Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Osama and Saddam pose real threats, but the Bush administration may be too incompetent -- and too arrogant -- to stop them.
Oct 11, 2002 | Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that those who know about the war plan for Iraq aren't talking, and those who are talking don't know. So I'm grateful to be invited here to deliver this first lecture at the Naval War College tonight. I guess the Secretary was busy. Rumsfeld has more one-liners than David Letterman these days.
A reporter friend of mine who doesn't normally cover the Pentagon beat, but who did cover it in the 1980s and knows something about the military, ended up being parachuted into the assignment after Sept. 11 last year to beef up coverage for his newspaper. Not having paid much attention to the subject matter for more than a decade, he told me how stunned he was at the chumminess and atmosphere of the daily briefing. If you've watched a briefing on C-SPAN, you know that when Rumsfeld is in the room, the place is rocking: the secretary, to his credit, appears more often before a hostile audience than any other secretary in modern memory. Cameras wait for the pithy remarks. Reporters laugh at Rumsfeld's quips and evasions. Hey, the guy is clever, and he clearly has come into his own as Secretary of War.
But it is war we are talking about. It isn't funny. It is not a partisan political issue. And no one in the current administration has the right to claim that Democrats or reporters or plain old vanilla citizens care less about American security that they do. I'm not talking about whether Rumsfeld or Cheney or Bush feels some obligation to divulge the war plan or spill secrets. They don't and it doesn't bother me at all that they don't. But there is something very wrong with the chumminess itself: On the one hand, the news media is captive to a 1,500-pound gorilla who has marked his territory and created his own reign of terror over a leaking ship called the Pentagon. The media tries to get the story to fulfill their mission, but in the presence of the great one, reporters can't be too aggressive or offensive or their access might be taken away. In theory. As another friend of mine in the media said: I don't have access anyhow so it doesn't matter if they punish me. But you understand that there is a certain dependency in the relationship here. So the chumminess is so strange because we are at war. But it is in what Bush and Rumsfeld say that I think makes them terribly wrong-headed and inappropriately arrogant. Before Sept. 11, this arrogance manifested itself in turning the United States' back on its treaty obligations, in pooh-poohing a military presence overseas, in condemning nation-building, even in ignoring terrorism as a priority.
When the attacks on Sept. 11 occurred, the administration didn't think it needed to muster the "evidence" it had about Osama bin Laden for the American public or the rest of the world. Let me be clear: It wasn't as if there wasn't evidence. Any sane person in the public now knows that al-Qaida was responsible and that it seeks to do us great harm. The problem is that the Bush team feels that it doesn't need to convince anyone of what it is doing. Its attitude is that there is such a grave threat to America, and that the threat is so different than any we've face in the past, that they, the custodians of our national security, not only are doing what is right, that only they know the truth, and moreover, that they have no obligation to convince the American public, that no one has a right to question them.
The Bush team's attitude is the same now when it comes to Iraq: The American public is supposed to consent to the use of force but the administration doesn't think it needs to "convince" the public of its certainty about the need for, or the method of, going to war. They seem to think it is enough to just repeat that Saddam Hussein is evil, that he is pursuing weapons of mass destruction, that he supports international terrorism, and therefore he has to go. I suspect that the administration has plenty of "evidence" about the Iraqi regime's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. I suspect if the administration made its case that the American public and the Congress and even most of the world would consent and support military action. I think what we are talking about here the attitude, an atmosphere in which the Bush inner circle believes that it knows what is best, and that it won't be forced into having to deign to make its case, particularly not if pushed by foreigners or the United Nations or the Congress or the evil institution of the liberal media.
Again, let me make my position clear: I believe that Iraq is a danger to its people, to the region, and to the United States. There is probably even tippy-top secret intelligence to connect Iraq to al-Qaida, maybe not specifically with regard to Sept. 11, but certainly over the years. No doubt there are al-Qaida operatives in Iraq today. On the one hand, it would be such a home run to just lay out the case: so why not reveal it? The answer I think is not that the Bush administration fears heading down a slippery slope of answering too many questions or feels like it needs to protect intelligence sources and methods; it is more again the mindset of the administration that it just doesn't have to, and won't, justify its actions.
So let me get this straight. The Bush team failed to predict the events of Sept. 11. Score one for bin Laden. They weren't competent enough to detect or stop what happened that day. Score two and three. The end result of Osama bin Laden's war is that our economy is in the toilet, that the airline industry is dying -- a pretty good achievement if you head a terrorist cell that wants to put the hurt to America. Score four. We've been at war for almost a year in Afghanistan and around the globe and the Bush administration didn't choose a smart enough strategy to stop bin Laden and the Taliban leadership from either escaping, or at least they can't prove that these dangerous people were killed. Score five and six. It seems today that as many if not more people hate us in those hopeless sectors of the Islamic world where the terrorists originate. Score seven for bin Laden.
The bad guys have arguably done fairly well under this administration, and there are a lot of questions about strategy and ultimate outcomes in Iraq, and we are supposed to accept blindly that the administration knows what it is doing?
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