How to Lose a War

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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.



-- Cherri (Jessam6@home.com), October 28, 2001

Answers

And I suppose your lover clinton could have done SO much better right?

Your shit gets old Cherri. It is typical liberal trash.

-- (oy@vhey.com), October 28, 2001.


I'd be seriously surprised if Cherri even voted for Bill Clinton in the last election, oy@vhey.

Now, just for fun, let's see how rational your response was.

Let's suppose your current employer made a series of blunders, went bankrupt and you became unemployed as a result. You and a fellow ex-employee are cleaning out your desks, and you start to recount the many bad decisions your idiot employer made that brought you to this pass. After a while listening to you, the other employee looks at you and asks... "I suppose you think Bill Clinton could have done a better job, bozo?"

If GW screws up, it is on his head. It doesn't matter if Clinton screwed up a million times worse - GW's screwups are still GW's screwups.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), October 28, 2001.


Little Nipper, how in the world would Cherri have voted for Clinton when he wasn't on the ballot? Last time I checked it seemed like it was Bush and Gore!

-- Boswell (fundown@thefarm.net), October 28, 2001.

Nipper:

You yourself have pointed out (and I agree) that this "war" is nearly impossible to fight, because it's so amorphous. We're not really sure who our enemies are -- is it the specific terrorists involved in the hijackings, is it the governments that support such terrorists, is it the militant Islam fringe? It's difficult to develop a battle plan without knowing exactly whom to target as the enemy.

Nor have we been much better at defining what "victory" might mean. Again, is it tracking down the specific terrorists involved? Is it discouraging governments from supporting terrorists? Is it acting to gain the support of moderate Muslims and thus marginalize the extremists and deprive them of a power base? And so on.

Now, I admit these are difficult issues to deal with, that there aren't any good answers nor any clearly correct policy directions. But Frank Rich isn't making the slightest effort trying to find some optimal (or even suboptimal) resolution to the real issues. He is simply applying highly slanted, partisan politics at what he hopes is a soft spot in the administration (of failing that, a soft spot in the minds of Cherri and her ilk, a straight no-brainer).

In essence, Frank Rich (much like Cherri) is *starting* with a pure hatred of Bush and all he presumably stands for (like big business and fundamentalist religion) and fabricating by careful selection a fantasy world whose sum is the result of omitting most of the parts. Either Rich is amazingly cynical, or simply *does not care* about what happened, considering it insignificant compared to the compelling need to win the next election. Rich's only game in town.

I don't know what our best response might be to what has happened. I'm sure I could poke as many holes as anyone else in *whatever* response we might make (or in none at all). I sincerely do not know whether Clinton could or would have done differently given the popular support for doing *something* that these attacks have galvanized. Still, I do not feel current circumstances are properly used as leverage to score points by political sniping. Rich reminds me of some soldiers in Vietnam who used a firefight as an opportunity to frag their own commanding officer. They were simply unable to adjust their priorities to the obvious circumstances.

Rich *does not care* what we're trying to accomplish. He makes it clear that to get rid of the hated Bush, he'd be willing to accept civilian deaths in the US *without limit*. I think this is a shame.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), October 28, 2001.


Flint, your arguments, cogent as they are, do not address my point, which was actually very simple: oy@vhey bringing up Clinton had absolutely no relevance to the article Cherri cut-and-pasted.

The reference to Clinton was a pure non sequitor. It was also that well-known and overused logical fallacy: the appeal to emotion. As far as the points Mr. Rich made (or tried to make), it makes no difference whether Bill Clinton is alive or dead, fiction or non-fiction, a god, a devil or a parakeet. He is out of the question - an irrelevancy to any of Rich's presumed points.

Or don't you agree?

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), October 28, 2001.



Nipper:

I agree. Clinton is irrelevant, per se. But politics (and the individuals who personify the political philosophies) are hardly irrelevant to Rich.

