Another good read from Foreign Affairs Journal
The Wisdom of Retrenchment: The United States can no longer afford a world-spanning foreign policy. Retrenchment -- cutting military spending, redefining foreign priorities, and shifting more of the defense burden to allies -- is the only sensible course. Luckily, that does not have to spell instability abroad. History shows that pausing to recharge national batteries can renew a dominant power’s international legitimacy.
In the wake of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy underwent a profound transformation. Unrestrained by superpower competition, the United States' ambitions spilled over their former limits. Washington increased its military spending far faster than any of its rivals, expanded NATO, and started dispatching forces around the world on humanitarian missions while letting key allies drift away. These trends accelerated after 9/11, as the United States went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, ramped up its counterterrorism operations around the world, sped up its missile defense program, and set up new bases in distant lands.
Today, however, U.S. power has begun to wane. As other states rise in prominence, the United States' undisciplined spending habits and open-ended foreign policy commitments are catching up with the country. Spurred on by skyrocketing government debt and the emergence of the Tea Party movement, budget hawks are circling Washington. Before leaving office earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced cuts to the tune of $78 billion over the next five years, and the recent debt-ceiling deal could trigger another $350 billion in cuts from the defense budget over ten years. In addition to fiscal discipline, Washington appears to have rediscovered the virtues of multilateralism and a restrained foreign policy. It has narrowed its war aims in Afghanistan and Iraq, taken NATO expansion off its agenda, and let France and the United Kingdom lead the intervention in Libya.
But if U.S. policymakers have reduced the country's strategic commitments in response to a decline in its relative power, they have yet to fully embrace retrenchment as a policy and endorse deep spending cuts (especially to the military), redefine Washington's foreign policy priorities, and shift more of the United States' defense burdens onto its allies. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has warned that a cut in defense spending beyond the one agreed to in the debt-ceiling deal would be devastating. "It will weaken our national defense," he said. "It will undermine our ability to maintain our alliances throughout the world." This view reflects the conventional wisdom of generations of U.S. decision-makers: when it comes to power, more is always better. Many officials fear that reducing the country's influence abroad would let tyranny advance and force trade to dwindle. And various interest groups oppose the idea, since they stand to lose from a sudden reduction in the United States' foreign engagements.
In fact, far from auguring chaos abroad and division at home, a policy of prudent retrenchment would not only reduce the costs of U.S. foreign policy but also result in a more coherent and sustainable strategy. In the past, great powers that scaled back their goals in the face of their diminishing means were able to navigate the shoals of power politics better than those that clung to expensive and overly ambitious commitments. Today, a reduction in U.S. forward deployments could mollify U.S. adversaries, eliminate potential flashpoints, and encourage U.S. allies to contribute more to collective defense -- all while easing the burden on the United States of maintaining geopolitical dominance. A policy of retrenchment need not invite international instability or fuel partisan rancor in Washington. If anything, it could help provide breathing room for reforms and recovery, increase strategic flexibility, and renew the legitimacy of U.S. leadership.
DECLINE: DELUSION OR DESTINY?
Power is multifaceted and difficult to measure, but the metrics that matter most over the long term are a country's military capability and economic strength relative to rivals. Using those benchmarks, there is a strong case to be made that although U.S. decline is real, its rate is modest.
The United States invests more in its military manpower and hardware than all other countries combined. As the political scientist Barry Posen argues, this has allowed it to exercise "command of the commons." With its vast fleet of attack submarines and aircraft carriers, the United States controls the seas -- even those that are not its territorial waters and those outside its exclusive economic zone. Its fighter aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles give it unrivaled air superiority. And its dominance of outer space and cyberspace is almost as impressive.
But the United States' return on its military investment is falling. Manpower and technology costs are increasing rapidly. The Government Accountability Office reports that since the end of the Cold War, funding for weapons acquisition has increased by 57 percent while the average acquisition cost has increased by 120 percent. According to the Congressional Research Service, between 1999 and 2005, the real cost of supporting an active-duty service member grew by 33 percent. Meanwhile, the benefits of unrestricted defense spending have not kept up with the costs. As Gates put it, U.S. defense institutions have become "accustomed to the post-9/11 decade's worth of 'no questions asked' funding requests," encouraging a culture of waste and inefficiency he described as "a semi-feudal system -- an amalgam of fiefdoms without centralized mechanisms to allocate resources."
The trend of the last decade is disturbing: as military spending soared, U.S. success abroad sagged. To be clear, the United States continues to field the best-armed, most skilled military in the world. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have bent, but not broken, the all-volunteer force, and the burden of maintaining this formidable force is not unacceptably onerous. The proposed $553 billion base-line defense budget for 2012 represents just 15 percent of the federal budget and less than five percent of GDP. (To put that figure in perspective, consider that the proposed 2012 budget for Social Security spending tops $760 billion.) Yet current trends will make it harder for the United States to continue to purchase hegemony as easily as it has in the past. Changes in military tactics and technology are eroding the United States' advantages. The proliferation of antiship cruise missiles makes it harder for the U.S. Navy to operate near adversaries' shores. Advanced surface-to-air missiles likewise raise the cost of maintaining U.S. air superiority in hostile theaters. Nationalist and tribal insurgencies, fueled by a brisk small-arms trade, have proved difficult to combat with conventional ground forces. U.S. defense dominance is getting more expensive at a moment when it is becoming less expensive for other states and actors to challenge the sole superpower.
Beyond these challenges to the country's military dominance, a weakened economic condition is contributing to the decline of U.S. power. The U.S. economy remains the largest in the world, yet its position is in jeopardy. Between 1999 and 2009, the U.S. share of global GDP (measured in terms of purchasing power parity) fell from 23 percent to 20 percent, whereas China's share of global GDP jumped from seven percent to 13 percent. Should this trend continue, China's economic output will surpass the United States' by 2016. China already consumes more energy than the United States, and calls are growing louder to replace the dollar as the international reserve currency with a basket of currencies that would include the euro and the yuan.
The fiscal position of the United States is alarming, whether or not one believes that Standard & Poor's was justified in downgrading U.S. Treasury bonds. Between 2001 and 2009, U.S. federal debt as a percentage of GDP more than doubled, from 32 percent to 67 percent, and state and local governments have significant debts, too. The United States' reliance on imports, combined with high rates of borrowing, has led to a considerable current account deficit: more than six percent of GDP in 2006. Power follows money, and the United States is leaking cash.
The news is not all doom and gloom. Despite massive federal debt, the United States spent less than five percent of its 2010 budget on net interest payments, limiting the extent to which debt servicing costs have crowded out other spending. The United States still exports more goods and services than any other country and is close behind China as the world's largest manufacturer. In terms of market exchange rate, the U.S. economy is still more than double the size of the Chinese economy, and China faces a raft of obstacles that could slow its rise: domestic unrest, stock and housing bubbles, corruption, an aging population, high savings, and an unproven track record of innovation. Yet the overall picture is clear: the United States' economic supremacy is no longer assured, and this uncertainty will reduce its geopolitical dominance.
In essence, the United States has fallen into a familiar pattern for hegemonic powers: overconsumption, overextension, and overoptimism. But the country also has a resourceful economy and a resilient military; it is not in free fall. Now, it needs a foreign policy to match.
RESISTING THE MYTHS OF EMPIRE
Despite the erosion of U.S. military and economic dominance, many observers warn that a rapid departure from the current approach to foreign policy would be disastrous. The historian Robert Kagan cautions that "a reduction in defense spending . . . would unnerve American allies and undercut efforts to gain greater cooperation." The journalist Robert Kaplan even more apocalyptically warns that "lessening [the United States'] engagement with the world would have devastating consequences for humanity." But these defenders of the status quo confuse retrenchment with appeasement or isolationism. A prudent reduction of the United States' overseas commitments would not prevent the country from countering dangerous threats and engaging with friends and allies. Indeed, such reductions would grant the country greater strategic flexibility and free resources to promote long-term growth.
A somewhat more compelling concern raised by opponents of retrenchment is that the policy might undermine deterrence. Reducing the defense budget or repositioning forces would make the United States look weak and embolden upstarts, they argue. "The very signaling of such an aloof intention may encourage regional bullies," Kaplan worries. This anxiety is rooted in the assumption that the best barrier to adventurism by adversaries is forward defenses -- the deployment of military assets in large bases near enemy borders, which serve as tripwires or, to some eyes, a Great Wall of America.
There are many problems with this position. For starters, the policies that have gotten the United States in trouble in recent years have been activist, not passive or defensive. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq alienated important U.S. allies, such as Germany and Turkey, and increased Iran's regional power. NATO's expansion eastward has strained the alliance and intensified Russia's ambitions in Georgia and Ukraine.
More generally, U.S. forward deployments are no longer the main barrier to great-power land grabs. Taking and holding territory is more expensive than it once was, and great powers have little incentive or interest in expanding further. The United States' chief allies have developed the wherewithal to defend their territorial boundaries and deter restive neighbors. Of course, retrenchment might tempt reckless rivals to pursue unexpected or incautious policies, as states sometimes do. Should that occur, however, U.S. superiority in conventional arms and its power-projection capabilities would assure the option of quick U.S. intervention. Outcomes of that sort would be costly, but the risks of retrenchment must be compared to the risks of the status quo. In difficult financial circumstances, the United States must prioritize. The biggest menace to a superpower is not the possibility of belated entry into a regional crisis; it is the temptation of imperial overstretch. That is exactly the trap into which opponents of the United States, such as al Qaeda, want it to fall.
Nor is there good evidence that reducing Washington's overseas commitments would lead friends and rivals to question its credibility. Despite some glum prophecies, the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from western Europe after the Cold War neither doomed NATO nor discredited the United States. Similar reductions in U.S. military forces and the forces' repositioning in South Korea have improved the sometimes tense relationship between Washington and Seoul. Calls for Japan to assume a greater defense burden have likewise resulted in deeper integration of U.S. and Japanese forces. Faith in forward defenses is a holdover from the Cold War, rooted in visions of implacable adversaries and falling dominoes. It is ill suited to contemporary world politics, where balancing coalitions are notably absent and ideological disputes remarkably mild.
Others warn that the U.S. political system is too fragmented to implement a coordinated policy of retrenchment. In this view, even if the foreign policy community unanimously subscribed to this strategy, it would be unable to outmaneuver lobbying groups and bureaucracies that favor a more activist approach. Electoral pressures reward lucrative defense contracts and chest-thumping stump speeches rather than sober appraisals of declining fortunes. Whatever leaders' preferences are, bureaucratic pressures promote conservative decisions, policy inertia, and big budgets -- none of which is likely to usher in an era of self-restraint.
Despite deep partisan divides, however, Republicans and Democrats have often put aside their differences when it comes to foreign policy. After World War II, the United States did not revert to the isolationism of earlier periods: both parties backed massive programs to contain the Soviet Union. During the tempestuous 1960s, a consensus emerged in favor of détente with the Soviets. The 9/11 attacks generated bipartisan support for action against al Qaeda and its allies. Then, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, politicians across the spectrum recognized the need to bring the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to an end. When faced with pressing foreign policy challenges, U.S. politicians generally transcend ideological divides and forge common policies, sometimes expanding the United States' global commitments and sometimes contracting them.
Today, electoral pressures support a more modest approach to foreign affairs. According to a 2009 study by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Americans would rather the United States share global leadership than go it alone. And a 2010 study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 79 percent of them thought the United States played the role of world policeman more than it should. Even on sacrosanct issues such as the defense budget, the public has demonstrated a willingness to consider reductions. In a 2010 study conducted by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland, 64 percent of respondents endorsed reductions in defense spending, supporting an average cut of $109 billion to the base-line defense budget.
Institutional barriers to reform do remain. Yet when presidents have led, the bureaucrats have largely followed. Three successive administrations, beginning with that of Ronald Reagan, were able to tame congressional opposition and push through an ambitious realignment program that ultimately resulted in the closure of 100 military bases, saving $57 billion. In its 2010 defense budget, the Obama administration succeeded in canceling plans to acquire additional F-22 Raptors despite fierce resistance by lobbyists, members of Congress, and the air force brass. The 2010 budget also included cuts to the navy's fleet of stealth destroyers and various components of the army's next generation of manned ground vehicles.
Thus, claims that retrenchment is politically impractical or improbable are unfounded. Just as a more humble foreign policy will invite neither instability nor decline, domestic political factors will not inevitably prevent timely reform. To chart a new course, U.S. policymakers need only possess foresight and will.
THE VIRTUES OF RESTRAINT
Even if a policy of retrenchment were possible to implement, would it work? The historical record suggests it would. Since 1870, there have been 18 cases in which a great power slipped in the rankings, as measured by its GDP relative to those of other great powers. Fifteen of those declining powers implemented some form of retrenchment. Far from inviting aggression, this policy resulted in those states' being more likely to avoid militarized disputes and to recover their former rank than the three declining great powers that did not adopt retrenchment: France in the 1880s, Germany in the 1930s, and Japan in the 1990s. Those states never recovered their former positions, unlike almost half of the 15 states that did retrench, including, for example, Russia in the 1880s and the United Kingdom in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Retrenchment works in several ways. One is by shifting commitments and resources from peripheral to core interests and preserving investments in the most valuable geographic and functional areas. This can help pare back the number of potential flashpoints with emerging adversaries by decreasing the odds of accidental clashes, as well as reducing the incentives of regional powers to respond confrontationally. Whereas primacy forces a state to defend a vast and brittle perimeter, a policy of retrenchment allows it to respond to significant threats at the times and in the places of its choosing. Conflict does not become entirely elective, as threats to core interests still must be met. But for the United States, retrenchment would reduce the overall burden of defense, as well as the danger of becoming bogged down in a marginal morass.
It would also encourage U.S. allies to assume more responsibility for collective security. Such burden sharing would be more equitable for U.S. taxpayers, who today shoulder a disproportionate load in securing the world. Every year, according to Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute, they pay an average of $2,065 each in taxes to cover the cost of national defense, compared with $1,000 for Britons, $430 for Germans, and $340 for Japanese.
Despite spending far less on defense, the United States' traditional allies have little trouble protecting their vital interests. No state credibly threatens the territorial integrity of either western European countries or Japan, and U.S. allies do not need independent power- projection capabilities to protect their homelands. NATO's intervention in Libya has been flawed in many respects, but it has demonstrated that European member states are capable of conducting complex military operations with the United States playing a secondary role. Going forward, U.S. retrenchment would compel U.S. allies to improve their existing capabilities and bear the costs of their altruistic impulses.
The United States and its allies have basically the same goals: democracy, stability, and trade. But the United States is in the awkward position of both being spread too thin around the globe and irritating many states by its presence on, or near, their soil. Delegating some of its responsibilities to allies would permit the U.S. government to focus more on critical objectives, such as ensuring a stable and prosperous economy. Regional partners, who have a greater stake in and knowledge of local challenges, can take on more responsibility. With increased input from others and a less invasive presence, retrenchment would also allow the United States to restore some luster to its leadership.
A MORE FRUGAL FUTURE
To implement a retrenchment policy, the United States would have to take three main steps: reduce its global military footprint, change the size and composition of the U.S. military, and use the resulting "retrenchment dividend" to foster economic recovery at home.
First, the United States must reconsider its forward deployments. The top priority should be to deter aggression against its main economic partners in Europe and Asia. This task is not especially burdensome; there are few credible threats to U.S. allies in these regions, and these states need little help from the United States.
Although Russia continues to meddle in its near abroad and has employed oil and gas embargoes to coerce its immediate neighbors, western Europe's resources are more than sufficient to counter an assertive Russia. A more autonomous Europe would take some time to develop a coherent security and defense policy and would not always see events through the same lens as Washington. But reducing Europe's dependence on the United States would create a strong incentive for European states to spend more on defense, modernize their forces, and better integrate their policies and capabilities. U.S. forces in the European theater could safely be reduced by 40-50 percent without compromising European security.
Asia is also ready for a decreased U.S. military presence, and Washington should begin gradually withdrawing its troops. Although China has embarked on an ambitious policy of military modernization and engages in periodic saber rattling in the South China Sea, its ability to project power remains limited. Japan and South Korea are already shouldering greater defense burdens than they were during the Cold War. India, the Philippines, and Vietnam are eager to forge strategic partnerships with the United States. Given the shared interest in promoting regional security, these ties could be sustained through bilateral political and economic agreements, instead of the indefinite deployments and open-ended commitments of the Cold War.
In the event that China becomes domineering, U.S. allies on its borders will act as a natural early warning system and a first line of defense, as well as provide logistical hubs and financial support for any necessary U.S. responses. Yet such a state of affairs is hardly inevitable. For now, there are many less expensive alternatives that can strengthen the current line of defense, such as technology transfers, arms sales, and diplomatic mediation. Defending the territorial integrity of Japan and South Korea and preventing Chinese or North Korean adventurism demands rapid-response forces with strong reserves, not the 30,000 soldiers currently stationed in each country. Phasing out 20 percent of those forces while repositioning others to Guam or Hawaii would achieve the same results more efficiently.
Reducing these overseas commitments would produce significant savings. A bipartisan task force report published in 2010 by the Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that the demobilization of 50,000 active-duty soldiers in Europe and Asia alone could save as much as $12 billion a year. Shrinking the U.S. footprint would also generate indirect savings in the form of decreased personnel, maintenance, and equipment costs.
