Who's tougher on terror?

Seeking to scuttle any probe before it could begin, the President's aides and his allies on Capitol Hill continued to stall the investigation by appealing to fear (and, rather brazenly, to patriotism). National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice argued that an investigation would endanger the country still further. "In the context of this ongoing war, it is extremely important to protect the sources and the methods and the information so that we can try and disrupt further attacks," she claimed. "The problem is that this is an act that is not finished. It is ongoing. We are still fighting a war on terrorism." Tom DeLay dove into the gutter immediately: "We will not allow our president to be undermined by those who want his job during a time of war." It was quite revealing that DeLay assumed a full investigation would undermine Bush.

Propelling the demand for an independent investigation were continuing pressures from organizations representing the families of the September 11 victims, combined with slowly leaking revelations about the incompetence of the FBI. The inconclusive results of an investigation by a joint congressional committee likewise gave momentum to that demand, which the public had supported from the beginning. Finally, in September 2002, the administration agreed to an independent commission, created by an amendment to the bill establishing the Department of Homeland Security. During intense negotiations with the amendment's sponsors, Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, the administration fought to gain control over the naming, staffing, and powers of the commission.

To the extent that they succeeded, the independent commission became a strange bipartisan hybrid that cannot issue a subpoena without approval of its chairman -- who happens to be a presidential appointee. In many respects, the commission as constituted is far less independent than similar entities set up after earlier national disasters such as Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, and the Challenger explosion. Or the independent counsels who probed every corner of the Clinton administration.

To make matters worse, the President immediately cast doubt on his own good faith when he appointed former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to chair the commission. The predictable reaction was outrage. Within weeks, the alleged war criminal, international corporate fixer, and inveterate liar resigned under a withering blast of editorial fire. Kissinger didn't want to reveal the corporate clients that might raise questions about conflict of interest. To replace him, Bush named a far blander choice: former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean. Nine months after the passage of the independent commission amendment, little apparent progress had been made. And the commission's meager funding was being held up by the White House.

To distract attention from the Bush administration's evident failure in dealing with al-Qaida, conservatives have pursued two separate but related offensives: defaming liberals and Democrats as "soft on terror," and blaming Bill Clinton for the September 11 attacks. Both are integral parts of Republican political strategy, but as a White House adviser, Rove leaves that kind of dirty work to others.

Naturally, Ann Coulter didn't let him down. In the first few pages of "Slander," this is what she says on the subject of the war on terror: "Here the country had finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism and they didn't want to fight it. They would have, except it would put them on the same side as the United States." Who didn't want to fight the war against terror? The Democrats who unanimously (with one exception) voted to support Bush's military action against the Taliban? Coulter also claims that "liberals urged compassion and understanding toward the terrorists," again without citing a single name or quotation.

Joining her in the smear campaign was former ultraleftist David Horowitz, the author of various articles and pamphlets counseling Republicans on political strategy. At least one of his booklets carried a personal endorsement from Rove, who had introduced Horowitz to George W. Bush.

In "How to Beat the Democrats," which appeared in 2002, Horowitz emphasized the supposed culpability of Democrats, particularly in the Clinton administration, for the September 11 catastrophe. He claimed that "mainstream Democrats were...significant players in the debacle of 9/11. And no one is more singularly responsible for America's vulnerability on that fateful day than the Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and his White House staff."

Like so much of what he feels compelled to say, Horowitz's advice was stark, simple, and demagogic. He told voters that their very lives could be endangered if they voted the wrong way: "This is a story the Republicans must tell the American people if they are to be warned about the dangers of putting their trust in the party of Bill Clinton by casting their votes for Democrats come November." Among conservatives rallying around Bush, there was little doubt that Clinton had known about al-Qaida's potential for destructive aggression and had "simply refused to do anything serious about the threat." Or so they said.

What these right-wing critics really knew about the years of American effort devoted to tracking and destroying al-Qaida was considerably less than they affected to know. The Republican attacks on Clinton -- at a moment when the nation was supposed to be unified and bipartisan -- gave off a peculiar smell. It was the odor of cover-up, as if spraying Clinton with bile were the only way to ensure that no one sniffed around the policy and administrative bungling of the Bush administration.

The most generous assessment of the Republican record in fighting terrorism is "mixed." Again, rhetoric obscures reality, with the assistance of the complaisant "liberal" media. Stereotypes of tough Republican daddies and soft Democratic mommies are irresistible to weak-minded journalists, who reinforce such cliches continuously. But recent history shows that it is conservatives, not liberals, whose attitude toward terrorism can turn squishy soft for political expediency.

The most notorious example is the Iran-Contra scandal, first exposed in 1986. At the center of that bizarre episode in conservative statesmanship was a scheme to sell high-tech missiles to the theocratic dictatorship governing Iran -- in exchange for that government's assistance in obtaining the release of American hostages by their kidnappers, the Iranian-controlled Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.

The conservative Republicans of the Reagan-Bush era spoke loudly about "fighting international terrorism." Their record was outstanding for its ineptitude, hypocrisy and politically motivated leniency: conniving in arms deals with the Iranian sponsors of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad; sponsoring secret attempts to secure the release of the Dawa'a terrorist prisoners from imprisonment in Kuwait; lifting sanctions on Chile despite the regime's refusal to extradite the perpetrators of a terror bombing in Washington, D.C.; favoring a Cuban terrorist mass murderer (Orlando Bosch) with presidential favors for domestic political reasons. Their record was an international disgrace. And they still have the gall to call their opponents "soft on terror."

When terrorists first tried to take down the World Trade Center with a truck bomb in February 1993, there was no organized outcry of recrimination against George Herbert Walker Bush, although he had left the Oval Office a scant six weeks earlier. Neither the incoming Clinton administration nor the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress tried to blame Bush for the intelligence failures that had allowed the perpetrators of that atrocity to conspire undetected for more than three years.

No liberal commentator pronounced the former President guilty of "criminal negligence," as conservatives immediately did in blaming Bill Clinton for the September 11 attacks. Using fabrications, falsehoods and half-truths, the opportunists of the right compiled an indictment of Clinton and the Democrats. Calling for "national unity" in one breath, they angrily assaulted Clinton in the next. To make their case, they had to erase his administration's extensive record of action against terrorism.

Next Page: Twisting Clinton's words, ignoring his record

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