When the Joint Chiefs of Staff were looking for a name for the
new war
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Marines at California's Camp
Pendleton train for the new "war."
DAVID MCNEW/GETTY IMAGES
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on terrorism, they baptized it "Infinite Justice." It is now clear
that George W. Bush's war indeed will be infinitethe real question
is to what extent the war will serve justice, abroad or at home. Bush's
speech to a joint session of Congress on September 20 followed a week
in which the administration conducted a spin campaign designed to
soften up the American people for the long war. And in that extraordinarily
fierce and bellicose address, Bush raised the bar so high that it
is apparent this war could last for years.
There was a fundamental contradiction in Bush's speech, which
went largely unremarked in the unadulterated gush of praise that
immediately followed it. Rolling up and eliminating the hydra-headed
networks of the terrorist diaspora, the worthy goal to which Bush
pledged the nation and its resources, is essentially a law enforcement
problem of planetary scope. That requires an unprecedented level
of international political cooperation, which in turn demands maximum
political stability around the world. But Bush's decision to militarize
the anti-terrorist campaign will inevitably undermine these prerequisites.
Bush called al-Qaedathe bin Laden-created umbrella network"the
Mafia" of terrorism. But one doesn't go after the Mafia with B-1
and B-52 high-altitude bombers, or with ground troops or special
forces commandos. The minute the bombs start falling, there will
be civilian casualties. Muslim ones. And that will only deepen the
political instability of those regimesmany of them unsavory
and already plagued with Islamist fundamentalisms of virulent character
and widespread popular appealthat are precisely the governments
whose cooperation is crucial to identifying, detaining and prosecuting
the terrorists.
Leslie Gelb, the former New York Times columnist who now runs
the Council on Foreign Relations, got it right when he said on PBS
after the speech that it was "a declaration of war on Afghanistan
and probably Iraq." And Bush's implacability in declaring he'll
"make no distinction" between terrorists and the nations harboring
them could soon add other countries to the list. When Bush ran for
president, he pledged never to send American armed forces abroad
in any operation without an "exit strategy." In militarizing the
campaign against terrorism, he doesn't have one. Eliminating the
repulsive bin Laden alone will not stop terrorism. Nor will deposing
the Taliban, even if Bush succeeds in doing so. Who will Bush put
in their placethe fractious Northern Alliance, composed of
distinctly minoritarian ethnic groups? The exiled King Mohammed
Zahir Shah, who is 86 and has not set foot in the country since
being overthrown in 1973? When reporters asked Bush spokesman Ari
Fleischer whom we were going to fight for in Afghanistan, he pointedly
refused to say (although the United States has been meeting secretly
in Switzerland with representatives of ItalyZahir's host and
sponsorIran, and several other countries to plot a new role
for the king). There are also credible reports from inside Afghanistan
that a number of local warlords and Taliban commanders are preparing
to stage a coupbut military action against the country now
would undercut such efforts by rallying people to the Taliban.
And what of Iraq? Jesse Helms told CNN that we should expect an
attack on Iraq "right soon." Following this, the administration
began leaking that there were no immediate plans to attack Iraq.
But the stepped-up bombing of Iraq's southern air defenses in the
three days preceding Bush's speech to Congress spoke louder than
the latest leaks. Now the Americans and the Brits have renewed and
intensified those aerial assaults. Disinformation is a weapon in
this new war.
Bush is an uncultured man who knew little of the exterior world
until he began running for presidentand couldn't have cared
less. As a result, he has committed serious verbal blunders whenever
his handlers let him off the leash without a prepared text. Thus,
when the historically illiterate Bush called his new war a "crusade,"
it conjured up for all the Muslim world the image of hoards of Knights
Templar pillaging Islam a millennium ago. Bush's speechwriters tried
to compensate for this ignorant misstep by including in his speech
to Congress affirmations that this is not a war against Islam. Too
late, as the anti-U.S., pro-bin Laden demonstrations in a wide swath
of the Islamic worldfrom Somalia to Indonesiahave shown.
Bin Laden himself seized on this verbal cockup to score propaganda
points in his letter to the al-Jazeera Arab TV network, referring
to the "Jewish-Christian crusade" and to Bush as the "chief crusader."
Here at home, the revulsion felt at the terrorist attacks, as
expected, has translated into a sharp lurch to the right. There
was only one vote cast in the House against the resolution giving
Bush full powers to militarize the anti-terrorist campaign (by Barbara
Lee, the African-American Democrat from the safe Oakland, California
seat formerly held by Ron Dellums). And there was not a single vote
in the Senate against this new Gulf of Tonkin resolution giving
Bush a blank check (contrast this with the 52 to 47 Senate vote
authorizing Bush pere's Gulf War).
