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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Having come into office boasting about its distrust of government, the Bush administration fell into rhetorical and mental confusion on the morning of 9/11. If he had been completely faithful to his principles, Bush would have mechanically announced: "It is your money, and therefore you cannot have airport security." But he obviously could not say anything of the kind. That is, a gap opened up between an irresistible public need for government action and the administration's ideological discomfort with government action. This rude clash between necessary policies and memorized slogans was by no means harmless.
Deep down, Bush and Cheney do not believe that the government has any business managing collective resources to solve common problems. This seems to be one reason why they have been dragging their feet on homeland security. Preparations for a bio-terrorist attack in a major urban center cannot be left up to the free-market or individual initiative. To stockpile vaccines, community assets must be managed by public officials. The administration is not inactive in these areas, of course. It bows to practical necessity, but it does so in a halfhearted way because vigorous government action contradicts its anti-government reflexes. When defending tax cuts during a national emergency, revealingly, administration spokesmen routinely lapse into pre-9/11 rhetoric. Without thinking it through, they recycle their claim that private individuals invariably know how to use their money better than the government. Its residual attachment to this pre-9/11 idea goes a long way toward explaining why the administration has shortchanged domestic preparedness against a future terrorist attack.
An implicit hostility to government power also helps explain the administration's greatest strategic mistake, namely its failure to prepare for postwar chaos in Iraq. Gingrich types who hate government and love to shut it down are the last people who should be setting up a new one. In the Republicans' anti-government worldview, moreover, there seems to be no place for the idea of a "power vacuum." Those who think that all evil stems from "too much government" are dangerously insensitive to the dangers of anarchy and state failure. If they had been less rigidly ideological, they would have heeded Gen. Eric Shinseki's advice and provided enough troops to control the looting and mayhem after the fall of Saddam. (The GOP's cluelessness on this subject was epitomized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's preposterous comment, made at the height of the looting, that "Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.") Before being elected, Bush honestly conveyed the discomfort Republicans naturally feel with state building. So deep ideological hostility to state power is also one of the reasons his administration has managed the stabilization process in Iraq so poorly. Because American national security is endangered by state weakness and state collapse around the world, we cannot trust our future to those who are viscerally opposed to governmental power.
2) American freedom depends on unregulated markets and unquestioning faith in private enterprise.
The flip side of Republican hostility to government is an unquestioning trust in the private sector, understood as a dynamic realm of individual initiative that must be freed from surveillance and asphyxiating control by pushy bureaucrats. The problem is that unregulated markets and politically unaccountable profit-seeking enterprises, treated as almost sacred in Republican ideology, present serious obstacles to an effective counterterrorism strategy. Transnational terrorists may or may not require state sponsorship, but they certainly rely on free markets to purchase the instruments (say, ammonium nitrate) with which to inflict mass casualties on Americans. Several private flight training schools, owned by American entrepreneurs, took cash to teach the 9/11 hijackers how to fly. These businessmen made a profit and did not pay excessive attention to the possibly negative downstream consequences of their profit-making activity on the safety of their fellow Americans.
Democrats are relatively better equipped than Republicans to wage war on terrorism because, while both recognize the many virtues of laxly regulated markets, the former have a less dogmatic and more pragmatic attitude toward government regulation of private business. Republicans seem ideologically incapable of closing this important breach in our defenses. Their wholly uncritical devotion to free enterprise blinds them to the obvious reality that private businesses, focused on near-term profit making, are not the best guardians of American national security. (The unprecedented, and highly problematic, use of private contractors to perform military duties in Iraq is an example.)
3) Anti-poverty programs are contrary to "freedom."
The Republicans are ideologically and dogmatically opposed to nonmarket distributions of community resources from rich to poor, even when it is self-evident that such distributions are politically stabilizing. Underlying this hostility to nonmarket distributions is a tacit conviction that there can never be too much economic inequality in a society. This set of beliefs, like those discussed above, would probably prevent any Republican administration, and certainly an ideologically rigid administration such as the one we now have, from waging an effective war against transnational terrorism. The point is not that poverty "causes" terrorism, but rather that lack of economic opportunity increases the pool from which terrorist organizations can recruit. The Marshall Plan was a nonmarket distribution, designed to stabilize an unstable part of the world and to weaken support for anti-American ideas and political movements. An equivalent today would be massive American support to the Pakistani government, earmarked to wrest control of elementary education from private religious charities. Strategically, this makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, it conflicts violently with a Republican mind-set that compulsively denigrates all government spending and nonmarket redistributions of assets from rich to poor.
4) Both scriptural fundamentalism and religious proselytizing in foreign countries are forces for good in the world.
Another reason why the Bush administration has failed to bring the terrorist threat into clear focus is that it cannot think coherently about the role of religion in the current conflict. We are faced with enemies who believe with unflinching certainty that they "know" God's will and who even assert that, in the current global conflict, they are instruments of a divine plan. Bush cannot speak to America about these demented beliefs. He probably cannot even think about them in private. The reason is obvious. Admittedly, his administration has moved to shut down private Islamic charities that were funneling money to al-Qaida. But Bush cannot bring the role of religious certainty and proselytizing zeal into focus, as an effective counterterrorism strategy demands, because his party is too thoroughly implicated in this form of hallucination itself.
