Our CEO and chief cooking the books on economy, Iraq
By FRANK RICH
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
Tuesday, October 1, 2002
You had to sympathize with poor Tom Daschle when he erupted on the floor of the Senate last week. After months of playing Clark Kent to George W. Bush's Superman, the guy looked as if he were about to become unhinged.
Sure, the majority leader had a valid point. The president was wrong to say the Democrat-controlled Senate is "not interested in the security of the American people" when everyone knows that Democrats care every bit as much about our security as Republicans do, patriotically ranking it second in importance only to their own job security. But Daschle's real frustration is his inability to change the subject of the national conversation. As the election nears, the Democrats want to talk about the economy, and every time they try, Bush drowns it out with "Iraq," a word so overpowering it can make grown Americans forget that their pensions are in the toilet.
What Daschle and the rest of his incoherent party have failed to articulate (along with so much else) is that this presidency is all of one consistent piece, whether it is managing our money or managing a war. Now, as pre-9/11, it reflects the CEO ethos of the '90s bubble at least as abundantly as the previous administration did the promiscuous '60s. Two weeks before his inauguration, Bush invited Jack Welch, Ken Lay and a bevy of CEO's down to Texas, and he has always run the White House by the cardinal rules in their playbook. A chief executive can do no wrong. The directors (for which read Republicans in Congress) and outside directors (that would be the Democrats) are expected to give him a blank check and question nothing, including the accounting, while the grateful shareholders (the benighted voters) watch their portfolios bulge.
Now that we know that this model was a sham, with even Welch's General Electric under scrutiny for fiscal sleight of hand, you would think the Bush administration might revisit it. But instead it is following a discredited modus operandi more slavishly than ever, even as it prepares to fight a new war. "There is a fine line between arrogance and self-confidence," said Welch in "Jack: Straight From the Gut," his Bushian-titled memoir. "Arrogance is a killer." Bush and the CEO's around him seem as oblivious to this maxim as the CEO who coined it.
The fuzzy math of this White House's tax cut and budget projections, chronicled by my colleague Paul Krugman from the start, is compounded daily rather than corrected. When we poor shareholders worry too loudly about our growing economic pain, the administration's antidote to our woes is not more honesty in bookkeeping but Ken Lay-style cheerleading. Last month Bush's SEC chief, Harvey Pitt, went so far as to tell Americans it is "more than safe" to get back in the market -- as the Dow plummeted for its sixth consecutive month. It's the same pitch Lay offered his employees in an e-mail -- "I want to assure you that I have never felt better about the prospects for the company" -- on the day Jeffrey Skilling resigned as chief executive in anticipation of Enron's collapse.
But this administration no longer cooks the books merely on fiscal matters. Disinformation has become ubiquitous, even in the government's allegedly empirical scientific data on public health. The annual federal report on air pollution trends published last month simply eliminated its usual (and no doubt troubling) section on global warming, much as accountants at Andersen might have cleaned up a balance sheet by hiding an unprofitable division. At the Department of Health and Human Services, The Washington Post reported recently, expert committees are being retired before they can present data that might contradict the president's views on medical matters -- much as naysaying Wall Street analysts were sidelined in favor of boosters who could be counted on to flog dogs like WorldCom or Pets.com right until they imploded.
It's when such dishonesty extends to the war on terrorism, though, that you appreciate just how much a killer arrogance can be. Even with little White House cooperation in its inquiry, last month's congressional intelligence hearings presented a chilling portrait of the administration's efforts to cover up its pre-9/11 lassitude about terrorist threats. Exhibit A was Condoleezza Rice's pronouncement from last May: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center . . . that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." In fact, the committee reported, U.S. intelligence had picked up a dozen plots of a similar sort, over a period from 1994 to pre-9/11 2001, with some of them specifically mentioning the World Trade Center and the White House as potential targets. In the weeks before the attack the CIA learned that in Afghanistan "everyone is talking about an impending attack."
The past cannot be undone, and the intelligence committee found no smoking gun to suggest that the administration could have prevented the horror. But as we ready our own attack on Saddam Hussein, that's not the issue. What we need to know now is if any of these catastrophic failings in preparedness have been corrected in the year-plus since. The congressional report says that al-Qaida learns from its mistakes, flexibly adjusting its organization and plans. Do we?
While the administration says yes, the factual backup is again fuzzy. Certainly it's hard to be reassured by anything said or done by John Ashcroft, who in May 2001 testified to the Senate that "our No. 1 goal is the prevention of terrorist acts." We now know that he was just putting us on. On Sept. 10, 2001, he refused a FBI budget request to add 149 field agents, 200 analysts and 54 translators to its counterterrorism effort. He did so despite the fact, unearthed by congressional investigators, that the FBI then had only one analyst monitoring al-Qaida.
The attorney general drives liberals crazy with his assaults on civil liberties, but we do have courts to sort that out (as they are already doing). What's truly frightening about Ashcroft is his incompetence. Even as we learned that the Justice Department's prosecutors are so sloppy that they mistakenly turned over 48 classified FBI reports to Zacarias Moussaoui, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that the attorney general may have blown our chance to get useful al-Qaida information out of Moussaoui by mismanaging his prosecution.
Nor is there any evidence that our intelligence operations have been repaired over the past year. Coordination between the FBI and the CIA remains so spotty that as of the 9/11 anniversary Congress still had not received an updated, cross-agency accounting of Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological arms capabilities. The administration's conflicting accounts of Saddam Hussein's nuclear prowess and his alleged links to al-Qaida change by the day. "The dots are there for all to connect," said Donald Rumsfeld one week; the next week Rice's spokeswoman said: "Have we connected those dots? No."
Is our information about other, possibly even graver terrorist threats just as slipshod? Like it or not, we have a new, pre-emptive defense policy built on the principle that we strike the bad guys before they hit us. But how can it be executed if our intelligence is too inconsistent to determine which bad guys are first on the horizon? As Hezbollah militants mobilize in Lebanon and non-fuzzy math suggests that more al-Qaida operatives are in Iran than Iraq, we have chosen a first-strike target, however thuggish, that may be tangential to the stateless, itinerant Islamic terrorism of the youthful Mohamed Atta generation.
But there's no point in debating that now. We are already on our way to Baghdad. It's our CEO's choice as the most profitable target for the next fiscal year, and we are assured that it will go better than some other CEO pet projects, like Dick Cheney's "win-win" Halliburton-Dresser merger. What's more, it is cost free: The chief White House economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, said it won't even dent that fine economy the president keeps telling us he is so optimistic about. Maybe there will be some price in blood, but the battle plans leaked daily from the Pentagon never seem to offer any casualty projections, reassuringly enough. Daschle and his fellow outside directors, meanwhile, have their own politically profitable business plan, to be executed as soon as they sign off on the war resolution. They will be all too happy to let Al Gore worry about Iraq in San Francisco, or wherever he is, while they whip up election-eve fears about something truly scary, like Social Security.
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Frank Rich is a columnist with The New York Times. Copyright 2002 New York Times News Service.
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