October 27, 2001
How to Lose a War
By FRANK RICH
elcome back to Sept. 10.
The "America Strikes Back" optimism that surged
after Sept. 11 has now been stricken by the multitude
of
ways we're losing the war at home. The F.B.I. has
proved more effective in waging turf battles against
Rudy Giuliani
than waging war on terrorism. Of the more than 900
suspects arrested, exactly zero have been criminally
charged in
the World Trade Center attack (though one has died of
natural causes, we're told, in a New Jersey jail
cell). The
Bush team didn't fully recognize that a second attack
on America had begun until more than a week after the
first
casualty. The most highly trumpeted breakthrough in
the hunt for anthrax terrorists — Tom Ridge's
announcement
that "the site where the letters were mailed" had been
found in New Jersey — proved a dead end. And now the
president is posing with elementary-school children
again.
Given that this is the administration that was touted
as being run with C.E.O. clockwork, perhaps it should
be added
to the growing list of Things That Have Changed
Forever since Sept. 11. But let's not be so hasty. Not
everything
changes that fast — least of all Washington. The White
House's home-front failures are not sudden,
unpredictable
products of wartime confusion but direct products of
an ethos that has been in place since Jan. 20.
This is an administration that will let its special
interests — particularly its high-rolling campaign
contributors and its
noisiest theocrats of the right — have veto power over
public safety, public health and economic prudence in
war, it
turns out, no less than in peacetime. When anthrax
struck, the administration's first impulse was not to
secure as
much Cipro as speedily as possible to protect
Americans, but to protect the right of pharmaceutical
companies to
profiteer. The White House's faith in tax cuts as a
panacea for all national ills has led to such
absurdities as this
week's House "stimulus" package showering $254 million
on Enron, the reeling Houston energy company (now
under
S.E.C. investigation) that has served as a Bush
campaign cash machine.
Airport security, which has been enhanced by at best
cosmetic tweaks since Sept. 11, is also held hostage
by
campaign cash: As Salon has reported, ServiceMaster, a
supplier of the low-wage employees who ineptly man the
gates, is another G.O.P. donor. Not that Republicans
stand alone in putting fat cats first. In a display of
bipartisanship, Democrats — lobbied by Linda Hall
Daschle, the Senate majority leader's wife — joined
the
administration in handing the airlines a $15 billion
bailout that enforces no reduction in the salaries of
the industry's
C.E.O.'s even as they lay off tens of thousands of
their employees.
To see how the religious right has exerted its own
distortions on homeland security, you also have to
consider an
administration pattern that goes back to its creation
— and one that explains the recent trials of poor Tom
Ridge.
Mr. Ridge is by all accounts a capable leader — a
successful governor of a large state (Pennsylvania)
who won the
Bronze Star for heroism in Vietnam. A close friend of
George W. Bush, he should have been in the
administration
from the get-go, and was widely rumored to be a
candidate for various jobs, including the vice
presidency. But after
being pilloried by the right because he supports
abortion rights, he got zilch. Instead of Mr. Ridge,
the administration
signed on the pro-life John Ashcroft and Tommy
Thompson — who have brought us where we are today.
The farcical failures of these two cabinet secretaries
are not merely those of public relations — though Mr.
Thompson often comes across as a Chamber of Commerce
glad- hander who doesn't know his pants are on fire,
and Mr. Ashcroft often shakes as if he's not just seen
great Caesar's ghost but perhaps John Mitchell's as
well. Both
have a history of letting politics override public
policy that dates to the start of the administration.
They've seen no
reason to reverse their partisan priorities even at a
time when the patriotic duty of effectively fighting
terror should
be their No. 1 concern.
Pre-Sept. 11, Mr. Thompson, in defiance of science,
heartily lent his credibility to the Bush
administration's stem cell
"compromise" by going along with its overstatement of
the viability and diversity of the stem cell lines it
would deliver
to researchers. Post-Sept. 11, he destroyed his
credibility by understating the severity of the
anthrax threat, also in
defiance of science. Now he maintains that the $1.5
billion the administration is requesting to plug the
many holes in
our public health system — almost all of it earmarked
for stockpiling pharmaceuticals, not shoring up local
hospitals
— is adequate for fighting bioterrorism. This, too, is
in defiance of all expert estimates, including that of
the one
physician in the Senate, the Republican Bill Frist.
It should also be on Mr. Thompson's conscience that
for the first two weeks of the anthrax crisis he kept
the federal
government's house physician — David Satcher, the
surgeon general and a much-needed honest broker of
public
health — locked away, presumably because Dr. Satcher,
a Clinton appointee, became persona non grata in the
Bush
administration for issuing a June report on teenage
sexuality that angered the religious right. Only after
Mr. Ridge
arrived on the scene was the surgeon general liberated
from the gulag.
As for Mr. Ashcroft, he has gone so far as to turn
away firsthand information about domestic terrorism
for political
reasons. Planned Parenthood, which has been on the
front lines of anthrax scares for years and has by
grim
necessity marshaled the medical and security expertise
to combat them, has sought a meeting with the attorney
general since he took office but has never been
granted one. This was true not only before Sept. 11
but, says Ann
Glazier, Planned Parenthood's director of security,
remains true — even though her organization, long
targeted by
such home-grown Talibans as the Army of God, has a
decade's worth of leads on "the convergence of
international
and domestic terrorism."
Ms. Glazier found the sight of Mr. Ashcroft and other
federal Keystone Kops offering a $1 million reward for
anthrax
terrorists a laughable indication of how little grasp
they have of the enemy. "Religious extremists don't
respond to
money," she points out. Such is the state of the
F.B.I., she adds, that one agent told a clinic to hold
onto a suspect
letter for a couple of days "because we have so many
here we're afraid we're going to lose it" (perhaps
among the
Timothy McVeigh documents).
If either the attorney general or the secretary of
health and human services inspired anything like the
confidence
that, say, Mayor Giuliani does, there wouldn't have
been a need to draft Mr. Ridge. Even so, he's mainly a
P.R.
gimmick — a man who should have been in the
administration in the first place reduced to serving
as a fig leaf for
lightweights. As director of homeland security, he's
allegedly charged with supervising nearly 50
government
agencies — so far with roughly a dozen staff members.
When asked to define Mr. Ridge's responsibilities, Ari
Fleischer said on Wednesday that it was "a very busy
coordination job," but so far Mr. Ridge is mainly
sowing still
more confusion.
The one specific duty that he has claimed — in an
interview with Tom Brokaw — was that he'd be the one
"making
the phone call" to the president to shoot down any
commercial airliner turned into a flying bomb by
hijackers. That
presumably comes as news to Donald Rumsfeld, who made
no provision for any homeland security czar in the Air
Force chain of command he publicly codified days after
Mr. Ridge's appointment.
Since the administration tightly metes out the news
from Afghanistan, we can only hope that the war there
is being
executed more effectively than the war here — even as
Mr. Rumsfeld and his generals now tell us that the
Taliban,
once expected to implode in days, are proving Viet-
Cong-like in their intractability. The Wall Street
Journal also
reported this week that "instead of a thankful Afghan
population, popular support for the Taliban appears to
be
solidifying and anger with the U.S. growing."
Maybe we're losing that battle for Afghan hearts and
minds in part because the Bush State Department
appointee in
charge of the propaganda effort is a C.E.O. (from
Madison Avenue) chosen not for her expertise in policy
or politics
but for her salesmanship on behalf of domestic
products like Head & Shoulders shampoo. If we can't
effectively fight
anthrax, I guess it's reassuring to know we can always
win the war on dandruff.
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"Not by a spade alone shall we dig."
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