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of 1973, Egypt and Syria certainly looked as if they were preparing to go to war. But, in the Middle East of the time, countries always looked as if they were going to war. In the fall of 1971, for instance, both Egypt’s president and its minister of war stated publicly that the hour of battle was approaching. The Egyptian army was mobilized. Tanks and bridging equipment were sent to the canal. Offensive positions were readied. And nothing happened. In December of 1972, the Egyptians mobilized again. The army furiously built fortifications along the canal. A reliable source told Israeli intelligence that an attack was imminent. Nothing happened. In the spring of 1973, the president of Egypt told Newsweek that everything in his country “is now being mobilized in earnest for the resumption of battle.” Egyptian forces were moved closer to the canal. Extensive fortifications were built along the Suez. Blood donors were rounded up. Civil-defense personnel were mobilized. Blackouts were imposed throughout Egypt. A trusted source told Israeli intelligence that an attack was imminent. It didn’t come. Between January and October of 1973, the Egyptian army mobilized nineteen times without going to war. The Israeli government couldn’t mobilize its army every time its neighbors threatened war. Israel is a small country with a citizen army. Mobilization was disruptive and expensive, and the Israeli government was acutely aware that if its army was mobilized and Egypt and Syria weren’t serious about war, the very act of mobilization might cause them to become serious about war.

Nor did the other signs seem remarkable. The fact that the Soviet families had been sent home could have signified nothing more than a falling-out between the Arab states and Moscow. Yes, a trusted source called at four in the morning, with definite word of a late-afternoon attack, but his last two attack warnings had been wrong. What’s more, the source said that the attack would come at sunset, and an attack so late in the day wouldn’t leave enough time for opening air strikes. Israeli intelligence didn’t see the pattern of Arab intentions, in other words, because, until Egypt and Syria actually attacked, on the afternoon of October 6, 1973, their intentions didn’t form a pattern. They formed a Rorschach blot. What is clear in hindsight is rarely clear before the fact. It’s an obvious point, but one that nonetheless bears repeating, particularly when we’re in the midst of assigning blame for the surprise attack of September 11.

2.

Of the many postmortems conducted after September 11, the one that has received the most attention is The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the F.B.I. and C.I.A. Failed to Stop It by John Miller, Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell. The authors begin their tale with El Sayyid Nosair, the Egyptian who was arrested in November of 1990 for shooting Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, in the ballroom of the Marriott Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Nosair’s apartment in New Jersey was searched, and investigators found sixteen boxes of files, including training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School; copies of teletypes that had been routed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; bomb-making manuals; and maps, annotated in Arabic, of landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and the World Trade Center. According to The Cell, Nosair was connected to gunrunners and to Islamic radicals in Brooklyn, who were in turn behind the World Trade Center bombing two and a half years later, which was masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, who then showed up in Manila in 1994, apparently plotting to kill the pope, crash a plane into the Pentagon or the CIA, and bomb as many as twelve transcontinental airliners simultaneously. And who was Yousef associating with in the Philippines? Mohammed Khalifa, Wali Khan Amin-Shah, and Ibrahim Munir, all of whom had fought alongside, pledged a loyalty oath to, or worked for a shadowy Saudi Arabian millionaire named Osama bin Laden.

Miller was a network-television correspondent throughout