigned because the event was much bigger than anything a single person could carry the blame for. By the same token, the investigation now is not so much about finger pointing as about identifying problems in the system that has sought to tackle terrorism for years.

The testimony of Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, who is more familiar than anyone with all the intelligence the government had access to prior to Sept. 11 reveals that Al-Qaeda was much better at planning ahead than the US government.

I do remember at least one announcement of a huge operation to be carried out against the United States, without indication of where or how. I don’t think that it entered anyone’s mind that the target could be inside the US. This was not because Al-Qaeda planners had no imagination but because they didn’t have the logistics — or so it was believed.

Without exception that legendary organization’s big operations around the world weren’t simple raids, they were all meticulously planned. Therein lies the US security organizations’ mistake. They saw Al-Qaeda as an angry religious movement, its longhaired and bushy-bearded members living in caves. But from the very beginning Al-Qaeda had been able to attract able minds — engineers, explosives and planning experts, as well as counterfeiters, spies, bankers and PR specialists.

If the Americans had realized the nature of Al-Qaeda and its ability, perhaps the confrontation would have been different, as would the results. Luckily for Bin Laden’s enemies, he did carry out the attacks that year and woke up the biggest power in the world to confront him on all levels.

The question that wasn’t put forward in the congressional inquiry is: What could Al-Qaeda possibly have done if it had delayed its attacks for two or three years? Because it is a hypothetical question, so is the answer: I believe that the damage would have been even greater and the confrontation more difficult.

Since George Bush has defined his reign by the war against what he calls terrorism, he may pay the price at the ballot box if Americans feel that he hasn’t done enough.