Bush, with his Wild West, "dead-or-alive" rhetoric, has surfed
the wave of nationalist sentiment to unprecedented popularity90
percent, the highest ever for a president in the Gallup poll, one
point higher than his father's at the end of the Gulf War. And the
Democrats in Congress have been cowed into silence: No criticism
of Bush passes their lips for fear of revenge by the voters next
year. The fulsome embrace between Bush and Tom Daschle after the
president's speech to Congress said it all: Daschle, who now talks
to Bush three and four times daily, is in the president's pocket.
In the House, Dick Gephardt is cutting deals in the back room with
Speaker Dennis Hastertand, while there is some grumbling among
Democratic members about their exclusion from this process, it doesn't
amount to much (only 54 votes against the first installment in the
airline bailout, for example). Although the economy was already
in recession before the attacksand is headed for even more
serious troubleit isn't hurting Bush. As CNN polling analyst
Bill Schneider put it, "It's no longer the Bush economy, it's the
bin Laden economy." The left had always hoped that when the overheated
economy tanked, the downturn would provide fertile ground for a
shift back to a more progressive politics; instead, it's having
the opposite effect.
On the first day Wall Street reopened for business a week after
the attacks on the Twin Towers, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill
went on Jim Lehrer's NewsHour to predict "record market highs."
At week's end, of course, the stock market had recorded its biggest
loss since 1933: $1.4 trillion in America's paper wealth had gone
up in smoke. Now we are being told that it's un-American to sell
one's stocks. The classic slogan of consumer hucksterism, "Buy and
Save," has been elevated to a moral imperative. Typical was the
impassioned plea on Larry King by New Mexico's Pete Domenici, the
GOP's chief Senate spokesman on budget matters: "If you have money
put aside toward a new home, buy it! If you've set aside money for
a new car, buy it! If you have money for new clothes, buy it!" [sic]all
to help "save the economy from terrorism." Even the unions seem
to be caught up in what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich derided
in a Washington Post opinion piece as "market patriotism": In New
York, for example, the union leaders who sit as trustees of the
municipal employees' pension funds gave their enthusiastic approval
to invest $800 million of the workers' retirement fund in Wall Street
to help it climb back from the disastrous lossesa suicidal
plan hatched by Mayor Rudy Giuliani with the collusion of the city's
top elected Democrats. And AFL-CIO President John Sweeney has linked
arms with U.S. Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donahue in a campaign
for "investment in the economy." Nationalist politics makes strange
bedfellows, indeed. But, as the excellent Alan Abelson wrote in
Barron's, "To equate buying stock with patriotism or selling stock
with a lack of patriotism is balderdash, the equivalent of praising
or damning a thermometer for the temperature it records."
The war frenzy is causing a revival of the most reactionary features
of Republican trickle-down economics, despite the failure of Bush's
economically impotent tax cut: With flag-draped rhetoric, the congressional
GOP has revived the capital gains tax cut, which appears likely
to garner enough Democratic votes to pass as an "economic stimulus"
measure to help finance the war. A tax cut to finance the war? Bizarre.
And even though the terrorist attacks showed the utter folly of
investing billions in the irrelevant, open-ended boondoggle known
as Star Wars, Democratic opposition seems to be collapsing. Michigan
Democrat Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,
has already agreed to withdraw his amendment that had been the chief
stumbling block to Senate approval of Star Wars (a requirement that
the system could not be tested without prior congressional approvaleven
though such tests would violate the ABM treaty).
From campaign finance reform to the fight against AIDS, everything
but the war is on hold in Congress for the foreseeable future. (The
lone exception: Bush's education proposal, which he and Daschle
are fashioning into a bipartisan one; score another triumph for
the presidentit will pass before Thanksgiving.) Bipartisan
nationalism means the Democrats will have no issues to take to the
country in the 2002 elections. As Democratic pollster Geoff Garin
told the Washington Post: "For the moment, at least the electorate
is on a war footing and everything else about politics flows from
that fact. The voters ask themselves on every issue the fundamental
question: How does it relate to defeating terrorism and making the
country more secure?"
Behind the scenes in Washington, the debate that's getting the
most attention is the one over the form and scope of the Office
of Homeland Security, to be headed by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge.