Retrenchment would also require the United States to minimize its presence in South Asia and the Middle East. The United States has an interest in ensuring the flow of cheap oil, yet armed interventions and forward deployments are hardly the best ways to achieve that goal. These actions have radicalized local populations, provided attractive targets for terrorists, destabilized oil markets, and inflamed the suspicions of regional rivals such as Iran. Similarly, the United States has a strong incentive to deny terrorist groups safe havens in ungoverned spaces. It is unclear, however, whether large troop deployments are the most cost-effective way to do so. The U.S.-led NATO mission in Afghanistan has established temporary pockets of stability, but it has enjoyed little success in promoting good governance, stamping out corruption, or eradicating the most dangerous militant networks. Nor have boots on the ground improved relations with or politics in Pakistan.
More broadly, the Pentagon should devote fewer resources to maintaining and developing its capabilities for engaging in peripheral conflicts, such as the war in Afghanistan. Nation building and counterinsurgency operations have a place in U.S. defense planning, but not a large one. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have raised the profile of counterinsurgency doctrine and brought prominence to its advocates and practitioners, such as David Petraeus, the retired general who is now director of the CIA. This is an understandable development, considering that the defense establishment was previously unprepared to wage a counterinsurgency war. But such conflicts require enormous commitments of blood and treasure over many years, rarely result in decisive victory, and seldom bring tangible rewards. A retrenching United States would sidestep such high-risk, low-return endeavors, especially when counterterrorism and domestic law enforcement and security measures have proved to be effective alternatives. Although they cannot solve every problem, relatively small forces that do not require massive bases can nevertheless carry out significant strikes -- as evidenced by the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
Curbing the United States' commitments would reduce risks, but it cannot eliminate them. Adversaries may fill regional power vacuums, and allies will never behave exactly as Washington would prefer. Yet those costs would be outweighed by the concrete benefits of pulling back. A focus on the United States' core interests in western Europe would limit the risk of catastrophic clashes with Russia over ethnic enclaves in Georgia or Moldova by allowing the United States to avoid commitments it would be unwise to honor. By narrowing its commitments in Asia, the United States could lessen the likelihood of conflict over issues such as the status of Taiwan or competing maritime claims in the South China Sea. Just as the United Kingdom tempered its commitments and accommodated U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere at the turn of the last century, the United States should now temper its commitments and cultivate a lasting compromise with China over Taiwan.
Disassociating itself from unsavory regimes in the Middle East would insulate the United States from the charges of hypocrisy that undermine public support for its foreign policy throughout the region. And an accelerated drawdown of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would save a considerable amount of money. The current request for $118 billion to support these operations represents a savings of $42 billion compared with last year. Moving even faster to end those conflicts would result in even larger savings. At a time when the U.S. government is under incredible pressure to justify big-ticket spending, what little return on investment these wars promise does not warrant any more patience -- or sacrifice.
FROM PROFLIGACY TO PRUDENCE
The second necessary step for retrenchment would be to change the size and composition of U.S. military forces. Despite Gates' best efforts, the 2012 defense budget remains stuffed with allocations for weapons systems of debatable strategic value. For instance, despite delays, cost overruns, failed or deferred tests, and opposition from U.S. allies, the Obama administration has pledged more than $10 billion for various ballistic missile defense systems and close to another $10 billion to fund the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. And such programs are merely the low-hanging fruit. A nonpartisan task force of leading experts convened by the Institute for Policy Studies recently concluded that the U.S. government could slash more than $77 billion from the 2012 defense budget across eight different programs. New submarines and preliminary payments on what would be the 11th U.S. aircraft carrier -- no other country has more than one -- cannot be the best way to spend $5 billion. Likewise, spending $100 billion over the next ten years to upgrade U.S. nuclear weapons will not alter any adversary's calculations in a positive way.
Deeper defense cuts would force the Pentagon to do what the rest of the United States is already doing: rethink the country's role in a changing world. One problem with present procurement plans is that the strategic rationale underlying certain goals -- a 320-ship fleet for the navy, 2,200 fighter aircraft for the air force -- remains murky. Protecting international trade routes against Chinese aggression is often cited as the justification for such military programs. But precisely how the United States is going to protect its economy by clashing with its third-largest trading partner is rarely explained.
The lack of a clear assessment of the costs and benefits of new weapons systems may also lead to expensive errors. The United States already has an immense lead in aircraft carriers, fourth-generation jet fighters, and mechanized land forces. There are few reasons to squander resources replacing weapons systems that already surpass those of every single rival. Moreover, the fast pace of technological change, in particular when it comes to advanced antiship and air defense capabilities, casts doubt on the wisdom of pouring money into systems that might be obsolete the moment they roll off assembly lines.
In contrast, a modest investment in proven capabilities would bolster U.S. defenses in core regions and give the United States maximum flexibility to respond to future threats. To this end, investments should continue in theater- and naval-based ballistic missile defense systems, which remain the best ways to protect U.S. allies against missile threats. The Pentagon should acquire cheap alternatives to existing systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, in large numbers. Congress should continue to fund research and development, but only enough to ensure that new technologies could be produced promptly when clear and present needs arise. These changes in procurement, combined with a slightly swifter drawdown in Afghanistan and Iraq and a somewhat smaller U.S. Army and Marine Corps, would save the United States a minimum of $90 billion annually.
Savings of that kind would be part of a retrenchment dividend that could be spent on reinvigorating the U.S. economy. Retrenchment begins with the curtailing of foreign policy resources, but it ends only when the resources saved are spent domestically. Although military expenditures are a productive investment, they are not infinitely or incomparably so. And the United States is already past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to defense spending. Washington should prioritize measures to more directly stimulate the U.S. economy and make it more competitive. How exactly to achieve that outcome will surely continue to be the subject of fierce debate. But that debate will be much more meaningful if it is conducted with the aim of investing a retrenchment dividend.
The modest decline of U.S. power, combined with a relatively benign international environment, has provided the United States with a unique opportunity to reduce its foreign policy commitments in a measured manner. To make a virtue of this necessity, policymakers in Washington must resist calls to tighten the United States' tenuous grasp on global affairs, ignore the stale warnings about eroded credibility, and overcome the tired protests of bloated bureaucracies. By reducing its forward deployments, sharing burdens with its allies, limiting its fights in peripheral territories, and paring back wasteful spending on unnecessary weapons, the United States can not only slow its decline but also sow the seeds of its recovery.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Monday, November 21, 2011
David Frum on The Troubled GOP
I've spent a lot of time looking for a sign of the honorable side of conservatism. I have always felt that the best political policy is born from the healthy tension between principled conservatism and principled liberalism. Over the last several years, and built to a fever pitch since the election of Barack Obama, the most insidious usurpation of reasoned conservatism has gripped the throat of the US and brought about a completely dysfunctional political stalemate devoid of any sign of the "art of the possible".
David Frum, formerly of the AIE and former advisor to George W. Bush and Rudi Giuliani, laments his parties break with reality-based politics. Good read.
"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Newt Gingrich
It’s a very strange experience to have your friends think you’ve gone crazy. Some will tell you so. Others will indulgently humor you. Still others will avoid you. More than a few will demand that the authorities do something to get you off the streets. During one unpleasant moment after I was fired from the think tank where I’d worked for the previous seven years, I tried to reassure my wife with an old cliché: “The great thing about an experience like this is that you learn who your friends really are.” She answered, “I was happier when I didn’t know.”
It’s possible that my friends are right. I don’t think so—but then, crazy people never do. So let me put the case to you.
I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support.
America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.
It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic-recovery program.
I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess. People may very well say: Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you work in the George W. Bush administration that disappointed so many people in so many ways? What qualifies you to dispense advice to anybody else?
Fair question. I am haunted by the Bush experience, although it seems almost presumptuous for someone who played such a minor role to feel so much unease. The people who made the big decisions certainly seem to sleep well enough. Yet there is also the chance for something positive to come out of it all. True, some of my colleagues emerged from those years eager to revenge themselves and escalate political conflict: “They send one of ours to the hospital, we send two of theirs to the morgue.” I came out thinking, I want no more part of this cycle of revenge. For the past half-dozen years, I have been arguing that we conservatives need to follow a different course. And it is this argument that has led so many of my friends to demand, sometimes bemusedly, sometimes angrily, “What the hell happened to you?” I could fire the same question back: “Never mind me—what happened to you?”
"If we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely." Michelle Bachman
So what did happen? The first decade of the 21st century was a crazy bookend to the twentieth, opening with a second Pearl Harbor and ending with a second Great Crash, with a second Vietnam wedged in between. Now we seem caught in the coils of a second Great Depression. These shocks radicalized the political system, damaging hawkish Democrats like Hillary Clinton in the Bush years and then driving Republicans to dust off the economics of Ayn Rand.
Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are opportunistic and cynical. It’s true that cynicism is never entirely absent from politics: I won’t soon forget the lupine smile that played about the lips of the leader of one prominent conservative institution as he told me, “Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.” Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.
Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.
The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers. For the past three years, the media have praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.
Many hope that the tea-party mood is just a passing mania, eventually to subside into something more like the businessperson’s Republicanism practiced in the nineties by governors and mayors like George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani, Christine Todd Whitman and Dick Riordan, Tommy Thompson and John Engler. This hope tends to coalesce around the candidacies of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, two smart and well-informed former governors who eschew the strident rhetoric of the tea party and who have thereby earned its deep distrust. But there are good reasons to fear that the ebbing of Republican radicalism remains far off, even if Romney (or Huntsman) does capture the White House next year.
"[Obama] grew up in a privileged way. He never had to really work for anything; he never had to go through what Americans are going through." Rick Perry
1. Fiscal Austerity and Economic Stagnation
We have entered an era in which politics increasingly revolves around the ugly question of who will bear how much pain. Conservative constituencies already see themselves as aggrieved victims of American government: They are the people who pay the taxes even as their “earned” benefits are siphoned off to provide welfare for the undeserving. The reality is, however, that the big winners in the American fiscal system are the rich, the old, the rural, and veterans—typically conservative constituencies. Squeezing the programs conservatives most dislike—PBS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, tax credits for the poor, the Department of Education, etc.—yields relatively little money. Any serious move to balance the budget, or even just reduce the deficit a little, must inevitably cut programs conservative voters do like: Medicare for current beneficiaries, farm subsidies, veterans’ benefits, and big tax loopholes like the mortgage-interest deduction and employer-provided health benefits. The rank and file of the GOP are therefore caught between their interests and their ideology—intensifying their suspicion that shadowy Washington elites are playing dirty tricks upon them.
2. Ethnic Competition
White America has been plunged into a mood of pessimism and anger since 2008. Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal: “63 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children to exceed their standard of living. Even college-educated whites are less optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the noncollege whites are the gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live better than they do; an equal number think their children won’t even match their living standard. No other group is nearly that negative.” Those fears are not irrational. In postrecession America, employers seem to show a distinct preference for foreign-born workers. Eighty percent of the net new jobs created in the state of Texas since 2009 went to the foreign-born. Nationwide, foreign-born workers have experienced a net 4 percent increase in employment since January 2009, while native-born workers have seen continuing employment declines. Which may explain why President Obama’s approval rating among whites slipped to 41 percent in January 2010 and is now testing a new low of 33 percent. The president’s name and skin color symbolize the emergence of a new America in which many older-stock Americans intuit they will be left behind.
It is precisely these disaffected whites—especially those who didn’t go to college—who form the Republican voting base. John McCain got 58 percent of noncollege-white votes in 2008. The GOP polls even higher among that group today, but the party can only sustain those numbers as long as it gives voice to alienation. Birtherism, the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, expressed the feeling of many that power has shifted into alien hands. That feeling will not be easily quelled by Republican electoral success, because it is based on a deep sense of dispossession and disinheritance.
3. Fox News and Talk Radio
Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.
But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”
"I'm ready for the gotcha questions...and when they ask me who is the president of Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I'm gonna say, you know, I don't know." Herman Cain
We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.
When contemplating the ruthless brilliance of this system, it’s tempting to fall back on the theory that the GOP is masterminded by a cadre of sinister billionaires, deftly manipulating the political process for their own benefit. The billionaires do exist, and some do indeed attempt to influence the political process. The bizarre fiasco of campaign-finance reform has perversely empowered them to give unlimited funds anonymously to special entities that can spend limitlessly. (Thanks, Senator McCain! Nice job, Senator Feingold!) Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. They watch Fox News too, and they’re gripped by the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base. In funding the tea-party movement, they are actually acting against their own longer-term interests, for it is the richest who have the most interest in political stability, which depends upon broad societal agreement that the existing distribution of rewards is fair and reasonable. If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair.
Over the past few years, I have left this alternative knowledge system behind me. What is that experience like? A personal story may be relevant here.
Through the debate over health-care reform in 2009–10, I urged that Republicans try to reach some kind of deal. The Democrats had the votes to pass something. They could not afford to lose. Providing health coverage to all is a worthy goal, and the core mechanisms of what we called Obamacare should not have been obnoxious to Republicans. In fact, they were drawn from past Republican plans. Democrats were so eager for Republican votes to provide bipartisan cover that they might well have paid a substantial price to get them, including dropping the surtaxes on work and investment that supposedly financed the Affordable Care Act. My urgings went unheeded, obviously. Senator Jim DeMint predicted that health care would become Obama’s Waterloo, the decisive defeat that would destroy his presidency, and Republicans accepted DeMint’s counsel. So they bet everything—and lost everything. A major new entitlement has been written into law, financed by redistributive new taxes. Changes in the bill that could have been had for the asking will now require years of slow, painful legislative effort, if they ever come at all. Republicans hope that the Supreme Court will overturn the Affordable Care Act. Such a decision would be the most dramatic assertion of judicial power since the thirties, and for that reason alone seems improbable. Yet absent action by the Supreme Court, outright repeal of President Obama’s health-care law is a mirage, requiring not only 60 votes in the Senate but also the withdrawal of benefits that the American people will have gotten used to by 2013.
On the day of the House vote that ensured the enactment of health-care reform, I wrote a blog post saying all this—and calling for some accountability for those who had led the GOP to this disaster. For my trouble, I was denounced the next day by my former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal as a turncoat. Three days after that, I was dismissed from the American Enterprise Institute. I’m not a solitary case: In 2005, the economist Bruce Bartlett, a main legislative author of the Kemp-Roth tax cut, was fired from a think tank in Dallas for too loudly denouncing the George W. Bush administration’s record, and I could tell equivalent stories about other major conservative think tanks as well.
I don’t complain from a personal point of view. Happily, I had other economic resources to fall back upon. But the message sent to others with less security was clear: We don’t pay you to think, we pay you to repeat. For myself, the main consequences have been more comic than anything else. Back in 2009, I wrote a piece for Newsweek arguing that Republicans would regret conceding so much power to Rush Limbaugh. Until that point, I’d been a frequent guest on Fox News, but thenceforward some kind of fatwa was laid down upon me. Over the next few months, I’d occasionally receive morning calls from young TV bookers asking if I was available to appear that day. For sport, I’d always answer, “I’m available—but does your senior producer know you’ve called me?” An hour later, I’d receive an embarrassed second call: “We’ve decided to go in a different direction.” Earlier this year, I did some volunteer speechwriting for a Republican contemplating a presidential run. My involvement was treated as a dangerous secret, involving discreet visits to hotel suites at odd hours. Thus are political movements held together. But thus is not how movements grow and govern.
Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of intellectual pollen. Call it instead the drying up of conservative creativity. It’s clearly true that the country faces daunting economic troubles. It’s also true that the wrong answers to those problems will push the United States toward a future of too much government, too many taxes, and too much regulation. It’s the job of conservatives in this crisis to show a better way. But it’s one thing to point out (accurately) that President Obama’s stimulus plan was mostly a compilation of antique Democratic wish lists, and quite another to argue that the correct response to the worst collapse since the thirties is to wait for the economy to get better on its own. It’s one thing to worry (wisely) about the long-term trend in government spending, and another to demand big, immediate cuts when 25 million are out of full-time work and the government can borrow for ten years at 2 percent. It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.
I refuse to believe that I am the only Republican who feels this way. If CNN’s most recent polling is correct, only half of us sympathize with the tea party. However, moderate-minded people dislike conflict—and thus tend to lose to people who relish conflict. The most extreme voices in the GOP now denounce everybody else as Republicans in Name Only. But who elected them as the GOP’s membership committee? What have they done to deserve such an inheritance? In the mid-sixties, when the party split spectacularly between Ripon Republicans, who embraced the civil-rights movement, and Goldwater Republicans, who opposed it, civil-rights Republicans like Michigan governor George Romney spoke forcefully for their point of view. Today, Republicans discomfited by political and media extremism bite their tongues. But if they don’t speak up, they’ll be whipsawed into a choice between an Obama administration that wants to build a permanently bigger government and a conservative movement content with permanently outraged opposition.
This is, unfortunately, not merely a concern for Republican voters. The conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society. The American system of government can’t work if the two sides wage all-out war upon each other: House, Senate, president, each has the power to thwart the others. In prior generations, the system evolved norms and habits to prevent this kind of stonewalling. For example: Theoretically, the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.
