On August 6, 2001, George W. Bush was given what may be the most infamous daily intelligence brief ever received by a US president. It was titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” and it included details on the activities of al-Qaeda operatives in the US, including threats to hijack US aircraft. In response, Bush did virtually nothing. And then, a little over a month later, those predictions came stunningly true with the 9/11 attacks.
Bush would not be the last leader to ignore such a warning. Decades into the “war on terror,” it’s clear that political leaders, as well as some of the world’s most powerful militaries and intelligence, still underestimate the ability and ambition of extremist militant groups to carry out large-scale attacks. There have now been three major instances of such failures in the past decade.
Multiple news outlets, including the New York Times and Haaretz, have now reported that Israeli intelligence agencies had provided officials with extraordinary details about the plans for what became the October 7 attack more than a year before it was carried out. Just a day before the attack, the CIA reported unusual activity by Hamas in Gaza, suggesting an imminent military operation. Hamas militants reportedly trained for the attack in all but plain sight less than a mile from the Israeli border.
Yet Israeli officials appear to have dismissed these warnings, believing the group had scaled back its military ambitions to the occasional rocket barrage. Instead of reinforcing the border with Gaza, they chose to focus Israel’s military assets on other threats, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the increasingly restive West Bank. Ultimately, some 1,200 Israelis would pay for this miscalculation with their lives, as would thousands more Palestinian civilians in the war that has followed.
But the October 7 attack was far from the first instance of this kind of strategic surprise from an extremist militant group in recent years….
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