The catalog of miscues by the FBI that allowed potential Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad to board the Emirates Airlines flight for Dubai has prompted many critics to call the Obama Administration more “lucky” than “good” in capturing the suspect. Add to this the comical ineptness of Shahzad himself – and the underwear bomber on Christmas – and a pattern of criticism emerges: we’ve been lucky and successful in our recent fight against terrorism in spite of our bungling.
There is certainly some truth to this. The Christmas bomber should have been tagged earlier and not allowed to board the flight in Amsterdam. And the Times Square case has already revealed numerous holes in the no-fly protocol. In two high-profile, potential mass casualty events, we have been lucky (we weren’t so lucky at Fort Hood but the death toll was relatively small compared to other incidents).
But is that really a serious criticism? The old saying goes, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” And this aphorism actually has a lot of explanatory power.
In the history field we call the seemingly random collection of events that coincide at a particular place and time “contingency.” Just as the best-laid battle plans are abandoned after the first shot is fired, so too do most complicated historical events follow a haphazard, non-linear process that veers toward complete randomness. An example of this I use to explain to my students is the causation of 9/11. Of all the explanations for 9/11, the one factor that NO student ever brings up – the beautiful weather that morning – is always left out. Yet, in the midst of hurricane season, there was a very real chance that poor weather could have delayed one or more of the ill-fated flights that Tuesday morning and, in the process, derailed the entire terror scheme. Yes, a thunderstorm could have prevented 9/11 and the rest of history would have looked very different.
But this explanation is deeply unsatisfying. For one, it removes nearly all human agency from the picture. Second, and more importantly, it absolves the historical actors of any causal responsibility. In other words, we need somebody to blame for the failures that allowed 9/11 to happen so that we can “learn our lessons,” and perhaps alter our approach so as to avoid that fate again. This is true for 9/11 as it is for the Civil War, World War I (a classic case of contingency re: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand), or just about any other major or minor event in history. Sometimes there just is no singular historical cause. There are only narratives that we find compelling for their larger moral and didactic value.
In fact, contingency goes a long way toward explaining why the Times Square bomb failed. For one, some of the precautions put in place since 9/11 DID work – most notably a widely marketed “See something, say something” campaign that empowered a street vendor to alert authorities at the site of a smoking car. The rapid response of the NYPD and FBI – bungling notwithstanding – was also a product of post-9/11 security improvements.
But there was a lot of luck too. Had Shahzad not been an incompetent fool, all the vigilance would have been for naught and hundreds of people would have died. We were lucky. We often are.
My point here is simply that we have to account for contingency – the millions of small things that could happen ever so differently – when explaining why something catastrophic did or didn’t happen. (Of course, the same luck may have run out in the oil spill as procedures that may have worked 999 times out of 1,000 unexpectedly failed on the Deepwater Horizon). This isn’t a call to fatalism, mind you. We can help to manage or even create our luck by increasing the odds that we will avoid catastrophe. We can improve procedures, heighten vigilance, and apply our resources in ways that we failed to do before. These actions reduce the likelihood of catastrophe.
But they don’t eliminate it. And as has been said many times, we have to succeed in preventing a terrorist attack every time. The terrorists only have to succeed once. And it may just be a matter of luck that stands between a three-day blogswarm on Memorandum and a world-historic, mass casualty event. As historians, analysts and citizens, we must come to grips with that.