We can debate when the slide began. But what seems beyond argument is that the U.S. political system becomes more polarized and more dysfunctional every cycle, at greater and greater human cost. The next Republican president will surely find himself or herself at least as stymied by this dysfunction as President Obama, as will the people the political system supposedly serves, who must feel they have been subjected to a psychological experiment gone horribly wrong, pressing the red button in 2004 and getting a zap, pressing blue in 2008 for another zap, and now agonizing whether there is any choice that won’t zap them again in 2012. Yet in the interests of avoiding false evenhandedness, it must be admitted: The party with a stronger charge on its zapper right now, the party struggling with more self-imposed obstacles to responsible governance, the party most in need of a course correction, is the Republican Party. Changing that party will be the fight of a political lifetime. But a great political party is worth fighting for.
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/
David Frum, formerly of the AIE and former advisor to George W. Bush and Rudi Giuliani, laments his parties break with reality-based politics. Good read.
"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Newt Gingrich
It’s a very strange experience to have your friends think you’ve gone crazy. Some will tell you so. Others will indulgently humor you. Still others will avoid you. More than a few will demand that the authorities do something to get you off the streets. During one unpleasant moment after I was fired from the think tank where I’d worked for the previous seven years, I tried to reassure my wife with an old cliché: “The great thing about an experience like this is that you learn who your friends really are.” She answered, “I was happier when I didn’t know.”
It’s possible that my friends are right. I don’t think so—but then, crazy people never do. So let me put the case to you.
I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support.
America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.
It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic-recovery program.
I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess. People may very well say: Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you work in the George W. Bush administration that disappointed so many people in so many ways? What qualifies you to dispense advice to anybody else?
Fair question. I am haunted by the Bush experience, although it seems almost presumptuous for someone who played such a minor role to feel so much unease. The people who made the big decisions certainly seem to sleep well enough. Yet there is also the chance for something positive to come out of it all. True, some of my colleagues emerged from those years eager to revenge themselves and escalate political conflict: “They send one of ours to the hospital, we send two of theirs to the morgue.” I came out thinking, I want no more part of this cycle of revenge. For the past half-dozen years, I have been arguing that we conservatives need to follow a different course. And it is this argument that has led so many of my friends to demand, sometimes bemusedly, sometimes angrily, “What the hell happened to you?” I could fire the same question back: “Never mind me—what happened to you?”
"If we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely." Michelle Bachman
So what did happen? The first decade of the 21st century was a crazy bookend to the twentieth, opening with a second Pearl Harbor and ending with a second Great Crash, with a second Vietnam wedged in between. Now we seem caught in the coils of a second Great Depression. These shocks radicalized the political system, damaging hawkish Democrats like Hillary Clinton in the Bush years and then driving Republicans to dust off the economics of Ayn Rand.
Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are opportunistic and cynical. It’s true that cynicism is never entirely absent from politics: I won’t soon forget the lupine smile that played about the lips of the leader of one prominent conservative institution as he told me, “Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.” Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.
Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.
The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers. For the past three years, the media have praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.
Many hope that the tea-party mood is just a passing mania, eventually to subside into something more like the businessperson’s Republicanism practiced in the nineties by governors and mayors like George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani, Christine Todd Whitman and Dick Riordan, Tommy Thompson and John Engler. This hope tends to coalesce around the candidacies of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, two smart and well-informed former governors who eschew the strident rhetoric of the tea party and who have thereby earned its deep distrust. But there are good reasons to fear that the ebbing of Republican radicalism remains far off, even if Romney (or Huntsman) does capture the White House next year.
"[Obama] grew up in a privileged way. He never had to really work for anything; he never had to go through what Americans are going through." Rick Perry
1. Fiscal Austerity and Economic Stagnation
We have entered an era in which politics increasingly revolves around the ugly question of who will bear how much pain. Conservative constituencies already see themselves as aggrieved victims of American government: They are the people who pay the taxes even as their “earned” benefits are siphoned off to provide welfare for the undeserving. The reality is, however, that the big winners in the American fiscal system are the rich, the old, the rural, and veterans—typically conservative constituencies. Squeezing the programs conservatives most dislike—PBS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, tax credits for the poor, the Department of Education, etc.—yields relatively little money. Any serious move to balance the budget, or even just reduce the deficit a little, must inevitably cut programs conservative voters do like: Medicare for current beneficiaries, farm subsidies, veterans’ benefits, and big tax loopholes like the mortgage-interest deduction and employer-provided health benefits. The rank and file of the GOP are therefore caught between their interests and their ideology—intensifying their suspicion that shadowy Washington elites are playing dirty tricks upon them.
2. Ethnic Competition
White America has been plunged into a mood of pessimism and anger since 2008. Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal: “63 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children to exceed their standard of living. Even college-educated whites are less optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the noncollege whites are the gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live better than they do; an equal number think their children won’t even match their living standard. No other group is nearly that negative.” Those fears are not irrational. In postrecession America, employers seem to show a distinct preference for foreign-born workers. Eighty percent of the net new jobs created in the state of Texas since 2009 went to the foreign-born. Nationwide, foreign-born workers have experienced a net 4 percent increase in employment since January 2009, while native-born workers have seen continuing employment declines. Which may explain why President Obama’s approval rating among whites slipped to 41 percent in January 2010 and is now testing a new low of 33 percent. The president’s name and skin color symbolize the emergence of a new America in which many older-stock Americans intuit they will be left behind.
It is precisely these disaffected whites—especially those who didn’t go to college—who form the Republican voting base. John McCain got 58 percent of noncollege-white votes in 2008. The GOP polls even higher among that group today, but the party can only sustain those numbers as long as it gives voice to alienation. Birtherism, the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, expressed the feeling of many that power has shifted into alien hands. That feeling will not be easily quelled by Republican electoral success, because it is based on a deep sense of dispossession and disinheritance.
3. Fox News and Talk Radio
Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.
But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”
"I'm ready for the gotcha questions...and when they ask me who is the president of Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I'm gonna say, you know, I don't know." Herman Cain
We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.
When contemplating the ruthless brilliance of this system, it’s tempting to fall back on the theory that the GOP is masterminded by a cadre of sinister billionaires, deftly manipulating the political process for their own benefit. The billionaires do exist, and some do indeed attempt to influence the political process. The bizarre fiasco of campaign-finance reform has perversely empowered them to give unlimited funds anonymously to special entities that can spend limitlessly. (Thanks, Senator McCain! Nice job, Senator Feingold!) Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. They watch Fox News too, and they’re gripped by the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base. In funding the tea-party movement, they are actually acting against their own longer-term interests, for it is the richest who have the most interest in political stability, which depends upon broad societal agreement that the existing distribution of rewards is fair and reasonable. If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair.
Over the past few years, I have left this alternative knowledge system behind me. What is that experience like? A personal story may be relevant here.
Through the debate over health-care reform in 2009–10, I urged that Republicans try to reach some kind of deal. The Democrats had the votes to pass something. They could not afford to lose. Providing health coverage to all is a worthy goal, and the core mechanisms of what we called Obamacare should not have been obnoxious to Republicans. In fact, they were drawn from past Republican plans. Democrats were so eager for Republican votes to provide bipartisan cover that they might well have paid a substantial price to get them, including dropping the surtaxes on work and investment that supposedly financed the Affordable Care Act. My urgings went unheeded, obviously. Senator Jim DeMint predicted that health care would become Obama’s Waterloo, the decisive defeat that would destroy his presidency, and Republicans accepted DeMint’s counsel. So they bet everything—and lost everything. A major new entitlement has been written into law, financed by redistributive new taxes. Changes in the bill that could have been had for the asking will now require years of slow, painful legislative effort, if they ever come at all. Republicans hope that the Supreme Court will overturn the Affordable Care Act. Such a decision would be the most dramatic assertion of judicial power since the thirties, and for that reason alone seems improbable. Yet absent action by the Supreme Court, outright repeal of President Obama’s health-care law is a mirage, requiring not only 60 votes in the Senate but also the withdrawal of benefits that the American people will have gotten used to by 2013.
On the day of the House vote that ensured the enactment of health-care reform, I wrote a blog post saying all this—and calling for some accountability for those who had led the GOP to this disaster. For my trouble, I was denounced the next day by my former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal as a turncoat. Three days after that, I was dismissed from the American Enterprise Institute. I’m not a solitary case: In 2005, the economist Bruce Bartlett, a main legislative author of the Kemp-Roth tax cut, was fired from a think tank in Dallas for too loudly denouncing the George W. Bush administration’s record, and I could tell equivalent stories about other major conservative think tanks as well.
I don’t complain from a personal point of view. Happily, I had other economic resources to fall back upon. But the message sent to others with less security was clear: We don’t pay you to think, we pay you to repeat. For myself, the main consequences have been more comic than anything else. Back in 2009, I wrote a piece for Newsweek arguing that Republicans would regret conceding so much power to Rush Limbaugh. Until that point, I’d been a frequent guest on Fox News, but thenceforward some kind of fatwa was laid down upon me. Over the next few months, I’d occasionally receive morning calls from young TV bookers asking if I was available to appear that day. For sport, I’d always answer, “I’m available—but does your senior producer know you’ve called me?” An hour later, I’d receive an embarrassed second call: “We’ve decided to go in a different direction.” Earlier this year, I did some volunteer speechwriting for a Republican contemplating a presidential run. My involvement was treated as a dangerous secret, involving discreet visits to hotel suites at odd hours. Thus are political movements held together. But thus is not how movements grow and govern.
Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of intellectual pollen. Call it instead the drying up of conservative creativity. It’s clearly true that the country faces daunting economic troubles. It’s also true that the wrong answers to those problems will push the United States toward a future of too much government, too many taxes, and too much regulation. It’s the job of conservatives in this crisis to show a better way. But it’s one thing to point out (accurately) that President Obama’s stimulus plan was mostly a compilation of antique Democratic wish lists, and quite another to argue that the correct response to the worst collapse since the thirties is to wait for the economy to get better on its own. It’s one thing to worry (wisely) about the long-term trend in government spending, and another to demand big, immediate cuts when 25 million are out of full-time work and the government can borrow for ten years at 2 percent. It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.
I refuse to believe that I am the only Republican who feels this way. If CNN’s most recent polling is correct, only half of us sympathize with the tea party. However, moderate-minded people dislike conflict—and thus tend to lose to people who relish conflict. The most extreme voices in the GOP now denounce everybody else as Republicans in Name Only. But who elected them as the GOP’s membership committee? What have they done to deserve such an inheritance? In the mid-sixties, when the party split spectacularly between Ripon Republicans, who embraced the civil-rights movement, and Goldwater Republicans, who opposed it, civil-rights Republicans like Michigan governor George Romney spoke forcefully for their point of view. Today, Republicans discomfited by political and media extremism bite their tongues. But if they don’t speak up, they’ll be whipsawed into a choice between an Obama administration that wants to build a permanently bigger government and a conservative movement content with permanently outraged opposition.
This is, unfortunately, not merely a concern for Republican voters. The conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society. The American system of government can’t work if the two sides wage all-out war upon each other: House, Senate, president, each has the power to thwart the others. In prior generations, the system evolved norms and habits to prevent this kind of stonewalling. For example: Theoretically, the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.
We can debate when the slide began. But what seems beyond argument is that the U.S. political system becomes more polarized and more dysfunctional every cycle, at greater and greater human cost. The next Republican president will surely find himself or herself at least as stymied by this dysfunction as President Obama, as will the people the political system supposedly serves, who must feel they have been subjected to a psychological experiment gone horribly wrong, pressing the red button in 2004 and getting a zap, pressing blue in 2008 for another zap, and now agonizing whether there is any choice that won’t zap them again in 2012. Yet in the interests of avoiding false evenhandedness, it must be admitted: The party with a stronger charge on its zapper right now, the party struggling with more self-imposed obstacles to responsible governance, the party most in need of a course correction, is the Republican Party. Changing that party will be the fight of a political lifetime. But a great political party is worth fighting for.
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Automation and employment in the 21st Century
This one gave me pause... it doesn't feel that close, but then would I notice if it did? I think that it is really just a question of when.
From the Economist...
Artificial intelligence
Difference Engine: Luddite legacy
AN APOCRYPHAL tale is told about Henry Ford II showing Walter Reuther, the veteran leader of the United Automobile Workers, around a newly automated car plant. “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues,” gibed the boss of Ford Motor Company. Without skipping a beat, Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”
Whether the exchange was true or not is irrelevant. The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product. The original Henry Ford, committed to raising productivity and lowering prices remorselessly, appreciated this profoundly—and insisted on paying his workers twice the going rate, so they could afford to buy his cars.
For the company, there was an added bonus. By offering an unprecedented $5 a day in 1914, he caused the best tool-makers and machinists in America to flock to Ford. The know-how they brought boosted production efficiency still further and made Ford cars ever more affordable. With its ingenious Model T, Ford became the first car company in the world to bring motoring to the masses.
Economists see this as a classic example of how advancing technology, in the form of automation and innovation, increases productivity. This, in turn, causes prices to fall, demand to rise, more workers to be hired, and the economy to grow. Such thinking has been one of the tenets of economics since the early 1800s, when hosiery and lace-makers in Nottingham—inspired by Ned Ludd, a legendary hero of the English proletariat—smashed the mechanical knitting looms being introduced at the time for fear of losing their jobs.
Some did lose their jobs, of course. But if the Luddite Fallacy (as it has become known in development economics) were true, we would all be out of work by now—as a result of the compounding effects of productivity. While technological progress may cause workers with out-dated skills to become redundant, the past two centuries have shown that the idea that increasing productivity leads axiomatically to widespread unemployment is nonsense.
But here is the question: if the pace of technological progress is accelerating faster than ever, as all the evidence indicates it is, why has unemployment remained so stubbornly high—despite the rebound in business profits to record levels? Two-and-a-half years after the Great Recession officially ended, unemployment has remained above 9% in America. That is only one percentage point better than the country’s joblessness three years ago at the depths of the recession.
The modest 80,000 jobs added to the economy in October were not enough to keep up with population growth, let alone re-employ any of the 12.3m Americans made redundant between 2007 and 2009. Even if job creation were miraculously nearly to triple to the monthly average of 208,000 that is was in 2005, it would still take a dozen years to close the yawning employment gap caused by the recent recession, says Laura D’Andrea Tyson, an economist at University of California, Berkeley, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration.
The conventional explanation for America's current plight is that, at an annualised 2.5% for the most recent quarter (compared with an historical average of 3.3%), the economy is simply not expanding fast enough to put all the people who lost their jobs back to work. Consumer demand, say economists like Dr Tyson, is evidently not there for companies to start hiring again. Clearly, too many chastened Americans are continuing to pay off their debts and save for rainy days, rather than splurging on things they may fancy but can easily manage without.
There is a good deal of truth in that. But it misses a crucial change that economists are loth to accept, though technologists have been concerned about it for several years. This is the disturbing thought that, sluggish business cycles aside, America's current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete.
This is unlike the job destruction and creation that has taken place continuously since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as machines gradually replaced the muscle-power of human labourers and horses. Today, automation is having an impact not just on routine work, but on cognitive and even creative tasks as well. A tipping point seems to have been reached, at which AI-based automation threatens to supplant the brain-power of large swathes of middle-income employees.
That makes a huge, disruptive difference. Not only is AI software much cheaper than mechanical automation to install and operate, there is a far greater incentive to adopt it—given the significantly higher cost of knowledge workers compared with their blue-collar brothers and sisters in the workshop, on the production line, at the check-out and in the field.
In many ways, the white-collar employees who man the cubicles of business today share the plight of agricultural workers a century ago. In 1900, nearly half of the adult population worked on the land. Thanks to tractors, combine harvesters, crop-picking machines and other forms of mechanisation, agriculture now accounts for little more than 2% of the working population.
Displaced agricultural workers then, though, could migrate from fields to factories and earn higher wages in the process. What is in store for the Dilberts of today? Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (“Program or Be Programmed” and “Life Inc”) would argue "nothing in particular." Put bluntly, few new white-collar jobs, as people know them, are going to be created to replace those now being lost—despite the hopes many place in technology, innovation and better education.
The argument against the Luddite Fallacy rests on two assumptions: one is that machines are tools used by workers to increase their productivity; the other is that the majority of workers are capable of becoming machine operators. What happens when these assumptions cease to apply—when machines are smart enough to become workers? In other words, when capital becomes labour. At that point, the Luddite Fallacy looks rather less fallacious.
This is what Jeremy Rifkin, a social critic, was driving at in his book, “The End of Work”, published in 1995. Though not the first to do so, Mr Rifkin argued prophetically that society was entering a new phase—one in which fewer and fewer workers would be needed to produce all the goods and services consumed. “In the years ahead,” he wrote, “more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring civilisation ever closer to a near-workerless world.”
The process has clearly begun. And it is not just white-collar knowledge workers and middle managers who are being automated out of existence. As data-analytics, business-intelligence and decision-making software do a better and cheaper job, even professionals are not immune to the job-destruction trend now underway. Pattern-recognition technologies are making numerous highly paid skills redundant.
