Why America napped

David Halberstam talks about the prosperity of the '90s, when America thought it could afford to ignore the world -- and what we'll do now that we've woken up.

By Suzy Hansen

Oct. 1, 2001 | Veteran journalist and historian David Halberstam's latest book, "War in a Time of Peace," a detailed, revealing examination of America's foreign policy in the 1990s, doesn't mention the name Osama bin Laden. Not only is there no acknowledgement of a terrorist network called al-Qaida, there's no reference, even in passing, to the bombings of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, or America's retaliatory strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan.

It's an irresistible and sometimes unfair reflex to see everything through the lens of Sept. 11; the days when Americans considered terrorism a minor concern seem so remote. Halberstam's book is mostly about the Balkans, and to a lesser degree about Somalia and Haiti. In probing the conflicts there, Halberstam unearths a lot about how policies, personalities and problems at home affected how we reacted to the rest of the world. But now, what Halberstam decided not to tell and why he might have chosen to leave it out seem just as relevant.

The battles that America did opt to fight, after all, were engaged in hesitantly. As Halberstam explains, President Clinton and the rest of country aggressively embraced, with a sigh of relief, the end of the Cold War era and the promise of a new peacetime economy. Tragic results in Somalia, for example, only encouraged America to avoid skirmishes on unfamiliar soil and in countries and cities with names that the average citizen didn't recognize. Terrorist threats hardly registered on the broader radar screen. It's an era that, in one hour, we've finally been forced to leave behind.

Salon spoke to Halberstam from his home in New York about the news networks' culpability in downplaying America's foreign involvements, how Americans might respond to the possibility of a "long twilight struggle" and his confidence in democracy in the face of war.

Two weeks after the World Trade Center and Pentagon tragedies, the last page of your book is chilling and prophetic. You write, "The real danger to an open society like America was the ability of a terrorist, not connected to any sitting government, to walk into any American city." Then you conclude with this statement about the 1990s: "Foreign policy was not high on the political agenda, primarily because whatever the forces that might threaten the future of this country were, they were not yet visible."

It really isn't prophetic. It's common sense. There's all this talk about a missile shield which would protect us from people whom we are not vulnerable to and would not protect us from those we are vulnerable to. That has been self-evident for a long time. It's not geopolitical brilliance.

The Saturday after the bombings, Warren Rudman, co-chair of this study on security and vulnerability that no one paid any attention to, was being interviewed. A certain pious, "Why weren't our security and intelligence services more ready and why did they fail us?" attitude was coming from the anchorman. Rudman gently reminded him that when his report came out, the networks did very little with it. Then he pointed out that it could have been worse. It could have been biological. That is the way we live today, with no immunities.

Next page: Did Clinton drop the ball on terrorism?