Published on Tuesday, May 21, 2002 in the Boston Globe
America the Fearful
by James Carroll
THE MORE powerful the United States becomes, the more frightened we are. Why is
that?
An undercurrent of hysteria has coursed through the talk out of Washington over the last
week as, first, critics demanded to know whether government officials had ignored
warnings of the terrorist attacks of last September and, second, the same government
officials - in response? - issued a new warning of coming attacks that might be even
worse.
The new warning is sharp enough to generate fear but too vague to enable any defensive
preparation. In airports, citizens sheepishly submit to screening measures that are still
administered with such incompetence that they can only enhance uneasiness - prompting
the question, Is that the point? Meanwhile, the FBI admits it has no clue about the anthrax
attacks, American soldiers remain on the hunt in Afghanistan, Pentagon war planners are
getting ready for Iraq, and even Cuba is said to be readying biological weapons.
The war on terrorism is not the only manifestation of heightened levels of our national fear.
This week Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin will sign an arms reduction
treaty that includes a US-sponsored provision allowing for the indefinite mothballing of
thousands of disarmed nuclear weapons. Notice this: The United States, breaking with the
primordial assumption of nuclear arms control, is now saying that the overkill supply of
warheads must be preserved against future threats - as yet entirely unimagined. This
marks the end of the hope, long shared by conservatives and liberals alike, that human
beings might eventually wean themselves of these terrible weapons altogether.
In one stroke, Bush has taken us from ''reduction'' to ''storage.'' He has reversed the most
positive foreign policy track of our lifetimes, and he has done it out of fear.
Here is the irony: The surest way to make the world an even more dangerous place is to
posit danger as the most important thing about it. This week's treaty is the clearest case
in point. America's determination to preserve thousands of excess nuclear warheads
means that now Russia, despite its firm preference for elimination, will certainly preserve
them as well.
And what will happen over time to those warheads? When the urgency of keeping such
material out of the hands of rogue elements is clear, the American move away from full
elimination of nukes, especially in Russia, makes no sense. But that very irrationality is
the revelation.
We are like a nation that has had a psychological break and is descending into rank
paranoia. The destruction of the twin towers shows that there are things to be afraid of, but
our government's mad responses are making us more vulnerable to such things, not less.
The ''war on terrorism'' has strengthened the hand of those who hate America. The US
example of ''overwhelming force'' has pushed the Middle East into the abyss and has
dragged India-Pakistan to its edge. The only real protections against cross-border
terrorism are international structures of criminal justice like the recently established
International Criminal Court, yet an ''unsigning'' United States slaps the court down with
contempt.
Since September we have squandered our wealth and focus on a huge war while
neglecting police work and intelligence at home and abroad. Hence the vagueness of the
current warning. And how dare our government set off alarms about Cuba's putative
bioterrorism project while it has done nothing to apprehend the anthrax killer? Oh, and -
forgive me, just asking - where is Osama?
The Bush administration's warning about Castro's interest in bioterrorism could seem
blatantly timed to deflect political pressures arising from Jimmy Carter's trip to Havana.
Vice President Cheney's agitated Sunday alarm about imminent terrorist attacks could
seem timed to defuse last week's long overdue political offensive by Democrats. The
president's rejection, in principle, of arms ''reduction'' could seem to serve his larger
political and economic purpose of restoring the American war industry to its place of
preeminence. The president and his closest advisers, in other words, could be cynically
exaggerating threats to our national security for their narrow purposes.
But it may be worse than that. The shape of their dread is useful to them in these ways,
but, also, like the mentally disturbed, they seem convinced that any danger they imagine
is real. Our nation is being led by men and women who are at the mercy of their fears.
That they work hard to keep the American people afraid might seem to suggest that they
want merely to deflect any second-guessing about the course they have set, but in fact
our fear reinforces theirs.
Fear has become Washington's absolute and is shaping its every response to the future.
America is being led by cowards.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company
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