Radiologists, who can earn over $300,000 a year in America, after 13 years of college education and internship, are among the first to feel the heat. It is not just that the task of scanning tumour slides and X-ray pictures is being outsourced to Indian laboratories, where the job is done for a tenth of the cost. The real threat is that the latest automated pattern-recognition software can do much of the work for less than a hundredth of it.
Lawyers are in a similar boat now that smart algorithms can search case law, evaluate the issues at hand and summarise the results. Machines have already shown they can perform legal discovery for a fraction of the cost of human professionals—and do so with far greater thoroughness than lawyers and paralegals usually manage.
In 2009, Martin Ford, a software entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, noted in “The Lights in the Tunnel” that new occupations created by technology—web coders, mobile-phone salesmen, wind-turbine technicians and so on—represent a tiny fraction of employment. And while it is true that technology creates jobs, history shows that it can vaporise them pretty quickly, too. “The IT jobs that are now being off-shored and automated are brand new jobs that were largely created in the tech boom of the 1990s,” says Mr Ford.
In his analysis, Mr Ford noted how technology and innovation improve productivity exponentially, while human consumption increases in a more linear fashion. In his view, Luddism was, indeed, a fallacy when productivity improvements were still on the relatively flat, or slowly rising, part of the exponential curve. But after two centuries of technological improvements, productivity has "turned the corner" and is now moving rapidly up the more vertical part of the exponential curve. One implication is that productivity gains are now outstripping consumption by a large margin.
Another implication is that technology is no longer creating new jobs at a rate that replaces old ones made obsolete elsewhere in the economy. All told, Mr Ford has identified over 50m jobs in America—nearly 40% of all employment—which, to a greater or lesser extent, could be performed by a piece of software running on a computer. Within a decade, many of them are likely to vanish. “The bar which technology needs to hurdle in order to displace many of us in the workplace,” the author notes, “is much lower than we really imagine.”
In their recent book, “Race Against the Machine”, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agree with Mr Ford's analysis—namely, that the jobs lost since the Great Recession are unlikely to return. They agree, too, that the brunt of the shake-out will be borne by middle-income knowledge workers, including those in the retail, legal and information industries. But the authors' perspective is from an ivory tower rather than from the hands-on world of creating start-ups in Silicon Valley. Their proposals for reform, while spot on in principle, expect rather a lot from the political system and other vested interests.
Unlike Mr Ford, Dr Brynjolfsson and Dr McAfee are more sanguine about the impact smart technology is having on the job market. As they see it, those threatened the most by technology should learn to work with machines, rather than against them. Do that, they suggest, and the shake-out among knowledge workers becomes less of a threat and more of an opportunity.
As an example, they point to the way Amazon and eBay have spurred over 600,000 people to earn their livings by dreaming up products for a world-wide customer base. Likewise, Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Marketplace have made it easy for those with ideas for doing things with phones to distribute their products globally. Such activities may not create a new wave of billion-dollar businesses, but they can put food on the table for many a family and pay the rent, and perhaps even the college fees.
In the end, the Luddites may still be wrong. But the nature of what constitutes work today—the notion of a full-time job—will have to change dramatically. The things that make people human—the ability to imagine, feel, learn, create, adapt, improvise, have intuition, act spontaneously—are the comparative advantages they have over machines. They are also the skills that machines, no matter how smart, have had the greatest difficulty replicating.
Marina Gorbis of the Institute for the Future, an independent think-tank in Palo Alto, California, believes that, while machines will replace people in any number of tasks, “they will amplify us, enabling us to do things we never dreamed of doing before.” If that new “human-machine partnership” gives people the dignity of work, as well as some means for financial reward, all the better. But for sure, the world is going to be a different place.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ludditelegacy
From the Economist...
Artificial intelligence
Difference Engine: Luddite legacy
AN APOCRYPHAL tale is told about Henry Ford II showing Walter Reuther, the veteran leader of the United Automobile Workers, around a newly automated car plant. “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues,” gibed the boss of Ford Motor Company. Without skipping a beat, Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”
Whether the exchange was true or not is irrelevant. The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product. The original Henry Ford, committed to raising productivity and lowering prices remorselessly, appreciated this profoundly—and insisted on paying his workers twice the going rate, so they could afford to buy his cars.
For the company, there was an added bonus. By offering an unprecedented $5 a day in 1914, he caused the best tool-makers and machinists in America to flock to Ford. The know-how they brought boosted production efficiency still further and made Ford cars ever more affordable. With its ingenious Model T, Ford became the first car company in the world to bring motoring to the masses.
Economists see this as a classic example of how advancing technology, in the form of automation and innovation, increases productivity. This, in turn, causes prices to fall, demand to rise, more workers to be hired, and the economy to grow. Such thinking has been one of the tenets of economics since the early 1800s, when hosiery and lace-makers in Nottingham—inspired by Ned Ludd, a legendary hero of the English proletariat—smashed the mechanical knitting looms being introduced at the time for fear of losing their jobs.
Some did lose their jobs, of course. But if the Luddite Fallacy (as it has become known in development economics) were true, we would all be out of work by now—as a result of the compounding effects of productivity. While technological progress may cause workers with out-dated skills to become redundant, the past two centuries have shown that the idea that increasing productivity leads axiomatically to widespread unemployment is nonsense.
But here is the question: if the pace of technological progress is accelerating faster than ever, as all the evidence indicates it is, why has unemployment remained so stubbornly high—despite the rebound in business profits to record levels? Two-and-a-half years after the Great Recession officially ended, unemployment has remained above 9% in America. That is only one percentage point better than the country’s joblessness three years ago at the depths of the recession.
The modest 80,000 jobs added to the economy in October were not enough to keep up with population growth, let alone re-employ any of the 12.3m Americans made redundant between 2007 and 2009. Even if job creation were miraculously nearly to triple to the monthly average of 208,000 that is was in 2005, it would still take a dozen years to close the yawning employment gap caused by the recent recession, says Laura D’Andrea Tyson, an economist at University of California, Berkeley, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration.
The conventional explanation for America's current plight is that, at an annualised 2.5% for the most recent quarter (compared with an historical average of 3.3%), the economy is simply not expanding fast enough to put all the people who lost their jobs back to work. Consumer demand, say economists like Dr Tyson, is evidently not there for companies to start hiring again. Clearly, too many chastened Americans are continuing to pay off their debts and save for rainy days, rather than splurging on things they may fancy but can easily manage without.
There is a good deal of truth in that. But it misses a crucial change that economists are loth to accept, though technologists have been concerned about it for several years. This is the disturbing thought that, sluggish business cycles aside, America's current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete.
This is unlike the job destruction and creation that has taken place continuously since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as machines gradually replaced the muscle-power of human labourers and horses. Today, automation is having an impact not just on routine work, but on cognitive and even creative tasks as well. A tipping point seems to have been reached, at which AI-based automation threatens to supplant the brain-power of large swathes of middle-income employees.
That makes a huge, disruptive difference. Not only is AI software much cheaper than mechanical automation to install and operate, there is a far greater incentive to adopt it—given the significantly higher cost of knowledge workers compared with their blue-collar brothers and sisters in the workshop, on the production line, at the check-out and in the field.
In many ways, the white-collar employees who man the cubicles of business today share the plight of agricultural workers a century ago. In 1900, nearly half of the adult population worked on the land. Thanks to tractors, combine harvesters, crop-picking machines and other forms of mechanisation, agriculture now accounts for little more than 2% of the working population.
Displaced agricultural workers then, though, could migrate from fields to factories and earn higher wages in the process. What is in store for the Dilberts of today? Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (“Program or Be Programmed” and “Life Inc”) would argue "nothing in particular." Put bluntly, few new white-collar jobs, as people know them, are going to be created to replace those now being lost—despite the hopes many place in technology, innovation and better education.
The argument against the Luddite Fallacy rests on two assumptions: one is that machines are tools used by workers to increase their productivity; the other is that the majority of workers are capable of becoming machine operators. What happens when these assumptions cease to apply—when machines are smart enough to become workers? In other words, when capital becomes labour. At that point, the Luddite Fallacy looks rather less fallacious.
This is what Jeremy Rifkin, a social critic, was driving at in his book, “The End of Work”, published in 1995. Though not the first to do so, Mr Rifkin argued prophetically that society was entering a new phase—one in which fewer and fewer workers would be needed to produce all the goods and services consumed. “In the years ahead,” he wrote, “more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring civilisation ever closer to a near-workerless world.”
The process has clearly begun. And it is not just white-collar knowledge workers and middle managers who are being automated out of existence. As data-analytics, business-intelligence and decision-making software do a better and cheaper job, even professionals are not immune to the job-destruction trend now underway. Pattern-recognition technologies are making numerous highly paid skills redundant.
Radiologists, who can earn over $300,000 a year in America, after 13 years of college education and internship, are among the first to feel the heat. It is not just that the task of scanning tumour slides and X-ray pictures is being outsourced to Indian laboratories, where the job is done for a tenth of the cost. The real threat is that the latest automated pattern-recognition software can do much of the work for less than a hundredth of it.
Lawyers are in a similar boat now that smart algorithms can search case law, evaluate the issues at hand and summarise the results. Machines have already shown they can perform legal discovery for a fraction of the cost of human professionals—and do so with far greater thoroughness than lawyers and paralegals usually manage.
In 2009, Martin Ford, a software entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, noted in “The Lights in the Tunnel” that new occupations created by technology—web coders, mobile-phone salesmen, wind-turbine technicians and so on—represent a tiny fraction of employment. And while it is true that technology creates jobs, history shows that it can vaporise them pretty quickly, too. “The IT jobs that are now being off-shored and automated are brand new jobs that were largely created in the tech boom of the 1990s,” says Mr Ford.
In his analysis, Mr Ford noted how technology and innovation improve productivity exponentially, while human consumption increases in a more linear fashion. In his view, Luddism was, indeed, a fallacy when productivity improvements were still on the relatively flat, or slowly rising, part of the exponential curve. But after two centuries of technological improvements, productivity has "turned the corner" and is now moving rapidly up the more vertical part of the exponential curve. One implication is that productivity gains are now outstripping consumption by a large margin.
Another implication is that technology is no longer creating new jobs at a rate that replaces old ones made obsolete elsewhere in the economy. All told, Mr Ford has identified over 50m jobs in America—nearly 40% of all employment—which, to a greater or lesser extent, could be performed by a piece of software running on a computer. Within a decade, many of them are likely to vanish. “The bar which technology needs to hurdle in order to displace many of us in the workplace,” the author notes, “is much lower than we really imagine.”
In their recent book, “Race Against the Machine”, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agree with Mr Ford's analysis—namely, that the jobs lost since the Great Recession are unlikely to return. They agree, too, that the brunt of the shake-out will be borne by middle-income knowledge workers, including those in the retail, legal and information industries. But the authors' perspective is from an ivory tower rather than from the hands-on world of creating start-ups in Silicon Valley. Their proposals for reform, while spot on in principle, expect rather a lot from the political system and other vested interests.
Unlike Mr Ford, Dr Brynjolfsson and Dr McAfee are more sanguine about the impact smart technology is having on the job market. As they see it, those threatened the most by technology should learn to work with machines, rather than against them. Do that, they suggest, and the shake-out among knowledge workers becomes less of a threat and more of an opportunity.
As an example, they point to the way Amazon and eBay have spurred over 600,000 people to earn their livings by dreaming up products for a world-wide customer base. Likewise, Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Marketplace have made it easy for those with ideas for doing things with phones to distribute their products globally. Such activities may not create a new wave of billion-dollar businesses, but they can put food on the table for many a family and pay the rent, and perhaps even the college fees.
In the end, the Luddites may still be wrong. But the nature of what constitutes work today—the notion of a full-time job—will have to change dramatically. The things that make people human—the ability to imagine, feel, learn, create, adapt, improvise, have intuition, act spontaneously—are the comparative advantages they have over machines. They are also the skills that machines, no matter how smart, have had the greatest difficulty replicating.
Marina Gorbis of the Institute for the Future, an independent think-tank in Palo Alto, California, believes that, while machines will replace people in any number of tasks, “they will amplify us, enabling us to do things we never dreamed of doing before.” If that new “human-machine partnership” gives people the dignity of work, as well as some means for financial reward, all the better. But for sure, the world is going to be a different place.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ludditelegacy
Sunday, October 30, 2011
What Occupy Wall Street Gets Wrong About Inequality | Foreign Affairs
What Occupy Wall Street Gets Wrong About Inequality | Foreign Affairs
October 24, 2011
SNAPSHOT
What Occupy Wall Street Gets Wrong About Inequality
A Better Way to Think About the Bailout, Jobs, and Taxes
Douglas Holtz-Eakin
DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN is President of the American Action Forum and is a Former Director of the Congressional Budget Office.
The protestors taking part in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations around the country, despite their disparate backgrounds, seem to have settled on a recurring theme: fairness. It is not fair that Wall Street employees got a bailout and still have their jobs while so many workers in the United States have neither. It is not fair that the rich are not taxed at higher rates. It is not fair that some people are far richer than others.
Complaints about the bailout and jobs are ironic, because it did not have to be this way. Indeed, it is a tribute to the bad execution, not the bad intent, of policy that the Occupy Wall Street movement exists in the first place.
In 2008, when it was first conceived, the Toxic Asset Relief Program (TARP, now simply referred to as "the bailout") was supposed to save jobs across the economy -- not by bailing out banks but by solving the problem of toxic assets, the mortgage-backed securities at the heart of the financial crisis. This did not mean handing taxpayer dollars to banks. At the time, Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), then the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, called the proposal "stunning and unprecedented in scope and lack of detail." He went on, "It would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to intervene in our economy by purchasing at least $700 billion of toxic assets. It would allow the Secretary to hold on to those assets for years and to pay millions of dollars to hand-picked firms to manage those assets." Notice that there is no mention of a bailout: the focus was not banks but toxic assets anywhere in the system.
Congress held hearings to consider the TARP proposal, during which Henry Paulson, then Secretary of the Treasury, testified that "the $700 billion program we have proposed is not a spending program. It is an asset purchase program, and the assets which are bought and held will ultimately be resold, with the proceeds coming back to the government." Ben Bernanke, chair of the Federal Reserve, concurred, saying, "The Federal Reserve supports the Treasury's proposal to buy illiquid assets from financial institutions."
At the time, I was the director for domestic and economic policy for John McCain's presidential campaign; I remember the words, intentions, testimony, legislative language, press releases, and promises that Bush administration officials made as to what the Treasury Department needed to counter the shock to the economy. In short, they said that the Treasury Department needed to buy toxic assets to stop the free-fall, not to direct infusions of taxpayer money into the banks that were teetering on collapse.
But this, unfortunately, is exactly what happened. Shortly after TARP was passed into law, Paulson abandoned purchases and elected to direct equity injections into banks. The bailout began. And once the Obama administration took office and Timothy Geithner became Treasury Secretary, Washington announced plans to address toxic assets but then abandoned them. In short, TARP was hijacked by Paulson and Geithner and turned into a bailout for bankers, with no discipline for either the banks or the bankers. This unfairness of bailouts was not the original intention.
Similarly, unemployment -- another central grievance of Occupy Wall Street -- did not have to be so dismal. The 2009 stimulus bill was poorly crafted, with few "shovel-ready" infrastructure jobs, too much waste, and a bevy of ineffective pet programs. In the aftermath of the stimulus, the Obama administration took its eye off job creation and instead prioritized its social agenda (health care reform), green objectives (Waxman-Markey and EPA regulations), labor priorities (National Labor Relations Board agenda), and other legislative and regulatory initiatives that were damaging to economic growth. And as the coup de grâce the administration placed the U.S. government on a dangerous, explosive debt trajectory that invites a return to the worst days of the financial crisis.
The Obama administration should have pushed for reforms to existing tax policy that would have created incentives for businesses and entrepreneurs to base their operations in the United States and to spend at a faster rate on innovation, workers, repairs, and new plants and equipment.
The place to start is the corporate income tax, which harms the United States' international competitiveness in two important ways. First, the current 35 percent rate is far too high: when combined with state-level taxes, U.S. corporations face the highest tax rates among developed countries. The rate should be reduced to 25 percent or lower. Second, the United States remains the only developed country to tax corporations based on their worldwide earnings. Other states follow a territorial approach in which, for example, a German corporation pays taxes to Germany only on its earnings in Germany, to the United States only on its earnings there, and so on. If the United States were to adopt the territorial approach, it would place U.S. firms on a level playing field with their competitors.
Proponents of the worldwide approach used by the United States argue that because it does not let U.S. firms enjoy lower taxes when they invest abroad, it removes a possible incentive to send jobs overseas. Imagine two Ohio firms, they say: one invests $100 million in Ohio, the other $100 million in Brazil. The worldwide approach treats the profits on these two investments equally -- both are taxed at U.S. rates -- giving the company that invests in Brazil no advantage over its competitor that invests in the United States.
But this line of reasoning is misguided and out of date. For starters, because firms all over the world pay lower taxes than the two Ohio-based companies, the likeliest outcome is that both firms would have trouble competing with global rivals. Moreover, when U.S. multinational firms invest in and expand employment abroad, they tend also to invest in and expand employment in the United States. In the end, healthy and competitive firms grow and expand, while uncompetitive firms do not. Washington's goal should be to make sure that U.S. companies do not end up overtaxed, uncompetitive, and eventually out of business. And finally, because the United States is the only holdout still using a worldwide approach, it is less attractive as a headquarters for large global firms. As the United States loses these headquarters, it will also lose the employment, research, and manufacturing that are typically located nearby.
