I hate to keep reading these columns that are negative on what the administration is doing, and agreeing with them. My reaction tells me that I think they are going the wrong way. I have just picked up on this Author, Arkin. I have included a short "Bio" on him at the end of the piece.
latimes.com
A Policy In From the Cold
The Bush administration has returned to Cold War-style secrecy and an end-justifies-means attitude
By WILLIAM M. ARKIN
William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for Opinion.
May 26 2002
WASHINGTON -- In the overheated atmosphere of the capital, who said what, when, to whom about which terrorist threats now fills the air and the airwaves. So when the Bush administration suddenly begins to seize upon and publicize every snippet of intelligence and every worry about possible new terrorist strikes, one might suspect it is just covering its flanks.
That would be a mistake. Seeing the administration's latest burst of warnings and fearful rhetoric as nothing but defensive politics would miss a larger point.
In the shock and carnage of Sept. 11, the president's men found their reason for being. They heard a call. During the early months of George W. Bush's presidency, his national security team floundered, employing what some here called "an ABC foreign policy"--anything but Clinton. Now, in the war on terrorism, they not only have found their calling, they have returned to familiar territory.
In their command posts, ever vigilant, fingers on a new button, they wait for "the big one"--much the way many of these same officials did during previous government service during the Cold War of bygone days.
What makes the new crusade feel so natural to the Bush team is that it looks so much like the old one: It is not conventional terrorism, but the possibility of terror with weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, that has galvanized the administration.
With that possibility comes a renewed appetite for covert action and human agents, a need to root out internal security risks, a rise in Cold War-style government secrecy.
Everywhere, the national security establishment is humming with new missions, new funds, new offices with esoteric names and no publicly stated duties--the Defense Department's C4ISR for HLS Operations, for instance. But scratch the surface and it is nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that give this new war its drive, in much the way Russian and Chinese warheads did the old.
In that, the familiar could blind the new Cold Warriors to the obvious: Horrific as weapons of mass destruction are, it is conventional explosives that have carried terrorism to new heights. And with this new Cold War mentality has come a reversion to the old notion that when it comes to national security, more and bigger is always better.
"The Bush administration has unlocked the federal Treasury to combat global terrorism and completed an intellectual back-flip by agreeing to substantive growth in the size and reach of the federal bureaucracy," says one retired military officer who works on homeland security in Washington.
Ironically, despite the administration's view that the previous administration wasn't serious about anything in foreign policy, Bush is largely following Bill Clinton's road map.
On June 21, 1995, President Clinton signed a secret document called Presidential Decision Directive 39, declaring: "The United States shall give the highest priority to developing effective capabilities to detect, prevent, defeat and manage the consequences of nuclear, biological or chemical materials or weapons used by terrorists." Before Sept. 11, the Bush administration paid little attention to the directive. Since then, it has embraced the Clinton priorities with a passion.
No one can dispute the dangers of international terrorism or the need for an effective response. Nonetheless, there are two problems with the Bush administration's response:
First, by focusing so much attention and so much of the new money on weapons of mass destruction, the government may neglect the more likely dangers of simpler attacks.
Second, by embracing the mind-set of the Cold War--with its implicit fear for national survival--the Bush administration has started down a road of secrecy and end-justifies-the-means thinking. In the past, that fear became a license to commit abuses ranging from violations of individual rights to foreign adventures that damaged the national interest without greatly enhancing security.
It seems symptomatic of this mind-set that high-level officials I have talked to bristle at the slightest questioning of their strategy or methods. But the questions need asking. Has Operation Enduring Freedom failed because the United States did not get Osama bin Laden or Mullah Mohammed Omar? Have civil liberties been threatened in the treatment of terror suspects? Is all the secrecy necessary?
The answers from senior administration officials are uniform: Thwarting terrorists overrides all other priorities. Any intelligence gained is worth what is sacrificed. The American people understand such "inconveniences."
Such certainty harks back to the earliest days of the old Cold War, but it is worth remembering that the Bush administration's claim to authority is newly found. Despite repeated terrorist incidents and warnings of future attacks in the months and years leading up to Sept. 11, terrorism did not receive "the highest priority" from the new administration before the attacks.