What I find illuminating is that here we have a long essay essentially arguing that Bush is bad because Bush is bad, so let's see what he did so we know what's wrong (and had he done the opposite, that would have been equally wrong). Let's badmouth his appointees ("P.R. gimmick man, Keystone Kops, etc.). Let's criticize as foolish (not ineffective, mind you. Stupid!) any act he takes. Whatever helps vent Rich's spleen is good enough for Cherri, right?

And here you are, finding nothing worth mentioning in Rich's long- winded irrelevance, but striking like a cobra at the equally irrelevant mention of Clinton by one of our anonymous airheads. So as razor-sharp as you are at noticing when someone misses the poing at Clinton's expense, you are uncharacteristically obtuse when someone does the same thing at Bush's expense, despite doing so at much greater length and rather absurdly at that (re-read Rich's last paragraph, for example).

Also, in answer to your observation on another thread (which has been placed into a huge font making a response there impractical): I do not feel the Afghan people have much control over the policies of their government -- it's not even a nominally representative system. But I doubt that the whereabouts and identities of the terrorists are known ONLY to the Afghan government, and a few leaks would go a long way. If US policies make such leaks impossible to commit, our politicians have become strangly forgetful of the entire art of politics...

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), October 28, 2001.


There is no such thing as an "innocent American". This is happening to us (and will keep happening to us) because Americans are stupid, arrogant and greedy, and deserve every bit of it. We have it coming, and it'll keep on coming until we learn our place in the world. "Superpower" is a totally meaningless word. When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
~Rudyard Kipling

-- Totally (disgusted@stupid.americans), October 28, 2001.

Flint, you characterize me as "...striking like a cobra..." against a stupid remark, when all I did was point out that it was a stupid remark. If that is a fair representation of my activity on this thread, then it applies with equal force to about 200 threads you have participated in, since I got here.

Would you accept that "cobra" characterization each time you criticized another poster? I will be happy to remind you each time in the future when you find a remark to be stupid and say so, if that is the case. Otherwise, let's agree that your "cobra" remark is somewhat prejudicial and overwrought and leave it at that.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), October 28, 2001.


Nipper:

I was just being colorful, and I don't grasp the point you intend by this sensitivity. I was simply pointing out that on this thread, the target of your observation was comparatively tiny, while the huge target Rich provides, you ignored. How peculiarly selective.

Hey, it's OK to be embarrassed when someone of your nominal political persuasion goes way overboard, completely losing sight of his objective in his zeal to score nearly-irrational points. I don't think it paints you in a good light to so pointedly ignore Rich's misplaced fanaticism. Your focus on my phrasing while ignoring the point I was trying to make is equally confusing.

So far, I've been in nearly complete agreement with you about this particular war. I'd like to hear more, because I consider your insights valuable. I know it might not bother you, but still it disappoints me when you confine your comments to the deliberately petty.

So, I'd like to know. What do you think would constitute "winning" this war, and how do you think we should achieve this?

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), October 29, 2001.


Actually, I though Rich's points were very well made. I did not notice Flint actually debating the issues, just smearing the character.

As usual, anyone who takes a swipe at Bush is met by someone who takes a swipe at Clinton, and then the remainder of the thread is about Clinton in one form or another - never a discussion about the original broadside at Bush.

-- FedUp (Asgood@sanyoneelses.com), October 29, 2001.



"Actually, I though[t] Rich's points were very well made." Points, you mean there were points somewhere in all this? Please for my reading pleasure enumerate them.

-- someone (who@doesnt.see), October 29, 2001.

"I was just being colorful, and I don't grasp the point you intend by this sensitivity."

I don't know... being compared to a venemous snake... it just seems to carry... um, somewhat negative connotations in my mind. However, it beats being compared to excrement or vomitus, so maybe I was being too sensitive.

"...it disappoints me when you confine your comments to the deliberately petty."

Hmmm. The pettiness was introduced by oy@vhey. I saw it scamper across my screen and I stepped on it. Purely reflexive.

Your disappointment over such a thing seems to indicate an equally sensitive nature to my own. We must be brothers under the skin, eh, Flint?