Related to their grievances about both jobs and taxes -- and indeed, to the very notion of fairness as they see it -- the Occupy Wall Street protesters would like to deal with the fallout of the economic collapse by having the rich pay higher taxes. After all, the incomes of the country's wealthiest have continued to rise when much of the labor force is idle. Moreover, they say, the wealthy get much of their current income in the form of capital gains, which are more lightly taxed.
But these arguments ignore the fact that capital gains are already taxed once, when the income is originally earned. And beyond that, the arguments of Occupy Wall Street are especially misleading because they focus only on annual tax payments and ignore the larger picture of federal finances.
The largest tax that most Americans pay each year is the payroll tax, which is dedicated to funding Social Security and Medicare. The vast majority of them will get much more out of these programs than they will ever pay in. In effect, these individuals are subsidized by the payroll and income taxes of the remainder of U.S. taxpayers.
More important, they get their federal government for free. Everything the country's original framers envisioned for the federal government -- national security, infrastructure, basic research, and so on -- is paid for largely by income taxes. Nearly one half of Americans pay no income tax, and the top five percent pay well over 50 percent of the income taxes.
Put another way, when a tiny fraction of Americans is paying for many of the federal services that every American enjoys, why is it fair to make them pay even more? Stepping back further, the major injustice is not who pays what tax rate but that, unless the United States changes course, future generations will inherit broken social safety-net programs, enormous debt, and a crippled economy. Focusing the fairness debate on the income taxes of a handful of Americans simply distracts from the greater injustices in federal fiscal policy.
Finally, some in the Occupy Wall Street movement and its sympathizers question the fundamental fairness of the capitalist system. And indeed, regardless of whether one focuses on the well-being of the least affluent (caring about the social safety net) or on the gap between them and the rich (caring about inequality per se) there is legitimate concern for the outlook for the bottom of the U.S. income distribution.
The solution, however, is to rely more on capitalism. The seminal economic event of the early twenty-first century is not the financial crisis and the recession but the entry to the global labor market of billions of workers in China, India, and elsewhere. The simplest economics suggest that this added competition will lower the relative market earnings of unskilled laborers and raise the return to higher-skilled workers and capital investment.
This is bad news for poor wage-earners and an advantage to those with human and financial capital. Progressives have reacted by calling for pure redistribution, empowering unionized labor, or attempting to close U.S. borders to the flows of goods, capital, and labor. But global market forces will overwhelm such ill-conceived government attempts to reverse economic fundamentals.
A better strategy would be to harness those very market forces by building human and financial capital. Fundamental reforms to the K-12 education system that would emphasize parental choice and reward teacher performance would be a good place to start; among other pluses, Republicans and Democrats now agree on the basic merits of such changes.
But Washington will also need a more thoroughgoing focus on building human capital at every stage of a person's career.
From a budgetary perspective, the United States should not only rein in the over-promises of existing entitlements but also reverse the underlying strategy of focusing more on a person's needs at the end of life than at the beginning. Instead of just providing entitlements for retirement income, health care, and elder assistance, the U.S. government should prioritize entitlements for pre-K schooling, primary education, nutrition, and preventive care.
Similarly, the U.S. government should move away from making unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other low-income programs conditional on low cash flows. Instead, it should integrate those programs with individual accounts that can be managed to accumulate wealth. Such a structure would provide strong incentives for reliance on work and on a timely exit from support.
Occupy Wall Street may be right about one thing: fairness is and should be at the heart of debate over financial policy and economic well-being. But the solution to these questions of fairness -- and to the United States' economic woes -- is to use the capitalist system, not to destroy it.
Copyright © 2002-2010 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved. To request permission to distribute or reprint this article, please fill out and submit a Permissions Request Form. If you plan to use this article in a coursepack or academic website, visit Copyright Clearance Center to clear permission.
October 24, 2011
SNAPSHOT
What Occupy Wall Street Gets Wrong About Inequality
A Better Way to Think About the Bailout, Jobs, and Taxes
Douglas Holtz-Eakin
DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN is President of the American Action Forum and is a Former Director of the Congressional Budget Office.
The protestors taking part in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations around the country, despite their disparate backgrounds, seem to have settled on a recurring theme: fairness. It is not fair that Wall Street employees got a bailout and still have their jobs while so many workers in the United States have neither. It is not fair that the rich are not taxed at higher rates. It is not fair that some people are far richer than others.
Complaints about the bailout and jobs are ironic, because it did not have to be this way. Indeed, it is a tribute to the bad execution, not the bad intent, of policy that the Occupy Wall Street movement exists in the first place.
In 2008, when it was first conceived, the Toxic Asset Relief Program (TARP, now simply referred to as "the bailout") was supposed to save jobs across the economy -- not by bailing out banks but by solving the problem of toxic assets, the mortgage-backed securities at the heart of the financial crisis. This did not mean handing taxpayer dollars to banks. At the time, Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), then the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, called the proposal "stunning and unprecedented in scope and lack of detail." He went on, "It would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to intervene in our economy by purchasing at least $700 billion of toxic assets. It would allow the Secretary to hold on to those assets for years and to pay millions of dollars to hand-picked firms to manage those assets." Notice that there is no mention of a bailout: the focus was not banks but toxic assets anywhere in the system.
Congress held hearings to consider the TARP proposal, during which Henry Paulson, then Secretary of the Treasury, testified that "the $700 billion program we have proposed is not a spending program. It is an asset purchase program, and the assets which are bought and held will ultimately be resold, with the proceeds coming back to the government." Ben Bernanke, chair of the Federal Reserve, concurred, saying, "The Federal Reserve supports the Treasury's proposal to buy illiquid assets from financial institutions."
At the time, I was the director for domestic and economic policy for John McCain's presidential campaign; I remember the words, intentions, testimony, legislative language, press releases, and promises that Bush administration officials made as to what the Treasury Department needed to counter the shock to the economy. In short, they said that the Treasury Department needed to buy toxic assets to stop the free-fall, not to direct infusions of taxpayer money into the banks that were teetering on collapse.
But this, unfortunately, is exactly what happened. Shortly after TARP was passed into law, Paulson abandoned purchases and elected to direct equity injections into banks. The bailout began. And once the Obama administration took office and Timothy Geithner became Treasury Secretary, Washington announced plans to address toxic assets but then abandoned them. In short, TARP was hijacked by Paulson and Geithner and turned into a bailout for bankers, with no discipline for either the banks or the bankers. This unfairness of bailouts was not the original intention.
Similarly, unemployment -- another central grievance of Occupy Wall Street -- did not have to be so dismal. The 2009 stimulus bill was poorly crafted, with few "shovel-ready" infrastructure jobs, too much waste, and a bevy of ineffective pet programs. In the aftermath of the stimulus, the Obama administration took its eye off job creation and instead prioritized its social agenda (health care reform), green objectives (Waxman-Markey and EPA regulations), labor priorities (National Labor Relations Board agenda), and other legislative and regulatory initiatives that were damaging to economic growth. And as the coup de grâce the administration placed the U.S. government on a dangerous, explosive debt trajectory that invites a return to the worst days of the financial crisis.
The Obama administration should have pushed for reforms to existing tax policy that would have created incentives for businesses and entrepreneurs to base their operations in the United States and to spend at a faster rate on innovation, workers, repairs, and new plants and equipment.
The place to start is the corporate income tax, which harms the United States' international competitiveness in two important ways. First, the current 35 percent rate is far too high: when combined with state-level taxes, U.S. corporations face the highest tax rates among developed countries. The rate should be reduced to 25 percent or lower. Second, the United States remains the only developed country to tax corporations based on their worldwide earnings. Other states follow a territorial approach in which, for example, a German corporation pays taxes to Germany only on its earnings in Germany, to the United States only on its earnings there, and so on. If the United States were to adopt the territorial approach, it would place U.S. firms on a level playing field with their competitors.
Proponents of the worldwide approach used by the United States argue that because it does not let U.S. firms enjoy lower taxes when they invest abroad, it removes a possible incentive to send jobs overseas. Imagine two Ohio firms, they say: one invests $100 million in Ohio, the other $100 million in Brazil. The worldwide approach treats the profits on these two investments equally -- both are taxed at U.S. rates -- giving the company that invests in Brazil no advantage over its competitor that invests in the United States.
But this line of reasoning is misguided and out of date. For starters, because firms all over the world pay lower taxes than the two Ohio-based companies, the likeliest outcome is that both firms would have trouble competing with global rivals. Moreover, when U.S. multinational firms invest in and expand employment abroad, they tend also to invest in and expand employment in the United States. In the end, healthy and competitive firms grow and expand, while uncompetitive firms do not. Washington's goal should be to make sure that U.S. companies do not end up overtaxed, uncompetitive, and eventually out of business. And finally, because the United States is the only holdout still using a worldwide approach, it is less attractive as a headquarters for large global firms. As the United States loses these headquarters, it will also lose the employment, research, and manufacturing that are typically located nearby.
Related to their grievances about both jobs and taxes -- and indeed, to the very notion of fairness as they see it -- the Occupy Wall Street protesters would like to deal with the fallout of the economic collapse by having the rich pay higher taxes. After all, the incomes of the country's wealthiest have continued to rise when much of the labor force is idle. Moreover, they say, the wealthy get much of their current income in the form of capital gains, which are more lightly taxed.
But these arguments ignore the fact that capital gains are already taxed once, when the income is originally earned. And beyond that, the arguments of Occupy Wall Street are especially misleading because they focus only on annual tax payments and ignore the larger picture of federal finances.
The largest tax that most Americans pay each year is the payroll tax, which is dedicated to funding Social Security and Medicare. The vast majority of them will get much more out of these programs than they will ever pay in. In effect, these individuals are subsidized by the payroll and income taxes of the remainder of U.S. taxpayers.
More important, they get their federal government for free. Everything the country's original framers envisioned for the federal government -- national security, infrastructure, basic research, and so on -- is paid for largely by income taxes. Nearly one half of Americans pay no income tax, and the top five percent pay well over 50 percent of the income taxes.
Put another way, when a tiny fraction of Americans is paying for many of the federal services that every American enjoys, why is it fair to make them pay even more? Stepping back further, the major injustice is not who pays what tax rate but that, unless the United States changes course, future generations will inherit broken social safety-net programs, enormous debt, and a crippled economy. Focusing the fairness debate on the income taxes of a handful of Americans simply distracts from the greater injustices in federal fiscal policy.
Finally, some in the Occupy Wall Street movement and its sympathizers question the fundamental fairness of the capitalist system. And indeed, regardless of whether one focuses on the well-being of the least affluent (caring about the social safety net) or on the gap between them and the rich (caring about inequality per se) there is legitimate concern for the outlook for the bottom of the U.S. income distribution.
The solution, however, is to rely more on capitalism. The seminal economic event of the early twenty-first century is not the financial crisis and the recession but the entry to the global labor market of billions of workers in China, India, and elsewhere. The simplest economics suggest that this added competition will lower the relative market earnings of unskilled laborers and raise the return to higher-skilled workers and capital investment.
This is bad news for poor wage-earners and an advantage to those with human and financial capital. Progressives have reacted by calling for pure redistribution, empowering unionized labor, or attempting to close U.S. borders to the flows of goods, capital, and labor. But global market forces will overwhelm such ill-conceived government attempts to reverse economic fundamentals.
A better strategy would be to harness those very market forces by building human and financial capital. Fundamental reforms to the K-12 education system that would emphasize parental choice and reward teacher performance would be a good place to start; among other pluses, Republicans and Democrats now agree on the basic merits of such changes.
But Washington will also need a more thoroughgoing focus on building human capital at every stage of a person's career.
From a budgetary perspective, the United States should not only rein in the over-promises of existing entitlements but also reverse the underlying strategy of focusing more on a person's needs at the end of life than at the beginning. Instead of just providing entitlements for retirement income, health care, and elder assistance, the U.S. government should prioritize entitlements for pre-K schooling, primary education, nutrition, and preventive care.
Similarly, the U.S. government should move away from making unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other low-income programs conditional on low cash flows. Instead, it should integrate those programs with individual accounts that can be managed to accumulate wealth. Such a structure would provide strong incentives for reliance on work and on a timely exit from support.
Occupy Wall Street may be right about one thing: fairness is and should be at the heart of debate over financial policy and economic well-being. But the solution to these questions of fairness -- and to the United States' economic woes -- is to use the capitalist system, not to destroy it.
Copyright © 2002-2010 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
All rights reserved. To request permission to distribute or reprint this article, please fill out and submit a Permissions Request Form. If you plan to use this article in a coursepack or academic website, visit Copyright Clearance Center to clear permission.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Chronicling America's 9/11 Descent
A little reminder so as we don't forget...
Published on The Smirking Chimp (http://www.smirkingchimp.com)
Chronicling America's 9/11 Descent
By Robert Parry
Created Sep 11 2011 - 11:11am
In retaliation for the terror attacks on Sept. 11, George W. Bush is vowing to strike at a shadowy network of international terrorists reaching into 60 countries. He has called this coming war a "crusade" and has led his friends to believe that he views his new duty as a mission from God.
"I think, in [Bush's] frame, this is what God has asked him to do," a close acquaintance told the New York Times. "It offers him enormous clarity." According to this acquaintance, Bush believes "he has encountered his reason for being, a conviction informed and shaped by the president's own strain of Christianity," the Times reported. [NYT, Sept. 22, 2001]
Few Americans would disagree that violent retribution should be inflicted on the masterminds of the mass murders at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - and on those who aided and abetted this crime that killed thousands of people. The unsettling question, which so far few have been willing to voice, is whether Bush is up to this delicate, complex and dangerous job.
Two weeks after the terrorist attacks, it appears that Bush still has little grasp of the long history of frustration that has met previous anti-terrorism campaigns. It’s also unclear whether he recognizes the risks in the geopolitical tradeoffs involved in building an international coalition and the potential costs of an open-ended war.
Bush's limited sense of the history goes beyond his use of the word "crusade," which has a European connotation of chivalrous knights in shining armor driving the infidels out of the Holy Lands, but conjures up very different memories in the Islamic world, of a bloody Christian holy war against Arabs. In 1099, for instance, the Crusaders massacred many of the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
Already, Osama bin Laden has seized on Bush's gaffe to rally Islamic fundamentalists. A typed statement attributed to bin Laden called the coming war “the new Christian-Jewish crusade led by the big crusader Bush under the flag of the cross.”
Wars on Terrorism
Bush's short-term knowledge of history seems sketchy, too.
Repeatedly, he has called this war on terrorism a new kind of conflict, the first war of the 21st Century. Yet, his father was vice president in the administration of Ronald Reagan that made combating terrorism a top priority of U.S. foreign policy, replacing the Carter administration's hallmark of human rights.
Reagan committed his administration to the war on terrorism in the wake of the Islamic revolution in Iran and the radical Arab nationalism of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi. The Reagan era’s war on terrorism met some success but also failure.
Reagan created special counter-terrorism task forces and authorized the CIA to hunt down suspected terrorists in preemptive attacks that bordered on assassinations. Some administration hard-liners, such as CIA Director William J. Casey, sought to trace virtually all terrorism back to the Soviet Union, combining anti-communism with anti-terrorism.
In Central America, the wars between right-wing governments and left-wing guerrillas also were squeezed under the umbrella of counter-terrorism, with Fidel Castro's Cuba listed as a chief sponsor of the terrorism. To wage a joint war against "terrorism" and "communism" in Central America, the Reagan administration armed and backed military repression in El Salvador, Guatemala and other countries.
Tens of thousands of Central American civilians were slaughtered in army sweeps of areas considered sympathetic to guerrillas, including massacres of Mayan Indians in Guatemala that a truth commission later deemed a genocide. The U.S.-backed armies also were linked to paramilitary "death squads" that murdered political dissidents, including labor leaders, academics, priests and nuns.
The war on terrorism even led the Reagan administration to engage in terrorism itself, both in Central America and the Middle East. To punish Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government for aiding insurgents elsewhere in the region, the Reagan administration supported the Nicaraguan contra rebels, who earned a reputation for torture, rape and murder as they swept through towns in northern Nicaragua.
One former contra director, Edgar Chamorro, described the contras' practice of dragging captured government officials into town squares and executing them in front of the residents. American news outlets also reported on larger contra massacres of peasants picking coffee, presumably to discourage economic activity. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History [1]]
To counter disclosures of these atrocities, the administration created special propaganda teams that engaged in “public diplomacy” to persuade editors, producers and bureau chiefs to stop these kinds of stories and to remove journalists who filed the reports.
Administration insiders called these largely successful public relations efforts "perception management." Today's influential conservative news media is, in part, an outgrowth of those Reagan-era efforts.
In George W. Bush's new war on terrorism, the nation can expect a similar strategy for shaping public opinion. In the 1980s, the head of State Department’s "public diplomacy" office, Otto Reich, is now Bush's nominee to be assistant secretary of state for Latin America.