Now, the almost obsessive focus on weapons of mass destruction poses another problem as well. In 1994, Congress broadened the legal definition of such weapons to include any large destructive device, such as the Oklahoma City truck bomb. Thus, while the public may be worrying about nuclear devices hidden on cargo ships or deadly toxins at the mall, the expanded legal definition--like the old Cold War threat--can be stretched to justify almost anything.
And that definition is fully embraced in secret plans and directives approved by the president. The Joint Chiefs of Staff even invented a new acronym for the expanded threat: CBRNE (pronounced "see-burn"), for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and High-Yield Explosives.
"CBRNE includes any event, industrial accident, act of nature, act of war, or terrorism," a document from the Joint Chiefs of Staff notes. "WMD refers to a CBRNE device specifically designed to produce casualties."
The federal response, to put it mildly, has been overkill. Clinton and Bush administration directives have now brought to life an entire government infrastructure for dealing with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, much of it hidden from public view.
The Army's "Operation Garden Plot," a plan formulated in the 1960s for dealing with large civil disturbances, has been dusted off and updated to focus mostly on military intervention in response to a domestic event involving weapons of mass destruction. Special Operations Command, and more specifically the super-secret Delta Force, now have a role in thwarting and responding to domestic terrorist incidents.
Loads of new organizations have been created and existing agencies refocused, including National Guard WMD-Civil Support Teams in dozens of states, a Marine Corps Chemical and Biological Incident Response Force, a Chemical and Biological Rapid Response Team and others.
Secret organizations with obscure names like the Joint Technical Operations Team and the enhanced command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) for Homeland Security Operations have been moved to center stage. Their stated purpose is to deal with America's worst nightmares, but at least some of their actual duties remain secret.
In 1999, an organizing headquarters called the Joint Task Force Civil Support was established to focus on "consequence management" by the Defense Department in the event of a domestic CBRNE incident.
"The key word is 'civil' support," President Clinton's secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen, said on Oct. 7, 1999, at the task force's activation ceremony. "Under this joint task force it is very clear that [the military] is subordinate to civilian control. It is not in any way meant to undermine the doctrine of posse comitatus."
The reason Cohen stressed civil support was the sensitivity of using military forces in law enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act bars federal military forces from executing or enforcing the laws, except as "authorized by the Constitution or act of Congress."
In practice, no one seems too concerned today about civilian control and the legal prohibition on using the military for civilian law enforcement. "We don't see any problem with posse comitatus," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on May 7. "We're not proposing, nor is the president proposing, that the military suddenly involve itself in roles that historically we've not been involved in and which, by statute, we've been prohibited from being involved in absent waivers."
The key word in Rumsfeld's statement is "suddenly." None of what's been done has been sudden. Much of this infrastructure was already building before Sept. 11; it was just on autopilot. Since Sept. 11, though, the Bush team has embraced more radical organizational change to fight a new war. This year, it activated yet another provisional task force--Joint Force Headquarters for Homeland Security. A new Department of Homeland Security will likely join the Cabinet.
The attacks of Sept. 11 "placed our nation ... on wartime footing," Gen. William F. Kernan, commander of U.S. domestic response forces, told Congress last month. "All elements of [the military], active, reserve, National Guard, civil service and contract employees are involved in this two-front war at home and abroad."
But is Al Qaeda or the international terrorist community the equivalent of the old Soviet Union? And does a Cold War approach offer our best hope of safety and security? Or does it just offer beleaguered government officials the reassurance of something familiar?
Vice President Dick Cheney, in his statements last week, seemed to display a veteran's own skepticism, predicting a new terrorist incident with certainty. Absent the frightening rhetoric, the need for unlimited government action might actually be questioned.
In the meantime, there is fear--fear that seems to have affected the government even more than the public.
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_____About the Author_____
William M. Arkin, the author of ten books and numerous studies on military affairs, is a consultant to numerous organizations, and a frequent television and radio commentator. He was an Army intelligence analyst during the 1970's, a nuclear weapons expert during the Cold War, and pioneered on-the-ground study of the effects of military operations in Iraq and Yugoslavia. In 1994, his "The U.S. Military Online: A Directory for Internet Access to the Department of Defense" was published. His Dot.Mil column, launched in November 1998, appears every other Monday on washingtonpost.com. E-mail Arkin at william.arkin@wpni.com. |
