| Subj: | [surfingtheapocalypse] How to Lose a War |
| Date: | 10/27/01 6:43:46 AM Pacific Standard Time |
http://www.nytimes.com
October 27, 2001
How to Lose a War
By FRANK RICH
Welcome back to Sept. 10.
The "America Strikes Back" optimism that surged after
Sept. 11 has now been stricken by the multitude of ways we're losing the
war at home. The F.B.I. has proved more effective in waging turf battles
against Rudy Giuliani than waging war on terrorism. Of the more than 900
suspects arrested, exactly zero have been criminally charged in the World
Trade Center attack (though one has died of natural causes, we're told, in
a New Jersey jail cell). The Bush team didn't fully recognize that a second
attack on America had begun until more than a week after the first casualty.
The most highly trumpeted breakthrough in the hunt for anthrax terrorists
- Tom Ridge's announcement that "the site where the letters were mailed"
had been found in New Jersey - proved a dead end. And now the president is
posing with elementary-school children again.
Given that this is the administration that was touted
as being run with C.E.O. clockwork, perhaps it should be added to the growing
list of Things That Have Changed Forever since Sept. 11. But let's not be
so hasty. Not everything changes that fast - least of all Washington. The
White House's home-front failures are not sudden, unpredictable products
of wartime confusion but direct products of an ethos that has been in place
since Jan. 20.
This is an administration that will let its special
interests - particularly its high-rolling campaign contributors and its noisiest
theocrats of the right - have veto power over public safety, public health
and economic prudence in war, it turns out, no less than in peacetime. When
anthrax struck, the administration's first impulse was not to secure as much
Cipro as speedily as possible to protect Americans, but to protect the right
of pharmaceutical companies to profiteer. The White House's faith in tax
cuts as a panacea for all national ills has led to such absurdities as this
week's House "stimulus" package showering $254 million on Enron, the reeling
Houston energy company (now under S.E.C. investigation) that has served as
a Bush campaign cash machine.
Airport security, which has been enhanced by at best
cosmetic tweaks since Sept. 11, is also held hostage by campaign cash: As
Salon has reported, ServiceMaster, a supplier of the low-wage employees who
ineptly man the gates, is another G.O.P. donor. Not that Republicans stand
alone in putting fat cats first. In a display of bipartisanship, Democrats
- lobbied by Linda Hall Daschle, the Senate majority leader's wife - joined
the administration in handing the airlines a $15 billion bailout that enforces
no reduction in the salaries of the industry's C.E.O.'s even as they lay
off tens of thousands of their employees.
To see how the religious right has exerted its own
distortions on homeland security, you also have to consider an administration
pattern that goes back to its creation - and one that explains the recent
trials of poor Tom Ridge.
Mr. Ridge is by all accounts a capable leader - a successful
governor of a large state (Pennsylvania) who won the Bronze Star for heroism
in Vietnam. A close friend of George W. Bush, he should have been in the
administration from the get-go, and was widely rumored to be a candidate
for various jobs, including the vice presidency. But after being pilloried
by the right because he supports abortion rights, he got zilch. Instead of
Mr. Ridge, the administration signed on the pro-life John Ashcroft and Tommy
Thompson - who have brought us where we are today.
The farcical failures of these two cabinet secretaries
are not merely those of public relations - though Mr. Thompson often comes
across as a Chamber of Commerce glad- hander who doesn't know his pants are
on fire, and Mr. Ashcroft often shakes as if he's not just seen great Caesar's
ghost but perhaps John Mitchell's as well. Both have a history of letting
politics override public policy that dates to the start of the administration.
They've seen no reason to reverse their partisan priorities even at a time
when the patriotic duty of effectively fighting terror should be their No.
1 concern.
Pre-Sept. 11, Mr. Thompson, in defiance of science,
heartily lent his credibility to the Bush administration's stem cell "compromise"
by going along with its overstatement of the viability and diversity of the
stem cell lines it would deliver to researchers. Post-Sept. 11, he destroyed
his credibility by understating the severity of the anthrax threat, also
in defiance of science. Now he maintains that the $1.5 billion the administration
is requesting to plug the many holes in our public health system - almost
all of it earmarked for stockpiling pharmaceuticals, not shoring up local
hospitals - is adequate for fighting bioterrorism. This, too, is in defiance
of all expert estimates, including that of the one physician in the Senate,
the Republican Bill Frist.
It should also be on Mr. Thompson's conscience that
for the first two weeks of the anthrax crisis he kept the federal government's
house physician - David Satcher, the surgeon general and a much-needed honest
broker of public health - locked away, presumably because Dr. Satcher, a
Clinton appointee, became persona non grata in the Bush administration for
issuing a June report on teenage sexuality that angered the religious right.
Only after Mr. Ridge arrived on the scene was the surgeon general liberated
from the gulag.
As for Mr. Ashcroft, he has gone so far as to turn away
firsthand information about domestic terrorism for political reasons. Planned
Parenthood, which has been on the front lines of anthrax scares for years
and has by grim necessity marshaled the medical and security expertise to
combat them, has sought a meeting with the attorney general since he took
office but has never been granted one. This was true not only before Sept.
11 but, says Ann Glazier, Planned Parenthood's director of security, remains
true - even though her organization, long targeted by such home-grown Talibans
as the Army of God, has a decade's worth of leads on "the convergence of
international and domestic terrorism."
Ms. Glazier found the sight of Mr. Ashcroft and other
federal Keystone Kops offering a $1 million reward for anthrax terrorists
a laughable indication of how little grasp they have of the enemy. "Religious
extremists don't respond to money," she points out. Such is the state of
the F.B.I., she adds, that one agent told a clinic to hold onto a suspect
letter for a couple of days "because we have so many here we're afraid we're
going to lose it" (perhaps among the Timothy McVeigh documents).
If either the attorney general or the secretary of health
and human services inspired anything like the confidence that, say, Mayor
Giuliani does, there wouldn't have been a need to draft Mr. Ridge. Even so,
he's mainly a P.R. gimmick - a man who should have been in the administration
in the first place reduced to serving as a fig leaf for lightweights. As
director of homeland security, he's allegedly charged with supervising nearly
50 government agencies - so far with roughly a dozen staff members. When
asked to define Mr. Ridge's responsibilities, Ari Fleischer said on Wednesday
that it was "a very busy coordination job," but so far Mr. Ridge is mainly
sowing still more confusion.
The one specific duty that he has claimed - in an interview
with Tom Brokaw - was that he'd be the one "making the phone call" to the
president to shoot down any commercial airliner turned into a flying bomb
by hijackers. That presumably comes as news to Donald Rumsfeld, who made
no provision for any homeland security czar in the Air Force chain of command
he publicly codified days after Mr. Ridge's appointment.
Since the administration tightly metes out the news
from Afghanistan, we can only hope that the war there is being executed more
effectively than the war here - even as Mr. Rumsfeld and his generals now
tell us that the Taliban, once expected to implode in days, are proving Viet-
Cong-like in their intractability. The Wall Street Journal also reported
this week that "instead of a thankful Afghan population, popular support
for the Taliban appears to be solidifying and anger with the U.S. growing."
Maybe we're losing that battle for Afghan hearts and
minds in part because the Bush State Department appointee in charge of the
propaganda effort is a C.E.O. (from Madison Avenue) chosen not for her expertise
in policy or politics but for her salesmanship on behalf of domestic products
like Head & Shoulders shampoo. If we can't effectively fight anthrax,
I guess it's reassuring to know we can always win the war on dandruff.