Dereliction of Duty
"- we won, didn't we? Maybe not. About half of the U.S. Army's
combat strength is now tied down in Iraq, facing what looks
increasingly like a guerrilla war "
The New York Times
June 17, 2003
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Last Thursday a House subcommittee met to finalize next year's homeland
security appropriation. The ranking Democrat announced that he
would introduce an amendment adding roughly $1 billion for areas
like port security and border security that, according to just about every
expert, have been severely neglected since Sept. 11. He proposed
to pay for the additions by slightly scaling back tax cuts for people making more
than $1 million per year.
The subcommittee's chairman promptly closed the
meeting to the public, citing national security - though no classified material was under
discussion. And the bill that emerged from the closed meeting did not contain the extra funding.
It was a perfect symbol of the reality of the Bush administration's
"war on terror." Behind the rhetoric - and behind the veil of secrecy, invoked in
the name of national security but actually used to prevent public
scrutiny - lies a pattern of neglect, of refusal to take crucial actions to protect us
from terrorists. Actual counterterrorism, it seems, doesn't fit the administration's agenda.
Yesterday The Washington Post printed an interview with Rand Beers,
a top White House counterterrorism adviser who resigned in March. "They're
making us less secure, not more secure," he said of the Bush administration.
"As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done." Among the
problem areas he cited were homeland security, where he
says the administration has "only a rhetorical policy"; failure to press Saudi Arabia (the
home of most of the Sept. 11 terrorists) to take action; and,
of course, the way we allowed Afghanistan to relapse into chaos.
Some of this pattern of neglect involves penny-pinching. Back in February,
even George W. Bush in effect admitted that not enough money had
been allocated to domestic security - though (to the fury of Republican legislators)
he blamed Congress. Yet according to Fred Kaplan in Slate, the
administration's latest budget proposal for homeland security actually contains
less money than was spent last year. Meanwhile, urgent priorities
remain unmet. For example, port security, identified as a top concern
from the very beginning, has so far received only one-tenth as much money
as the Coast Guard says is needed.
But it's not just a matter of money. For one thing, it's hard to claim now
that the Bush administration is trying to hold down domestic spending to
make room for tax cuts. With the budget deficit projected at more than
$400 billion this year, a few billion more for homeland security wouldn't
make much difference to the tax-cutting agenda. Moreover,
Congress isn't pinching pennies across the board: last week the Senate voted to provide
$15 billion in loan guarantees for the construction of nuclear power plants.
Furthermore, even on the military front the administration has
been weirdly reluctant to come to grips with terrorism. It refused to provide
Afghanistan's new government with an adequate security
umbrella, with the predictable result that warlords are running rampant and the Taliban
are making a comeback. . The squandered victory in Afghanistan
was one reason people like myself had a bad feeling about the invasion of Iraq -
and sure enough, the administration was bizarrely lackadaisical
about providing postwar security. Even nuclear waste dumps were left unguarded
for weeks.
So what's the explanation? The answer, one suspects,
is that key figures - above all, Donald Rumsfeld - just didn't feel like dealing with the real
problem. Real counterterrorism mainly involves police work and
precautionary measures; it doesn't look impressive on TV, and it doesn't provide
many occasions for victory celebrations.
A conventional war, on the other hand, is a lot more fun: you get
stirring pictures of tanks rolling across the desert, and you get to do a victory
landing on an aircraft carrier. And more and more it seems that
that was what the war was all about. After all, the supposed reasons for fighting
that war have turned out to be false - there were no links to Al Qaeda,
there wasn't a big arsenal of W.M.D.'s.
But never mind - we won, didn't we? Maybe not. About half of the U.S.
Army's combat strength is now tied down in Iraq, facing what looks
increasingly like a guerrilla war - and like a perfect recruiting device
for Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, the real war on terror has been neglected, and
we've antagonized the allies we need to fight that war.
One of these days we'll end up paying the price.
nytimes.com
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |
