Letters.

Law in Order:

William Wechsler and I have worked on many of the issues he writes about in the Spring 2002 issue of The National Interest ["Law in Order: Reconstructing U.S. National Security Policy"], he from the last administration, I working in the U.S. Senate. We were then "friendly adversaries", divided more by the nuances of our agreements than over fundamental differences. It is in that spirit that I would quibble with his generally excellent and timely piece dealing with the underside of globalization and what we need to do about it.

There is much in what Mr. Wechsler says about problems in Federal law enforcement as a component in national security thinking. But, to be fair, Federal law enforcement for years took the threat of international crime seriously when the national security apparatus did not. Now that national security policymakers have seen the problem, they tend to act as if they discovered it. Few administrations have ever made money laundering a priority, for example, and few Treasury secretaries have ever dealt with it seriously. If that is now changing, it is not because law enforcement agencies did not perceive the problem; they just had trouble making anyone up top pay attention to it.

The real problem for law enforcement is how it defines success. Winning for law enforcement is prosecuting bad guys. Winning a war, however, does not always mean bringing bad guys to justice. There needs to be a shift in focus, consistent with civil liberties, that seeks to disrupt criminal or terrorist enterprises when prosecution is less of an option or less optimal. Such a shift will not be met necessarily with reorganization. I have been through too many reorganizations to have the faith in them that Mr. Wechsler seems to have. They are rarely on target and too often work on paper while creating havoc in practice. It is not simply the case that agencies or efforts are uncoordinated. The problem lies more in the fact that the core missions for different agencies are different and only overlap at the margins. We cannot wish away those realities or the political ones that excel at making hash from roast beef. Take the residency of the Coast Guard in the Department of Transportation as just one example. Mr. W echsler focuses on the Coast Guard's law enforcement mission. But its core constituency in Congress sees its core mission as maritime safety with a law enforcement component. That will not change by rearranging the deck chairs.

Mr. Wechsler is certainly right that the events of 9/11 enlarged our perspective on a hostile world and what exactly is hostile about it. We need a dialogue of willing listeners and able doers. Mr. Wechsler reminds us of our responsibilities.

WILLIAM OLSON

Republican Staff Director, U.S. Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control

Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge might have been able to accomplish something as the nation's first "Homeland Security Director" if he had demanded and achieved a restructuring of Federal law enforcement along the lines recommended by William Wechsler ("Law and Order", Spring 2002) as a prerequisite for taking the job.

But the "if" is a very big one. While Congress' recent vote to abolish the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) suggests some desire for change, it is not yet clear that either the administration or the Congress has an attention span long enough to do more than move around the deck chairs. A reorganization that restructures our existing baker's dozen of Federal law enforcement agencies into a mere trinity requires strategic imagination. But it also would require Federal law enforcement to respond to policymakers in a fashion that has been unprecedented since J. Edgar Hoover anointed himself America's cop-in-chief-for-life some 75 years ago.

Wechsler's plan suffers from the flaw of rationality. It would require parts of the government that have refused to work well together to join up bureaucratically to create a seamless network that marries and integrates national security, law enforcement, economic security and foreign policy goals. It would create a defense-in-depth to assist Federal investigations in operating within cross-border reality; make border enforcement an integrated whole; and give the security issues involved in protecting America their own much needed independence and focus. It would also require every part of existing U.S. law enforcement to share its existing sovereignty with others, a task only marginally more difficult than securing shared sovereignty in the West Bank.

During my six years working on international law enforcement issues for the State Department under the Clinton Administration, the hodge-podge of Federal departments and agencies working on transborder drugs, thugs, and terrorist issues spent as much energy fighting one another as they did fighting the bad guys. The Justice Department refused to tell the State Department when it was extraditing major drug kingpins, the FBI refused to tell Justice what it was doing against Russian organized crime, the Treasury Department refused to tell anyone what it was doing on money laundering in Mexico, Customs refused to tell Treasury what it was doing on anything, and the local offices of all of the above worked equally hard to keep their own headquarters out of the loop whenever possible.

For the Wechsler proposal to have a chance, the President would need to take on the mattress mice and announce a team even before securing the reforms. He might, for example, name the heads of the new three agencies on the day he announces the initiative to create them, relying on people who have already proven they can do the work. One effective team, for example, might consist of FBI Director Robert Mueller to head the new FIA, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge at BEA, and General Wayne Downing, currently the NSC's counter-terrorism chief, at the FPA. The President would present his restructuring as part of an emergency authorization to respond to terrorism, ask the Congress to vote it up or down in a fast track, and then use his anti-terrorism credentials to get his initiative through the ensuring bureaucratic food fight. No one should imagine, however, that reforming Federal...