Seeds of Violence
In the Middle East, the counter-terrorism campaigns of the 1980s also veered into terrorism itself, with some of the central players of that era still holding center stage today.
Under the leadership of then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. The goal was to crush Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, which was then widely regarded as a terrorist organization.
Allied with right-wing Lebanese forces, Israeli troops forced the PLO to flee Lebanon. But Israel's Lebanese allies then massacred Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, drawing U.S. Marines into Lebanon on what was initially a peacekeeping mission.
Gradually, U.S. forces began siding with the right-wing Lebanese army as it mounted paramilitary attacks on suspected Muslim terrorists. The loss of neutrality worsened when the Reagan administration ordered the U.S.S. New Jersey to begin shelling Muslim villages in the mountains. Irate Muslims countered by launching a suicide bombing attack against the U.S. Marine barracks outside Beirut, killing 241 Marines.
Though the surviving U.S. forces withdrew from Lebanon, the war of terror and counter-terror continued. In a 1985 strike against Hizbollah leader Sheikh Fadlallah, Casey helped finance an operation that included the hiring of operatives who detonated a car bomb outside the Beirut apartment building where Fadlallah lived.
As described by Bob Woodward in Veil, "the car exploded, killing 80 people and wounding 200, leaving devastation, fires and collapsed buildings. Anyone who had happened to be in the immediate neighborhood was killed, hurt or terrorized, but Fadlallah escaped without injury. His followers strung a huge 'Made in the USA' banner in front of a building that had been blown out."
The mixed experiences of the 1980s - and the efforts to contain terrorism that continued through the 1990s - should be both a guide and a warning as America seeks retribution against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 mass murders.
Tough Rhetoric
To date, Bush has opted for tough rhetoric but relatively modest action, such as beefing up U.S. military forces near Afghanistan and tightening financial restrictions on money flows to groups considered friendly to bin Laden's organization.
The initial military phase of the retaliation appears likely to be special operations attacks aimed at bin Laden and his top lieutenants at their Afghan base camps, combined with aerial attacks against his Taliban allies who rule most of Afghanistan.
As Bush moves forward, one of the few institutions that has applied some brakes to any rush toward war has been Wall Street. While joining in patriotic demonstrations, such as singing God Bless America before the start of trading on Sept. 17, institutional investors voted with their dollars when it came to showing confidence in the future U.S. economy.
With war looming, the stock markets went into free-fall. From Sept. 17 through Sept. 21, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 14.3 percent, its biggest percentage weekly drop since the Great Depression. The sell-off reversed somewhat on Monday as the expectation of a hasty U.S. military action faded and investors moved in to pick up some stocks at bargain prices.
A longer-term problem to big investors, however, is that the world that beckoned during the Clinton administration - one of rapidly advancing international cooperation with U.S. industry ideally positioned to profit from the growth - had receded since Bush's inauguration.
President Clinton pushed multilateral strategies around the world, including peace initiatives in the Middle East. In so doing, he presented the prospect of a world transforming into a single market. New technologies, such as the Internet, also created a sense that communication could transcend traditional national boundaries and bridge cultural divides.
Faced with these new opportunities for growth, U.S. business prospered. Along with the expectations of rapid growth went the stock markets. During the Clinton administration, the Dow more than tripled, from about 3,200 to above 10,000. The technology-heavy Nasdaq more than quadrupled, even counting the dot-com losses last year.
A Declining Economy
Over the past eight months, that rosy future has darkened and the stock market has fallen.
Instead of innovative technologies and alternative energy sources leading the way toward solutions to the world's energy and environmental problems, the Bush administration has advocated drilling more oil and digging more coal. Instead of international strategies for addressing global problems, the Bush administration favored a go-it-alone approach, at least prior to Sept. 11.
In 1999, the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization prompted the Clinton administration to begin addressing the inequities that came with the global economy. Clinton’s team began work on international standards for environmental protections and labor rules.
By contrast, the Bush administration has taken a staunchly free-market approach to free trade. Bush's economists maintain that trade organizations should confine their attentions to trade issues and stay away from worldwide regulatory standards.
Bush also repudiated the Kyoto global warming agreement in defiance of the European nations and Japan. Further offending longtime U.S. allies, Bush vowed to scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in favor of implementing Ronald Reagan's dream of a missile shield.
On the sensitive issue of the Middle East, Bush pulled U.S. diplomats away from negotiations seeking to stop the spiral of violence in Israel and the West Bank. He alienated pro-U.S. Arab states by directing his toughest criticism about the violence at Palestinian leader Arafat.
On Sept. 3, U.S. representatives walked out on a United Nations anti-racism conference because a proposal was under discussion equating Israeli treatment of Palestinians with racism.
Bush appeared to be implementing a foreign policy drawn from the most conservative commentators on the Op-Ed pages.
The economic consequences of the Bush policies also have not been good. The economy teetered on the brink of recession, hundreds of thousands of jobs were eliminated, the non-Social Security budget surplus disappeared. Millions of Americans lost big chunks of their savings and retirement plans in the stock market drop.
Even Bush's wealthy backers have not been spared from economic misfortune. For instance, members of the wealthy Bass family of Texas - which built a fortune in oil and invested heavily in Bush’s political career - were forced to sell a 6.4 percent stake of the Disney Company in what Wall Street insiders called a distress sale. [NYT, Sept. 21, 2001]
If Bush’s war on terrorism expands over the next several months, economists agree a full-scale recession could follow. Some estimates see unemployment soaring from the 4.5 percent range of the late Clinton years to about 7 or 8 percent.
Though American investors had come to see the Dow 10,000 as a launching pad for higher growth, it may actually represent a level that was realistic only if the world continued coming together as a single marketplace. With that future fading, the Dow and other indexes might be expected to retreat as well, though probably not all the way back to the Dow 3200 of George H.W. Bush’s administration.
Open Societies
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan made a similar point about the value of world cooperation in congressional testimony on Sept. 20. He stressed the importance of the free flow of goods and ideas to future growth.
“We have developed a really major and, in many respects, extraordinary economic system on a global basis in the last 10, 15 years, resting on technology and the free movement of people, capital goods. And most interesting enough, during the period we’ve seen increasing evidence that the interaction between economies has enhanced global growth, and, indeed, the growth of everybody,” Greenspan said.
“The openness of societies, the openness of economies are very crucial for economic growth, and they can be open only if they are not hampered by violence,” the Fed chairman continued. “Violence is complete destruction of the institutions of free markets and of global economic systems.”
So, the inexperienced president now is faced with a two-pronged challenge: how to live up to his strong words about an unrelenting war on terrorism and how to do so without tanking the economy and creating deeper divisions in the world.
Bush also must recognize that some of the tradeoffs in fighting terrorism can create potentially worse dangers. To gain support for isolating Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, for instance, Bush waived sanctions that had been placed on Pakistan and India for developing and testing nuclear weapons.
The nightmare scenario is that one of those nuclear weapons - or one from the old Soviet stockpiles - will end up in the hands of a terrorist group intent on an even more dramatic attack on a major U.S. city.
To date, Bush has drawn strength from the unity of the American people horrified by the mass murders of Sept. 11. He also has shown restraint in avoiding a rash retaliation that might have satisfied a thirst for revenge while killing innocent civilians in Afghanistan - and enflaming anti-American passions in the Middle East.
But Bush's challenge now is to implement a measured - and effective - response to the Sept. 11 attacks. To do that, Bush must recognize the shades of gray that have marked the path behind and surely will mark the struggle ahead.
Missed Opportunities of Sept. 11
Jan. 13, 2002
The ouster of the Taliban and the disruption of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network may have bought the U.S. public some added safety four months after the Sept. 11 attacks. But those gains could prove illusory because George W. Bush has ignored the root causes of the violence.
Some of those root causes, such as the world’s unequal economic development, may require long-term attention. But others could have been addressed in the aftermath of Sept. 11 as fitting responses to the atrocities.
Missed, for instance, was the opportunity to call on the American people to commit themselves to serious energy conservation and thus to free the hand of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. Bush also missed a unique opportunity to demand a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And he has been silent about the danger of mixing politics with religious fundamentalism.
In each case, Bush displayed a lack of presidential vision or was frozen by the political and economic entanglements of his supporters.
Perhaps most significantly, at a time when Americans were eager to do something meaningful as a way to pay tribute to the 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks, Bush most memorably urged the U.S. public to go shopping and take vacations, a call made in a national address to Congress and now featured in tourist industry TV commercials.
The White House could have explained how the nation's over-dependence on fossil fuels prevents the U.S. government from pressuring Arab states, especially the Saudi Arabians, to reform corrupt and authoritarian governments, one of most immediate causes for Islamic terrorism. But Bush has close ties to the oil industry, both in the United States and the Middle East.
The Saudi royal family and other undemocratic Arab regimes have long understood the leverage that oil gives them over the United States. The implicit deal was expressed bluntly in one State Department cable dated July 5, 1979. "The basis of this relationship - our need for oil and the Saudi need for security - will continue," predicted the cable. [For details, see Robert Parry's Trick or Treason.]
To fulfill the U.S. side of the relationship, the CIA has collaborated with Saudi security forces by training palace guards and disrupting political opposition. The United States adopted similar relationships with other undemocratic leaders throughout the Middle East - from the Shah of Iran, before the 1979 Iranian revolution, to the Emir of Kuwait, who was reinstalled by a U.S.-led military force that reversed the Iraqi invasion in 1991.
In return for U.S.-supplied security, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms have kept the oil flowing. But they also paid what amounts to protection money to Islamic fundamentalist leaders who share bin Laden’s hostility to the West. In effect, these “allies” subsidized bin Laden’s attacks on Americans.
Home Video
In December, when a home-made videotape was released of bin Laden speaking to guests, some Saudi clerics mentioned on the tape were “fairly influential and well-known,” according to Saudi experts quoted in The Wall Street Journal.
One Saudi religious leader, Suleiman al-Ulwan, who had been considered a moderate, is described on the tape as having issued a fatwa, or religious decree, that endorsed the Sept. 11 attacks and judged the dead Americans as not innocent. [WSJ, Dec. 19, 2001]
U.S. intelligence has been aware of the growing Saudi danger for years, at least since the 1990s when the Saudis frustrated U.S. efforts to investigate acts of terrorism emanating from Saudi soil.
In 1995, when a U.S.-run military school in Riyadh was bombed and five Americans were killed, the FBI rushed in agents to question four suspects. Before the questioning could begin, the Saudi government beheaded the suspects.
A similar lack of Saudi cooperation frustrated the investigation into the Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 American soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia in 1998. [For a detailed account, see The New Yorker's Jan. 14, 2002, article on former FBI counter-terrorist specialist John O'Neill, who died at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.]
Bin Laden himself is a Saudi whose family grew rich from construction contracts awarded by the Saudi king. He saw up close the decadence and corruption of the Saudi princes. These men preside over a system of strict Islamic law, even executing women who commit adultery, while the princes have wild parties during frequent trips to Europe and with Western women flown into the kingdom.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks also were Saudis. Yet U.S. diplomats still tiptoe around the issue of official Saudi complicity because the U.S. remains dependent on foreign oil and Saudi Arabia sits atop about a quarter of the world’s proven supply.
Curbing U.S. energy use would give U.S. diplomacy crucial maneuvering room to confront the Saudi royal family. By raising fuel-efficiency standards for motor vehicles and investing in alternative energy sources, the U.S. government also could improve relations with Western allies concerned about U.S. inaction on global warming.
The American people were ready to make the sacrifice after Sept. 11 if Bush had asked. Instead, Bush made no conservation appeal to the public and continued to oppose legislation that would require better gas mileage in cars.
In his new budget, he moves to cut government spending on alternative fuels and scraps a program to introduce high-mileage cars over the next few years. Instead, Bush will propose long-range research on fuel-cell technology whose promise is a decade or more down the road.
"They're letting Detroit off the hook on delivering real fuel-economy breakthroughs in the next few years," said Dan Reicher, assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration. "This is in exchange for potential improvements that are more than a decade off." [Washington Post, Jan. 10, 2002]
Oil Pals
Besides giving car manufacturers a pass, Bush's decision means oil consumption will remain high, a boon to Bush's political backers from the Texas oil fields and their Arab business pals.
"Many of the same American corporate executives who have reaped millions of dollars from arms and oil deals with the Saudi monarchy have served or currently serve at the highest levels of U.S. government," the Boston Herald reported in an investigative series.
"Those lucrative financial relationships call into question the ability of America's political elite to make tough foreign policy decisions about the kingdom that produced Osama bin Laden and is perhaps the biggest incubator for anti-Western Islamic terrorists," the Herald article said. "Nowhere is the revolving U.S.-Saudi money wheel more evident than within President Bush's own coterie of foreign policy advisers, starting with the president's father, George H.W. Bush."
The former president has served as a senior adviser at the Carlyle Group, an investment house which employed other key Bush aides. One Carlyle consultant was James A. Baker III, George W. Bush's chief lawyer in the Florida recount battle and his father's secretary of state. Another was Colin Powell, the younger Bush's secretary of state.
One of the deals between the Carlyle Group and the Saudi monarchy was an "Economic Offset Program," a kind of kickback scheme in which U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to Saudi Arabia return some money as contracts to Saudi businesses, most with links to the royal family. The Carlyle Group served as an adviser on this program, the Herald article reported. [Boston Herald, Dec. 11, 2001]
Bush Oil-igarchy
The Bush family itself has built its wealth through the oil industry, going back more than half a century when a young George H.W. Bush moved his family from Connecticut to the oil fields of Midland, Texas. [For details, see "The Bush Family Oil-igarchy [2]" at Consortiumnews.com]
George W. Bush has never forgotten the interests of those oil friends. During the first months of his administration, one of the few foreign policy initiatives that attracted his personal interest was the border conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, a dispute that jeopardized the development of oil fields around the Caspian Sea.
The law firm representing the oil companies trying to extract that oil and build a pipeline was headed by James Baker, who had directed the bare-knuckled strategy for nailing down the Florida electoral votes that put Bush in the White House. The Bush administration's coziness with the energy industry has been underscored again in the scandal surrounding the now-bankrupt Enron Corp.
Between the U.S. public's dependence on foreign oil and the profits going to the U.S. economic elite in cahoots with oil-rich Arab sheiks, it may not be surprising that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has propped up a variety of anti-democratic and unsavory regimes.
This expedient view of democracy - that it is an important principle elsewhere but can't be allowed to destabilize oil production - has given traction to anti-American charges in the Middle East that Washington is hypocritical about its most cherished principles or is simply prejudiced against Arabs.
Bush has avoided any public discussion of these thorny political realities in the Middle East. Instead, he has framed the post-Sept. 11 debate in the quasi-Christian language of a “crusade” to eradicate “evil,” with bin Laden as the “evil one.”
Politics & Religion
Another missed opportunity of Sept. 11 has come in Bush's failure to explain the danger of mixing politics and religious fundamentalism.
Bush has urged Americans to avoid blaming all believers in Islam for the violence of some extremists. But Bush's own close political ties to Christian fundamentalists are an obstacle for him in championing the American constitutional principle of the separation of church and state.
The Founding Fathers devised this principle out of a close historical understanding of the bloody religious wars of Europe's Dark Ages, the Inquisitions and the clashes among Christian faiths, as well as between Christians and Muslims. The principle recognized that the government should allow all to worship as they choose without the government promoting one religion over others.
By building a wall between religion and government, the Founders enabled the United States to avoid the worst of the internecine conflicts that have marred other societies with diverse populations. The Founders' genius has fresh relevance today as a blueprint for how to function successfully as a society of differing religious beliefs.
Bush, however, cannot espouse this important principle without offending many of his Christian Right backers who view the separation of church and state as a "myth" that must be overturned. They demand the imposition of "Christian law," much as Islamic fundamentalists do when they insist that only the words of the Koran can form the basis of government.
So Bush fudged on the discussion of Islamic fundamentalism, confining his critique to charges that bin Laden had "hijacked" the religion. Bush failed to delve more deeply into the complicated problem of fundamentalism, which does not arise only in Islam.
Other Fundamentalisms
Islamic fundamentalism is mirrored by Jewish and Christian fundamentalism, movements that profess similar though contradictory certainties about God's choice of them as the guardians of all that is right and just.
One of the major sore points between the West and the Islamic world has been the activism of Jewish fundamentalists in Israel. By placing settlements in Palestinian areas of the West Bank and denying Palestinians basic human dignity, these fundamentalists claim they are exercising a divine right to the land.
Bush appears incapable of drawing a line against this fundamentalism, partly because the Israeli Right and the American Christian Right have been closely allied since the late 1970s and 1980s. Sharing an interest in advancing conservative power in the United States, the leaders of Israel's Likud Party, such as Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, threw in their lot with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.
The alliance changed the political reality in both countries. A new harsh tone, driven by the certainty of religious fundamentalism, entered the politics of both the United States and Israel.
"Liberal Jewish peace activists, both in Israel and America, were denounced as traitors, and new alliances were forged with the Christian Evangelical right in the United States," wrote journalist Robert I. Friedman in his 1992 book, Zealots for Zion. "Israel's popular TV advertising slogan, 'Come to Israel, stay with friends,' was drowned out by Prime Minister Menachem Begin's cry, 'We don't care what the goyim think!'"