While Bush administration officials leaked to the Wall Street Journal
that Ridge's job "can be compared to the National Security Adviser"
and he'll operate "above the bureaucracy" (40 different government
agencies are involved in the anti-terrorism effort), Congress will
have other plans. Presidentially ambitious Sen. Joe Lieberman, the
Connecticut DLCer, is preparing a bill to create a super-agency,
a kind of all-powerful Ministry of the Interior on the European
model, and the bureaucrats already have their box-cutters out for
the bitter turf wars. The infighting and lobbying by institutional
pachyderms of notorious incompetence, like the FBI, is already getting
bitter. As Senator John Kerry told CNN in a laughable understatement:
"There's nothing more difficult in Washington than rearranging the
deck chairs."
What of our civil liberties in all this? Lieberman has already
called on all Americans to become "citizen-soldiers" and, in effect,
spy on their neighbors. What this means in practice in the current
climate of xenophobia can be seen in the Arab-bashing by Louisiana
Republican Rep. John Cooksey in his call for ethnic profiling: "When
you've got a guy wearing a diaper on his head, with a fan belt around
the diaper, that guy has got to be pulled over." (Just imagine the
effect of this rancid racism when it is reported in the Muslim world.)
Now the Bush administration is planning to propose adoption of the
Orwellian FaceInt system of "facial profiling," in which security
cameras of the kind used in banks, stores and on the streets of
many cities are linked by computer to digitized facial profiles
of suspects which, the proponents claim, are as accurate as fingerprints.
The adoption of a national ID card will sail through Congress with
no difficultysoon you won't be able to leave home without
this odious aussweiss.
It took the Senate only 30 minutes to expand government wiretapping
as well as Internet surveillance through the Carnivore system (a
Big Brother legacy of the Clinton administration that allows the
feds to monitor the Internet), and there's more to come. The Wall
Street Journal predicts that the government will know "where you
surf, patterns of e-mail use, what you buy," as well as what you
say. The FBI has descended on college campuses across the country
demanding the educational records of studentsand getting themunder
the "health and safety" loophole of the Family Educational Privacy
Act, which was passed in the '70s after revelations of massive government
spying on students. Bills are being introduced to shred that law's
protections even further.
As these words are written two weeks after the attacks comes news
of a small, momentary victory for liberty: The Republicans who control
the House Judiciary committee had tried to force through Attorney
General Ashcroft's anti-terrorism package in just 24 hours, with
no hearings and no debate. But skirmishing by committee Democrats
under the leadership of Michigan Rep. John Conyers succeeded in
getting action postponed for a week. Conyers contends that at least
six of its provisions are unconstitutionalincluding a provision
for the preventive detention in perpetuity and without trial of
noncitizen terrorist "suspects." (Hundreds of Americans, as well
as foreigners, are already being held without charges, and no one
seems terribly concerned about their rights.)
Conyers comes from a safe seat that has re-elected him for three
decades and can say what he wants; this staunch civil libertarian
is a walking argument against term limits. But that doesn't detract
from his courage in writing a tart Washington Post op-ed piece quoting
Benjamin Franklin's injunction"They that can give up essential
liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty
nor safety." To which Conyers added: "We must ensure that these
acts of terror do not accomplish in a 'slow burn' what the fires
of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could notsubversively
destroying the foundation of our democracy." That kind of thinking
is, sadly, distinctly in the minority among the governing classes.
Nat Hentoff warned right after the attacks of the dangers of "a
new McCarthyism." There are signs Hentoff's prediction is coming
true. There's a vicious organized campaign by right-wing groups
to purge ABC's Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher from the airwaves
for having the temerity to suggest that raining cruise missiles
on Afghanistan was "cowardly." A raft of local stations, including
ABC's Washington affiliate, have already taken his show off the
air. Will the network owned by Disneyalways concerned for
its "family" imagehave the courage to resist this hysteria?
And the Murdoch press is already in full cry against anyone who
dares enter a demurrer to rampant jingoism. New York Post columnist
John Podhoretz (a dimmer version of his indigestible parent, Norman)
spewed anti-intellectual bile at Susan Sontag for a brief comment
in The New Yorker that Congress' "unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory
[pro-war] bromides" reminded her of the "Soviet Party Congress";
he also flayed The Nation as "the magazine that supported Stalin,
Ho Chi Minh, the Sandinistas and the El Salvadoran guerrillas and
the Palestinian terrorists and anyone else who made it his mission
to destroy democracy and capitalism." The New Republic's callow
editor, Peter Beinart, penned a far-fetched attack on the anti-globalization
movement as the handmaiden of terrorism. You can turn on the Fox
Network at almost any hour to hear more of the same.
The attempt to stifle dissent is well underway. And as the long
war drags on, the worse it will get.
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