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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (38061)	4/5/2004 8:39:24 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 794443

Asleep on Alert By William Raspberry Monday, April 5, 2004; Page A17 As regular readers of this column may have deduced, I am not a huge fan of President Bush's. I would not throw myself off a cliff if his turned out to be a one-term presidency. Still, just what am I supposed to conclude if the allegations against him regarding his pre-Sept. 11 leadership prove even partially correct? That he was fixated on Saddam Hussein goes without saying. But was that fixation at the expense of anti-terrorist action he might have taken to prevent the attacks? That clearly is the implication of the inquiry (in the media and by the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission) into the extent to which members of the Bush administration ignored credible intelligence before terrorists commandeered those four American airliners and turned three of them into jet-propelled bombs. Is this reexamination of recent and painful history likely to make us smarter -- render us less vulnerable to future terrorist attacks? Or is it little more than Monday-morning quarterbacking, where any armchair critic can explain how the play that didn't work couldn't have worked? The fixation on Hussein can be explained many ways: an angry president's desire to avenge his father for an alleged attempt on the older Bush's life; an insecure president's hope to prove himself a man among men; or an inexperienced president's ensnarlment in the ideologically driven machinations of his key advisers. Peter R. Neumann, an anti-terrorism scholar at King's College London, offers a useful reminder. Before Sept. 11 most experts -- not just those in the Bush administration -- assumed that international terror was a state-sponsored phenomenon. It took a while for the notion to take hold that al Qaeda was something new on the scene -- terrorism without centralized, geographically based leadership. (It also took a while, as Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, remarked a week ago, for anyone to figure out that commercial airliners could be used as weapons.) But everybody knows it now. Will going over it all again make us less vulnerable next time? Will we be clearer on what to do? Two polls released last week drive home the point I want to make. One, from the Council for Excellence in Government, found that less than half of all Americans think government action since Sept. 11 has made us safer -- and more than three out of four believe there will be a major terrorist attack, here or abroad, in the next few months. In other words, like the Bush administration post-Sept. 11, we have waked up. But look at the other survey, this one by USA Today/CNN/Gallup. A majority of Americans have failed to follow the government's advice on how to prepare for a terrorist attack. Only about 40 percent of us report having a stockpile of food and water at home -- down from 60 percent a year ago. Only 25 percent have designated a "safe room" in their homes. (Remember when we were told to use plastic sheets and duct tape to seal off that special refuge?) USA Today quoted Marsha Evans, president of the American Red Cross, as saying: "Americans are asleep at the switch when it comes to their own safety." No. It isn't that we are oblivious to terrorist threats but that we understand how little we can do about those threats so long as they remain as vague as a national "Code Yellow." I wasn't oblivious to the threat of the Washington sniper, but I didn't stop driving the Beltway or gassing up my car or going to shopping malls. I could have made myself safer from the sniper, no doubt, by moving into my basement -- and I might have done so had I been told the sniper was looking for me, or was believed to be lurking in my neighborhood. But knowing only that he was probably in the Washington area was too vague a threat to change my routine. That's why I haven't plastic-sheeted and duct-taped that "safe room." I'd do so in a heartbeat if I had reason to believe the next terrorist attack would be in my part of town, and that it would occur while my family and I were at home, and that going to the safe room would be safer than leaving the house for one of those evacuation routes being worked up by other government agencies. You don't have to be "asleep at the switch" to decide that you can't hide under a rock. And that goes for the government, too. willrasp@washpost.com