Theocratic Agendas
In the U.S., Christian fundamentalists also escalated their political activism in opposition to America's secular political traditions. Falwell’s Moral Majority and other Christian Right groups led campaigns to demonize feminists, homosexuals, "secular humanists" and liberals in general.
A key figure in supplying a mysterious flow of capital for this undertaking was the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a South Korean theocrat who espouses a totalitarian form of Christianity that would eradicate American democracy and place the world under his authority. While publicly avowing love for America, Moon privately tells his followers that America is "Satanic" and represents "Satan's harvest."
In one speech to his believers, Moon said his eventual dominance over the United States would be followed by the liquidation of American individualism.
"Americans who continue to maintain their privacy and extreme individualism are foolish people," Moon declared. "The world will reject Americans who continue to be so foolish. Once you have this great power of love, which is big enough to swallow entire America, there may be some individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be digested."
Since 1982, Moon has financed one of the conservative movement's most influential media outlets, The Washington Times, as a way to build popular support for conservative politicians and undermine liberals and centrists. Moon also subsidized conservative direct-mail operations and sponsored conferences that paid money to influential politicians.
The Reagan-Bush administration worked closely with Moon's apparatus. Ronald Reagan called Moon's Times his "favorite" newspaper. After leaving office, George H.W. Bush gave paid speeches in support of Moon, including an appearance in Argentina where Bush hailed Moon's Washington Times for bringing "sanity" to Washington and called Moon "the man with the vision." [For details, see "The Dark Side of Rev. Moon [3]" series at Consortiumnews.com]
With devastating effect, Moon and more traditional Christian fundamentalists have targeted political leaders associated with "liberalism." For instance, President Clinton was pursued for eight years in a relentless campaign to destroy him and his political influence.
Paula Jones
One of the Christian fundamentalist groups joining in the anti-Clinton assaults was the Rutherford Institute, which was inspired by the teachings of Rousas John Rushdoony, an advocate of Christian Reconstructionism, a movement that would replace democracy with "Biblical law."
The Rutherford Institute financed the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit against Clinton. Rutherford's leader John Whitehead, who appeared on cable news shows on behalf of Jones, has advocated the reorganization of the United States as a "Christian Nation."
In his book, The Separation Illusion, Whitehead opposes religious pluralism and argues that the doctrine of separation of church and state causes "the true God" to be an "outcast" and a "criminal." [See Frederick Clarkson's "Paula's Onward-Marching Christian Soldiers [4]" at Consortiumnews.com]
In his political rise, George W. Bush cultivated Christian fundamentalists by wearing his born-again religious fervor on his sleeve.
Bush courted Christian Right leaders with speeches at leading fundamentalist institutions such as Bob Jones University in South Carolina. He won Robertson's key backing in defeating Sen. John McCain's primary challenge.
Bush also enjoyed the strong support of Moon's Washington Times, which aggressively promoted stories questioning Al Gore's mental stability and his supposed tendency toward "delusions." [See "Al Gore vs. the Media [5]" at Consortiumnews.com]
Since taking power in January, Bush has rewarded his Christian Right followers. He has chipped away at the church-state separation by touting his "faith-based" initiative to put government money into religious organizations engaged in social services.
Bush imposed strict limits on federally funded stem-cell research. He named fundamentalist-favorite John Ashcroft to be attorney general. And Bush has vowed to appoint conservative anti-abortion justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Separation of church and state may be a principle that shines with new relevance today amid the bloodshed that stretches from Jerusalem to Kabul to New York City. But Bush has failed to explain the principle’s practical logic to the world.
Israel-Palestine
Bush also has failed on a third front, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, again letting politics and ideology obscure a possible route to a solution.
During his first months in office, Bush repudiated Clinton's Middle East policy of pressing for a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. Clinton's policy had been staunchly opposed by right-wing commentators, such as the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, a neoconservative supporter of Israel.
Bush chose to follow the hard-line strategy against the Palestinians charted by Krauthammer and others. Some foreign-policy sources say Bush picked that route out of a belief that his father lost in 1992, in part, because of Israel's suspicion that the elder Bush privately favored the oil-rich Arab countries and couldn’t be trusted.
Possibly with 2004 in mind, Bush cast aside any appearance of balance in the first several months of his presidency. Bush singled out Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat for primary blame for the continued Israeli-Palestinian violence and essentially let Likud leader Ariel Sharon off the hook.
Bush voiced no public sympathy for the worsening conditions of Palestinians living in the squalor of Gaza and other fenced-in areas. In early September, Bush ordered U.S. diplomats to walk out of a United Nations racism conference because of draft language criticizing Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
The tragedy of Sept. 11 did not alter Bush's basic strategy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many Americans might have favored a stern demand to both sides to accept a reasonable compromise that protected Israel's security while granting the Palestinians an economically viable homeland - or perhaps a solution that forged a single secular state with constitutional protections for all religions.
But Bush made no such move. His emissaries continued to insist that cease-fires of specific lengths were necessary before more substantive negotiations. However, the time limits turned into deadlines for Islamic suicide bombers to inflict bloody outrages against Israeli civilians. The Israeli government then responded with helicopter attacks and targeted killings of Palestinian leaders.
Four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush seems clueless about how to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Meanwhile, the post-Sept. 11 public pressure for action has dissipated and the tit-for-tat killings have taken on a grim look of business as usual.
Missed Warnings
Not only has Bush failed to address the larger threats that continue to give rise to terrorism, he did not protect the United States from the Sept. 11 attacks themselves.
Though columnist Andrew Sullivan and other conservative writers have gone to great lengths to blame former President Clinton for failing to stop the Sept. 11 attacks, the reality is that the Clinton administration did thwart previous attacks, including the millennium bombers, and waged covert campaigns to disrupt and kill leaders of al Qaeda.
While Clinton and his predecessors can be faulted for not doing more about terrorism, George W. Bush deserves blame for ignoring the more immediate dangers. It wasn’t as if there were no warnings.
On Jan. 31, 2001, just 11 days after Bush’s inauguration, former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman unveiled the final report of a blue-ribbon commission on terrorism that bluntly warned that urgent steps were needed to prevent an attack on U.S. cities.
“States, terrorists and other disaffected groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction, and some will use them,” the report said. “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.”
Hart specifically noted that the nation was vulnerable to “a weapon of mass destruction in a high-rise building.”
Little, however, was done. Between a news media that still obsessed over “Clinton scandals,” such as the later debunked stories of his aides “trashing” the White House, and a new Bush administration focused on domestic concerns, such as tax cuts, the warning drew scant attention.
When congressional hearings on the findings were set for early May, the Bush administration intervened to stop them, an article in the Columbia Journalism Review reported. Presumably, Bush did not want to seem behind the curve.
So, instead of embracing the Hart-Rudman findings and getting to work on the recommendations, Bush set up a White House committee, headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, to examine the issue again and submit a report in the fall.
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had joined President Clinton in creating the Hart-Rudman panel, acknowledged that Bush’s actions delayed progress. “The administration actually slowed down response to Hart-Rudman when momentum was building in the spring,” said Gingrich in an interview cited by the CJR study of press coverage of the terrorism issue.
Alarm Bells
By late spring 2001, other alarm bells were ringing.
Credible evidence of what became the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks began pouring in to U.S. intelligence agencies. "It all came together in the third week of June," said Richard Clarke, who was the White House coordinator for counter-terrorism. "The CIA's view was that a major terrorist attack was coming in the next several weeks." [See The New Yorker, Jan. 14, 2002]
The intelligence community also learned that two suspected terrorists had penetrated the United States, but the FBI could not find them.
As these dangers grew, Bush focused not on terrorism but on stem-cell research and other domestic issues that played well with his Christian Right allies. Bush took off the month of August for a working vacation that interspersed relaxation on his Texas ranch with his speech on stem-cell policy and trips to non-coastal cities to praise "heartland" values.
Former Sen. Hart tried to rekindle interest in what he viewed as the pressing threat of terrorism. On Sept, 6, he went to the White House for a meeting with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and urged the White House to move faster. Rice agreed to pass on Hart’s concerns to higher-ups.
Five days later, despite all the warnings, Bush and his administration were caught flatfooted. Two of America’s greatest landmarks were leveled, with thousands of people killed. For the first time in history, the Pentagon was attacked and partially destroyed.
After the attacks, however, the nation rallied around Bush. He won praise for unleashing the U.S. military against Afghanistan and pulling together a coalition that backed the war. Ironically, the attacks that his administration had done nothing to stop boosted Bush’s approval ratings to historically high levels.
God’s Will
The news media’s praise for Bush was unbridled. On Dec. 23, 2001, for instance, NBC’s Tim Russert joined New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and First Lady Laura Bush in ruminating about whether divine intervention had put Bush in the White House to handle this crisis.
Russert asked Mrs. Bush if “in an extraordinary way, this is why he was elected.” Mrs. Bush disagreed with Russert’s suggestion that “God picks the president, which he doesn’t.”
Giuliani thought otherwise. “I do think, Mrs. Bush, that there was some divine guidance in the president being elected. I do,” the mayor said.
McCarrick also saw some larger purpose. “I think I don't thoroughly agree with the first lady. I think that the president really, he was where he was when we needed him,” the cardinal said.
Theologically speaking, it was less clear why God didn’t simply let Bush actually be elected, rather than having him get a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to stop the vote count in Florida - or why God didn’t give Bush the foresight to act on the Hart-Rudman warnings so he could thwart the terrorist attacks altogether.
More mundane realities can explain Bush’s subsequent failure in squandering an unparalleled opportunity to take decisive action against some of the root causes that have fed - and will continue to feed - terrorism. The hard fact is that Bush, weighed down with political and ideological baggage, missed the moment.
Bush's New War Lies
Sept. 10, 2003
In a healthy democracy, the grave act of going to war wouldn't be justified under false pretenses and false impressions. Plus, government officials responsible for spreading false rationales wouldn't be allowed to slide away from the first batch of lies and distortions to begin offering a new set of slippery excuses.
But the United States is not a healthy democracy at this time. It is dominated by a politician who chooses to manipulate rather than lead; who would rather trick the people into following him than engage them in a meaningful debate; who has demonstrated such a shallow regard for democracy that he took office despite losing the national popular vote and then only by blocking a full counting of ballots in one key state.
A healthy democracy wouldn't put up with this trifling of the people's will. But in today's United States, there appears to be little shame in gullibility. Indeed, for some, it is a mark of patriotism. Others just act oblivious to their duties as citizens to be informed about even basic facts, even when the consequences are as severe as those of wartime.
This sad state of affairs was highlighted in a new Washington Post poll, which found that seven in 10 Americans still believe that Iraq's ousted leader Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks although U.S. investigators have found no evidence of a connection.
As the Post notes, this widely held public misperception explains why many Americans continue to support the U.S. occupation of Iraq even as the other principal casus belli - trigger-ready weapons of mass destruction - has collapsed. [Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2003.]
Bush’s Speech
The search for Iraq’s WMD apparently has become such a farce that George W. Bush barely mentioned it during his nationally televised speech on Sunday.
He slipped into the past tense in saying the former regime “possessed and used weapons of mass destruction,” without attaching a year or a decade to his statement. Iraq’s alleged use of chemical weapons dates back to the 1980s and its possession of effective WMD may have ended in the 1990s, according to some information that U.S. intelligence has received from former senior Iraqi officials.
While downplaying the WMD case, however, Bush continued to work the subliminal connection between the 9/11 murders and Iraq.
Indeed, after listening to Bush on Sunday juxtapose references to the 9/11 murders, their al-Qaeda perpetrators and Iraq, it shouldn't be surprising how seven out of 10 Americans got the wrong idea. It's pretty clear that Bush intended them to get the wrong idea. In speech after speech, Bush has sought to create public confusion over these connections.
Though no Iraqis were involved in the terror attacks two years ago - and though Osama bin Laden and most of the attackers were Saudis - Bush and his top aides routinely have inserted references about Iraq and the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the same paragraphs. They often used unsubstantiated assertions that Iraq was sharing or planning to share WMD with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda as the connection.
That practice of blending Sept. 11 with Iraq continued into Bush's speech Sunday night defending the U.S. occupation of Iraq and asking for $87 billion more to pay for it. "Since America put out the fires of September the 11th, and mourned our dead, and went to war, history has taken a different turn," Bush said. "We have carried the fight to the enemy."
Given that Iraq was the context of the speech, a casual listener would assume that Iraq attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and the United States was simply hitting back. An average American, who wasn't steeped in the facts of the Middle East, would be left with the impression that Saddam Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda were allies.
The reality is that Hussein and bin Laden were bitter rivals. Hussein ran a secular state that brutally suppressed the Islamic fundamentalism that drives al-Qaeda. Indeed, many of the atrocities committed by Hussein's government were done to suppress Islamic fundamentalists, particularly from Iraq's large Shia population.
Bin Laden despised Hussein as an "infidel" who was repressing bin Laden’s supporters and corrupting the Islamic world with Western ways.
Bush History
Other inconvenient facts that Bush has left out of all his speeches about Iraq include that his father, George H.W. Bush, was one of the U.S. officials in the 1980s who was assisting and encouraging Hussein in his bloody war with Iran to contain the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.
The younger Bush also doesn't mention that the CIA and its allies in Pakistani intelligence - not Iraqis - were involved in training al-Qaeda fundamentalists in the arts of explosives and other skills useful to terrorists. That was part of the U.S. covert operation against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Bush also trusts that the American people will have forgotten that other little embarrassment of the Iran-Contra Affair, when the elder Bush and President Reagan were involved in a secret policy of shipping missiles to Iran's government. At the time, Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist regime was designated a terrorist state by the U.S. government.
Nor does the public hear much about how the U.S. government taught the dictators of Saudi Arabia techniques of suppressing political dissent to keep that oil-rich kingdom in pro-U.S. hands. Saudi leaders also financed Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East as part of the Saudi strategy for buying protection for their dictatorial powers.
Out of this mix of repression and corruption emerged an embittered Osama bin Laden, a scion of a leading Saudi family who turned against his former patrons.
If Americans knew more about this convoluted history, they might draw a very different conclusion than the one George W. Bush wants them to draw. Rather than seeing black-hatted villains who need a taste of Bush's Western-style justice, the American people might conclude that Bush's father and other top U.S. officials were at least as implicated in supporting Osama bin Laden and other international terrorists as Saddam Hussein was.
Indeed, if the full history were known, Hussein might appear less like a rogue leader than a U.S. client who was useful during his violent rise to power but then went awry. Not only did the CIA collaborate with Hussein's Baathist Party as a bulwark against communism in the 1960s and 1970s, but Hussein personally sought U.S. advice at key moments from the 1980s to as late as 1990.
In ordering invasions of two neighboring countries - Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 - Hussein may well have believed he had received "green lights" from the United States. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Missing U.S.-Iraq History [6]."]
U.S. intelligence also understood the implausibility of Hussein sharing WMD with his arch Islamic fundamentalist rivals. A year ago, a CIA assessment was released acknowledging this reality.
The CIA told Congress that Hussein would not share weapons of mass destruction with Islamic terrorists unless he saw a U.S. invasion as inevitable. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Misleading the Nation to War [7]."]
In seeking to manipulate U.S. public opinion now, however, the Bush administration has done all it can to "lose" this history and these nuances. With a few exceptions, the U.S. news media has gone along, as journalists appear more interested in proving their "patriotism" - and keeping their high-paying jobs - than telling the full story.
The American people have been fed a steady diet of false impressions and misleading arguments.
New Half Truths
Now, as the bloody reality of conquering Iraq intrudes on the pre-war fantasies of happy Iraqis showering U.S. troops with rose petals, the administration's misleading rhetoric has switched from exaggerating the danger posed by Saddam Hussein's government to exaggerating the gains attributable to the invasion.
New half-truths and lies are quickly replacing the old ones, lest Americans begin to wonder how they got fooled by the earlier bogus rationales. In Bush's speech Sunday night, he highlighted two of these new arguments for a long-term military occupation of Iraq.
One of the new reasons is that the resistance to the U.S. occupation can be attributed to two groups - die-hard Hussein loyalists and foreign terrorists slipping into Iraq.
"Some of the attackers are members of the old Saddam regime who fled the battlefield and now fight in the shadows," Bush said. "Some of the attackers are foreign terrorists who have come to Iraq to pursue their war on America and other free nations."
But what Bush leaves out is that there is a third force in Iraq: nationalist Iraqis who resent foreign occupation of their country. Many of them had no fondness for Hussein and may have welcomed the overthrow of the brutal dictator.
Some of these nationalists may have served in Iraq's army while others appear to be young Iraqis who have begun fighting the U.S. occupation of Iraq much as young Palestinians have battled the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Other Iraqi fighters may be driven by revenge for the thousands of Iraqis killed in the U.S. invasion.
This likelihood of widespread resistance was known by Bush and his advisers before the war. "U.S. intelligence agencies warned Bush administration policymakers before the war in Iraq that there would be significant armed opposition to a U.S.-led occupation, according to administration and congressional sources familiar with the reports," the Washington Post reported on Sept. 9, 2003.
