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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
There will always be fanatics who think the American government is an enemy in the wars they are fighting. You and your family and your hometown, however, are not the terrorists' targets, not then, not now, not in the future. Attacking the American people violates common sense and basic survival instincts, not just their morality and ours. We are too strong to be defeated by any outside force, a fact the terrorists know very well.
Al-Qaida's goals are political, and much closer to home. One of them, which was to weaken American influence on the Islamic world, unfortunately has been achieved -- not by the 9/11 attacks but by the president's mistake in invading Iraq. By misreading the Middle East, the United States lost much of its ability to help countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, whose war on terrorism is genuinely a matter of national survival. American soldiers and diplomats and businesspeople across half the planet are in deadly danger now because their president is oblivious to the politics that drive terrorism.
Getting Iraq wrong was forgivable, maybe. I was so certain that Iraq would be a disaster for America that I quit my career to be free to speak out publicly. Realists were in the minority, however. Most of the experts found it prudent to ignore the evidence that Iraq was not a threat to the United States. One reason they kept silent, I learned from former colleagues more senior than I, is that Bush does not forgive subordinates who offer advice he does not want to hear.
As a superpower we can afford some mistakes. But did the president learn anything from the Iraq fiasco, anything at all from the more than 1,000 American men and women who have died so far? He has no regrets, he says, even now. Are you confident that he will ask the opinion of the real experts at the CIA and State Department before he launches another war, or will he misread someone else as a madman the way he misread Saddam Hussein and his imaginary weapons of mass destruction?
President Bush is strong, his speechwriters maintain, because he does not shrink from sending American soldiers to die. It may seem strange to you, but it takes little political courage to send American soldiers to war. Americans have never turned down a president who invited them to battle.
True moral courage recognizes that there is no automatic connection between killing foreigners and defeating America's enemies. You've been encouraged to forget Vietnam. President Nixon knew Vietnam was lost from the moment he took office in 1969. He preferred to sacrifice 20,000 more American lives and kill 2 million additional Vietnamese rather than risk losing your parents' vote by admitting defeat. Nixon was brave enough to make some tough economic decisions, at least. What moral courage has President Bush shown? He never vetoed a single piece of legislation, never said no to a spending bill, never fired anyone, not till CIA director George Tenet lost control of his angry intelligence experts and had to step down this summer.
But the president's most terrifying weakness was his loss of control over his Cabinet and the budget. No strong president lets his secretary of state get outmaneuvered every time by his secretary of defense. No strong president allows defense contractors to dictate his military spending: Our troops on the ground in Iraq die needlessly because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld considers them an expensive nuisance and preferred to give the money to Lockheed and General Dynamics.
It's easy to become popular in Washington by spending money, just as it's easy to become popular in your hometown by buying your friends fancy dinners. You must have at least one friend who maxed out the credit cards and had a wonderful time. What happened to that family? Now think of the United States. The president put a few thousand dollars back in your pocket by cutting taxes. He didn't cut spending to pay for the tax cuts. On the contrary, he allowed the U.S. bureaucracy to bloat again after President Clinton had painfully cut it back. The deficit is the largest in our history, with no plan in sight to keep it from growing indefinitely.
Deficits don't matter, Vice President Cheney said. But your kids are going to spend the rest of their lives paying back, with interest, the money we are borrowing from our Chinese friends to make up for this government's extravagance. President Bush says he won't give foreigners a veto over U.S. security. But he already has. All they have to do is stop buying our Treasury bills.
Oil has hit more than $50 a barrel. Two billion Chinese and Indians intend to drive cars the way we do, and it isn't going to get better. The rest of the world saw this coming and is investing in renewable energy and conservation. I can't figure out what the president has in mind besides praying that our buddies in Venezuela and Nigeria and Saudi Arabia keep pumping. We can get only six months' worth of oil by opening up Alaska's remaining wilderness to Exxon. Better than nothing, I suppose, but six months isn't a long time in your kids' life.
Sorry, Soccer, oops, Security Mom. I've spent a career agonizing about America's security and I can't keep quiet when danger looms. Be an economic security mom. Be an energy security mom. Be an environmental security mom. Fight for better schools, for child care and healthcare and jobs. Those are the threats facing your children, and those are threats we can do something about.
The world is a less scary and more manageable place when moms are looking after it. If you don't vote for a candidate who understands that, life in America could soon become as frightening as Bush tells you it already is. And please, please, lock the handgun somewhere your kids can't get at it. You will never need to shoot a terrorist. But the soccer team needs your kids.