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), October 29, 2001.


Nipper:

Maybe you're right. Anyhow, I'd intended the cobra remark as a compliment, visualizing someone both quick and accurate. And I still marvel that your reflexes, so instinctive when one tiny claim scampers across your screen, remain somnolent even yet when the likes of Frank Rich lumbers and staggers across your field of vision, excreting genuinely venomous non sequiturs in great honking globs all the while. But perhaps you remain stunned?

In any case, back to the war. What would you suppose "winning" it might look like? And how might we achieve this? I'm sincerely curious, since I haven't been able to come up with any answers I'm satisfied with yet.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), October 29, 2001.


"What would you suppose 'winning' [the war] might look like? And how might we achieve this? I'm sincerely curious, since I haven't been able to come up with any answers I'm satisfied with yet."

In a normal war, winning is whatever removes the source of the threat. In this "war", we don't appear to have that option. Any fanatical opponent is certain to succeed, if the goal is simply to inflict harm.

I can't imagine any scenario as clean and simple as, for example, causing "the enemy" to surrender and sign a peace treaty. But we can probably figure out how to raise the cost of attacking us and increase the benefits of cooperation with us. Such a "solution" won't remove the threat or guarantee our security. Nothing could. It can alter the equation in our favor.

The bombs we are dropping in Afghanistan could be viewed as one way we are "raising the cost" of attacking us. But I am afraid that it will prove ineffective even at that modest aim.

In a nation as poor, backward and fatalistic as Afghanistan there is a huge amount of room for "increasing the benefits", but hardly any room for inflicting damage. If we fail to inflict heavy damage to the Taliban, we will only raise their prestige and encourage their contempt. In football parlance, we ran a sweep toward the near sideline instead of the wide part of the field.

I happen to think that the target of greatest opportunity is solving the "Palestinian problem." I don't care what kind of bribes or threats are needed - there has to be some way of creating a viable Palestinian state and settling the administration of Jerulsalem. This one act would neutralize more hostility toward the USA than any other possible action we could take. That makes it look worthwhile to me.

Just as a side thought, we need to hire a lot more Arabic speakers in the CIA. Muy pronto. We need to hire them in droves and then sort them out later to see which ones are keepers and which to throw back. Then we need to build up our intelligence capability in the Middle East.

I have no problem with temporarily increasing wiretap authority. Wiretaps are a legitimate tool for this sort of law enforcement at this time. Phones represent command and comtrol for a terrorist cell. Just as we needed to take away as much of their money as possible, we need to take away their phones and every other tool we can deny them.

If there is a terrorist in this country, I want them exceedingly nervous about every move they make. I want them twitching and turning in their sleep.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), October 29, 2001.


Nipper:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I agree that we need to make the terrorism business more expensive both for the terrorists and for their political and financial backers. For the terrorists themselves, maybe assassins might be more effective than bombs. For the politicians, I suppose we need some way for their constituencies (and even absolute dictators have constituencies) to suffer unacceptable losses, while we make it clear both what *caused* those losses, and how they can be avoided in the future (with policy changes).

For the financial backers, I think we understand this part fairly well. We are freezing assets, making their wealth unspendable. And here bombs help as well, since they destroy expensive infrastructure. And nobody holds political power without the support of the owners of the infrastructure.

However, yanking financial and political support from Israel is probably more expensive than our politicians can afford. The Jews in the US weild power way out of proportion to their numbers. You need only reflect that a German accent is STILL the universal signature of a villian in EVERY movie and TV show made to catch a glimpse of this power.

And with that kind of influence over the way things are depicted, you'll find that getting the media to be less sympathetic to Israel and more sympathetic to the Palestinians to be slightly more difficult than getting some of our forum Devout Christians to decide their god is a myth -- and for the same reason.

Otherwise, I agree that the one-sided US policy in the Middle East has been and will continue to be an aggravating factor.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), October 29, 2001.



"Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me."

I will treasure this moment.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), October 30, 2001.


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