QuitTheirClogs
Trustworthy Freedom Fighter
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
Posts: 630
Location: Manchester
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 Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 1:06 am Post subject: |
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Commencement Address at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point
Remarks by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Michie Stadium, West Point, NY, Saturday, June 02, 2001
| Quote: | Extensive scientific research has demonstrated that on an average day in June, the average human brain is capable of remembering at most one thought from a commencement speech. But since today is cooler than average, and West Pointers are definitely above average, I will challenge you to think this morning about two words: "surprise" and "courage."
This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of a military disaster whose name has become synonymous with surprise—the attack on Pearl Harbor. Interestingly, that "surprise attack" was preceded by an astonishing number of unheeded warnings and missed signals. Intelligence reports warned of "a surprise move in any direction," but this made the Army commander in Honolulu think of sabotage, not attack. People were reading newspapers in Hawaii that cited promising reports about intensive Japanese diplomatic efforts, unaware that these were merely a charade. An ultra-secret code-breaking operation, one of the most remarkable achievements in American intelligence history, an operation called "Magic," had unlocked the most private Japanese communications, but the operation was considered so secret and so vulnerable to compromise that the distribution of its product was restricted to the point that our field commanders didn’t make the "need-to-know" list. And at 7 a.m. on December 7th, at Opana radar station, two privates detected what they called "something completely out of the ordinary." In fact, it was so out of the ordinary that the inexperienced watch officer assumed it must be friendly airplanes and told them to just forget about it.
Yet military history is full of surprises, even if few are as dramatic or as memorable as Pearl Harbor. Surprise happens so often that it’s surprising that we’re still surprised by it. Very few of these surprises are the product of simple blindness or simple stupidity. Almost always there have been warnings and signals that have been missed--sometimes because there were just too many warnings to pick the right one out, sometimes because of what one scholar of Pearl Harbor called "a poverty of expectations"—a routine obsession with a few familiar dangers.
This expectation of the familiar has gotten whole governments, sometimes whole societies, into trouble. At the beginning of the last century, the British economist Norman Angell published a runaway best seller that must have drawn the attention of professors and cadets of West Point at that time. Angell argued that the idea that nations could profit from war was obsolete. It had become, as he titled his book, The Great Illusion. International finance, he argued, had become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that it had rendered war unprofitable.
One of Angell's disciples, David Starr Jordan, the President of an institution on the West Coast called Stanford University, argued that war in Europe, though much threatened, would never come. "The bankers," he said, "will not find the money for such a fight; the industries will not maintain it; the statesmen cannot. There will be no general war." Unfortunately for him, he made that prediction in 1913. One year later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand fell to an assassin’s bullet, plunging Europe into a war more terrible than any that had come before it. The notion of the Great Illusion yielded to the reality of the Great War.
One hundred years later, we live, once again, in a time of great hopes for world peace and prosperity. Our chances of realizing those hopes will be greater if we use the benefit of hindsight to replace a poverty of expectations with an anticipation of the unfamiliar and the unlikely.
By doing so… |
_________________
Simon - http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/
David Ray Griffin - 9/11: the Myth & the Reality
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-275577066688213413 |
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