But this information shared the fate of other facts that didn’t support Bush’s propaganda themes. It disappeared. The American people now are supposed to believe that the resistance is only a mixture of Saddam "dead-enders" and "foreign terrorists."
The second new myth is that by killing "terrorists" in Iraq and elsewhere, the U.S. homeland will be made safer. "The surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans," Bush said Sunday night. "We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities."
While this argument is another not-so-subtle appeal to the residual fears from Sept. 11, 2001, and America's hunger for revenge, it is not a logical formulation. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that killing Iraqis and other Middle Easterners in Iraq won't incite other people to attack Americans in the United States or elsewhere. Indeed, many savvy U.S. military analysts expect just such a response as revenge for the deaths inflicted by Bush's invasion of Iraq.
It also is clear that Bush still is resisting the time-tested lessons of counterinsurgency — that blunt force is no more likely to achieve peace than is abject cowardice, that peace and security are achieved through a combination of factors: a measured application of force combined with a sensible strategy for achieving political justice and economic improvements.
History also teaches that there are limits of national power no matter how noble a cause might be, that in geopolitics as in personal lives, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.
In Bush’s televised speech, however, he presented the ongoing war as a choice of weakness or strength, good or evil, with no sense of the subtleties of history or the gray areas of past diplomacy. "We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness," Bush said.
P.R. Tricks
Beyond the speech, the Bush administration has issued reports that engage in such obvious P.R. tricks that they must assume the American people have the sophistication of pre-schoolers.
For instance, to commemorate Aug. 8, the 100th day since Bush donned his flight suit and celebrated "mission accomplished," the White House released a report entitled "Results in Iraq: 100 Days Toward Security and Freedom." The paper, which offered 10 reasons in 10 categories to support the thesis, declared "substantial progress is being made on all fronts."
The artificial construct, requiring 10 reasons in each of the 10 categories, led to much stretching of facts and some repetition of examples. For instance, Reason No. 9 under "signs of cultural rebirth" used a quote from a member of Baghdad's city council declaring that "if you want to civilize society, you must care about education." The same trite-and-true quote crops up again three pages later as another example in another category.
But more significantly, the report repeats much of the elliptical reasoning and selective intelligence used before the war to exaggerate Iraq's WMD threat and to connect Iraq with al-Qaeda.
"Saddam Hussein's regime posed a threat to the security of the United States and the world," the report asserts. "The old Iraqi regime defied the international community and 17 U.N. resolutions for 12 years and gave every indication that it would never disarm and never comply with the just demands of the world."
There is no acknowledgment in the report that U.S. troops have failed to find any WMD. Nor is there any reference to the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors, such as Hans Blix, believed that Iraq was demonstrating greater compliance in the weeks before the U.S. invasion, or that the invasion was carried out in defiance of a majority on the U.N. Security Council.
The White House report also continues to use selective information to support the administration's case, while leaving out contrary facts or a fuller context.
For instance, the report states that "a senior al-Qaeda terrorist, now detained, who had been responsible for al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, reports that al-Qaeda was intent on obtaining WMD assistance from Iraq." The report leaves out the fact that nothing resulted from this overture.
The report also repeats the story that an al-Qaeda associate, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, went to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, but leaves out that no evidence has surfaced that the Iraqi government was aware of his presence or cooperated with him.
Similarly, the report notes that "a safe haven in Iraq belonging to Ansar al-Islam - a terrorist group closely associated with Zarqawi and al-Qaeda - was destroyed during Operation Iraqi Freedom." Left out is that the Ansar al-Islam base was in a northern section of Iraq that was outside the control of the Baghdad government and under the protection of a U.S. no-fly zone.
But the report, like Bush's Sunday speech, is just another indication that the administration never wanted a real debate about its war policy in Iraq. The goal has always been to tilt the evidence - often with a dose of public abuse for anyone who asks too many questions - so the American people can be herded like sheep into Bush's desired direction.
Weakened Democracy
As the nation plunges deeper into a costly and bloody war, there is little about this process that resembles a healthy - or even meaningful - democracy. Though Bush claims that his goal is to bring democracy to Iraq, he apparently thinks very little of the process at home. Rather than invite a full debate, he tries to rig the process to manufacture consent.
Bush's contempt for an informed electorate on the issue of war in the Middle East also doesn't stand alone. In December 2000, his respect for democracy didn't even extend to the basic principle that in a democracy, the candidate with the most votes wins.
Not only did Bush lose the popular vote to Al Gore by more than a half million ballots, Bush blocked a full and fair counting of votes in Florida for the simple reason that he was afraid of losing. Instead, he ran to his father's powerful friends on the U.S. Supreme Court and got them to shut down the troublesome recount, which had been ordered by the state supreme court. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "So Bush Did Steal the White House [8]."]
But Bush is only partly to blame for this steep decline in American democratic traditions and for the nation’s stumble into the dangerous quicksand of a Middle East occupation.
As in any democracy - even a troubled one - it remains the ultimate responsibility of the people to shoulder the burden of citizenship, which includes getting the facts and acting on them. That responsibility also demands that the people hold politicians accountable when they lead the country to war with lies and distortions.
9/11's Dark Window to the Future
Sept. 11, 2006
As the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks unfolds, it has come to look less like a sad remembrance of the past and more like a troubling glimpse into the future, a window to a new-age totalitarianism that looms before the United States, where a powerful right-wing government tells lies aided and abetted by friendly media corporations.
So, even as the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee finally acknowledge some of the many Iraq War falsehoods told by George W. Bush and his senior advisers, Bush's misfeasance and malfeasance are obscured by Disney's ABC-TV "docu-drama" pinning most of the blame for the 9/11 catastrophe not on Bush, but on Democrats.
With Disney's selection of a right-wing director and with the secrecy that surrounded the project - that gave Democrats little time to react - "The Path to 9/11" also had the sickening feel of a collaboration between a giant corporation and the Republican government in power.
So, less than two months before a pivotal national election, with Americans increasingly wondering how the nation got into the mess it faces today, this joint project of Disney and pro-Bush operatives provides a narrative that focuses not on Bush blowing off CIA warnings of an impending attacks in 2001 but on events dating back to 1993.
"The Path to 9/11," which ABC touted as a public service shown "with no commercial interruptions," makes some of its right-wing judgments with sneering asides from characters, such as wondering if Attorney General Janet Reno had "any balls," and others by mixing real and fabricated events to put Democrats in the worst possible light.
When the mysterious project finally was unveiled to mainstream media reviewers and when Democrats started complaining about fabricated scenes, the right-wing media responded with a counter-attack accusing the protesting Democrats of threatening the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.
In other words, at a time when Republicans control the White House, the Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and increasingly the American media, the Democrats still get transformed into the ones threatening free speech, for protesting their harsh and at times false depiction in events that led to the deaths of almost 3,000 people.
Looking Forward
Media manipulation also appears likely to play a major part in the Republican strategy for beating back Democratic challenges in the Nov. 7 election. In the eight weeks ahead, Republicans can be expected to exploit their financial and media advantages to wage personal attacks against Democratic challengers, district by district, state by state.
About four months ago, a Republican political operative told me about this strategy to "disqualify" Democratic candidates through a combination of negative research, called "oppo," and the timely dissemination of attack lines to conservative allies in the local and national media. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Why Democrats Lose [9].]
The pattern first surfaced in a special congressional election near San Diego, where Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham had resigned over a lobbying-bribery scandal and gone to prison.
To succeed Cunningham, the Republicans boldly put up a professional lobbyist, Brian Bilbray, while Democrats chose Francine Busby, who was counseled by Democratic consultants to avoid controversial Democratic positions in a traditionally Republican district. Democrats felt that Cunningham’s disgrace would be enough to guarantee success.
Indeed, despite a lackluster campaign, Busby appeared headed for victory. But then she blurted out to a mostly Latino audience that "you don't need papers for voting," hastily clarifying her meaning to say "you don't need to be a registered voter to help."
Conservative radio and TV talk show hosts across southern California seized on Busby's verbal slip and began accusing her of urging illegal immigrants to vote. Busby then spent the last several days of the campaign apologizing and backtracking before losing by about four percentage points. [Washington Post, June 7, 2006]
In explaining Busby's defeat, some Democratic activists raised suspicions that the election had been stolen by Republican vote fraud (though no hard evidence materialized). National Democratic consultants also pointed to the fact that the Republican Congressional Committee pumped more than $4.5 million into the district.
But whatever the truth, the Republicans had tested out their 2006 model for victory - and for continued one-party rule in Washington. They would exploit their advantages in finances, media and campaign tactics to prevent the Democrats from achieving a majority in either the House or Senate.
‘Defining’ Democrats
In a front-page article on Sept. 10, 2006, the Washington Post added more details about this Republican strategy: "Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said."
The Post reported that the National Republican Congressional Committee had earmarked more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget to negative advertising that would disseminate the findings of researchers who have been combing through tax and legal records searching for exploitable themes against Democrats.
"The hope is that a vigorous effort to 'define' opponents, in the parlance of GOP operatives, can help Republicans shift the midterm debate away from Iraq and limit losses this fall," the Post wrote.
An early example of the strategy has been a Republican ad directed against physician Steve Kagen, a Democratic congressional candidate in Wisconsin who is being labeled "Dr. Millionaire" because over the years his allergy clinic has sued 80 patients, mostly for unpaid bills.
Against inexperienced or little-known Democratic candidates, "it will take one or two punches to fold them up like a cheap suit," Republican strategist Matt Keelen told the Post. [Washington Post, Sept. 19, 2006]
The Republicans also have a huge advantage because their negative themes reverberate through a giant right-wing media megaphone that extends from the national level down to the states and districts, where Republicans have identified specific hosts on local right-wing radio stations and friendly newspaper editors.
I was told that Republican operatives have an apparatus to electronically communicate instantaneous talking points to these local media outlets, promoting "bad votes" or exploitable quotes from individual Democratic candidates. Republicans will be putting negative spins on Democratic candidates before the Democrats can even reach a microphone.
The Left’s Failure
By contrast, the Democratic response mechanism - concentrated mostly on personal Internet sites and under-funded Air America Radio stations - is amateurish and relatively slow. Much of it depends on volunteers with day jobs finding time to do a little blogging.
While the Right has built up its media machinery over three decades, spending billions of dollars and integrating its media with its political operations, the Left has invested sparingly on media and focused mostly on "grassroots organizing."
In effect, the Left counted on the mainstream news media to provide the necessary information and thus ceded control of the national narrative, while the Right created its own narrative and aggressively pressured the mainstream media to go along, labeling any out-of-step journalists as "liberal."
The consequences of these two competing strategies cannot be overstated. Beyond enabling the Right to build a political following with consistent messages day in and day out, its media machine gives the Right enormous advantages at key moments, such as during a run-up to war or in the weeks before an election.
Increasingly, too, the mainstream media finds itself under the influence of the Right's narrative and under pressure to accept the Right's "facts." Individual journalists may first bend their coverage to the Right to avoid the career-threatening "liberal" label but often even that doesn't work.
Eventually, targeted news personalities, such as Dan Rather, get weeded out and replaced with unthreatening ciphers, like Katie Couric, who, in turn, put opinion segments on the CBS Evening News that range from Thomas L. Friedman, an Iraq War hawk with some second thoughts, to Rush Limbaugh, an Iraq War hawk with no second thoughts.
In another sign of the times, Disney, which has faced right-wing attacks for supposed tolerance of homosexuality and for some executives who have contributed to Democrats, turned to a Limbaugh friend, Cyrus Nowrasteh, to direct its docu-drama on 9/11.
Disney saw little downside in promoting a favorite right-wing theme - blaming the 9/11 attacks on Democratic President Bill Clinton - despite the evidence that Clinton took the al-Qaeda threat much more seriously than did Bush, who famously brushed aside warnings from the CIA and downplayed terrorism in his first eight months in office.
As another favor to the Right - and as proof that the motive wasn't financial - Disney's ABC-TV presented its anti-Clinton mini-series without commercial breaks. It is inconceivable that Disney or any media corporation would give similar treatment to a TV special that worked as hard to put Bush in an unfavorable light.
Fake Testimony
On a smaller scale but also instructive, right-wing operatives continue to spread a disinformation campaign that has doctored Iran-Contra testimony to have former White House aide Oliver North prophetically describing his concerns about terrorist Osama bin Laden in 1987 - while Democrats, supposedly including then-Sen. Al Gore, behave cluelessly.
Over the past five years, I have been asked about this supposed North testimony at least a dozen times. Heading into the 9/11 anniversary, the North "testimony" was circulating again, distributed widely across the Internet as further "evidence" of Republican farsightedness and Democratic fecklessness.
But North did not cite concerns about bin Laden in 1987, when bin Laden was actually a U.S. ally receiving military assistance from the Reagan administration to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. North's concerns were about another terrorist, named Abu Nidal. Sen. Gore also wasn't on the Iran-Contra committee.
Yet, this bogus history - much like the Disney docu-drama and Bush's longstanding lies about Iraq - are combining in big ways and small to create an Orwellian future for the American people.
Internationally, Bush has outlined an endless war against the vague concept of "Islamic fascists" with the underlying reality that the United States is committing itself to a bloody "World War III" against many of the world's one billion Muslims.
At home, Karl Rove and other Republican strategists project what effectively will be a one-party state, with the Republicans controlling all branches of government, using the federal courts to redefine the Constitution and keeping Democrats around as foils and boogey men to stir up the conservative base with warnings about the enemy within.
On this fifth anniversary of 9/11, President Bush and his Republican supporters are trying hard to revive the lost sentimental unity that followed the attacks. But the saddest legacy of that tragic day may be that it marked the path toward the end of the noble American Republic and the start of a new totalitarianism.
Did al-Qaeda Succeed?
Sept. 11, 2008
Ten years after the neoconservatives laid out plans for permanent U.S. global dominance - and seven years after the brutal 9/11 attacks gave them the opening to carry out those plans - the neocons instead have guided the United States onto the shoals of a political/military disaster and the prospect of rapid decline.
This grim result from the neocons' overreach is an unstated subtext of the U.S. intelligence community's project for assessing the world in 2025, a point 17 years into the future when the United States is likely to have lost its current world dominance, according to a preview [10] offered by the government's top intelligence analyst.
Speaking at a Sept. 4 conference in Orlando, Florida, Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said the United States might still be "the preeminent power" in 2025, but that "American dominance will be much diminished."
Further, Fingar projected that the United States would see the greatest declines in the most important areas of global influence, the economic and the cultural, while likely maintaining military supremacy, which would be of lesser importance.
"The overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military," Fingar said.
"But part of the argument here is that by 15 years from now, the military dimension will remain the most preeminent [but] will be the least significant - or much less significant than it is now."
In other words, U.S. intelligence is looking toward a future in which the United States may serve as the world's policeman, but without the more subtle and profitable influence that comes from economic, cultural and political strength - known as "soft power."
Though Fingar did not tie the "accelerating" erosion of American power to the policies of the neocons and the Bush administration, it is hard to avoid that conclusion.
In 1998, the neocons were unveiling their Project for the New American Century with its vision of never-ending U.S. global dominance. When potential threats did arise, the neocons argued, the United States must react with "preemptive wars," striking before a rival could pose a serious threat.
After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush embraced these neocon theories, vowing to not just exact revenge on the 9/11 perpetrators but to wage a "global war on terrorism" with the ultimate goal of eradicating "evil" itself.
Quick Pivot
So, after invading Afghanistan and blasting al-Qaeda base camps, Bush made a quick pivot toward Iraq to fulfill the neocon dream of eliminating Saddam Hussein, a longtime thorn in Washington’s side.
The U.S. occupation of Iraq also would establish an American military outpost "East of Suez," projecting U.S. power into the region, guaranteeing access to its oil and protecting Israel from its Muslim neighbors.
However, the neocons' neocolonial strategy foundered on the rocks of Iraq's violent resistance and sectarian warfare. More than five years into the conflict, about 140,000 American troops are tied down in Iraq while a force of about 30,000 U.S. troops finds itself facing worsening security in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders not only survived the U.S. retaliatory strikes after 9/11 but exploited the Bush administration's obsession with Iraq to reestablish themselves inside Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country.
The damage to U.S. interests also extends beyond the war zones. The military adventures are putting the U.S. government more than $1 trillion deeper into debt, drawing away resources that the United States desperately needs to retool its industries, develop alternative energy sources and improve its education, infrastructure and health care.
Plus, the neocon hubris about American dominance has alienated much of the world's population, squandering goodwill built up since World War II. Instead of the nation that established the Nuremberg principles and wrote the United Nations Charter, the United States is seen as the country of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and torture.
In almost every corner of the globe - and especially in strategic regions such as Europe and the Middle East - respect for the United States as a beacon of political freedom and international progress has fallen to historic lows.
While the rest of the world appears eager to get on with expanded commerce and technological competition, the United States looks like it can't stop clumsily throwing its military weight around, amid chants of "USA, USA."
So, as U.S. intelligence continues work on its projections for 2025, the nation finds itself at a crossroads. It can give the neocons around John McCain another four-year lease on the White House - so they can keep doing what they've been doing - or the country can take another direction.
As Fingar made clear in his Sept. 4 speech, the future of 2025 is not yet set in stone. It is only the intelligence community's best estimate based on current dynamics. If those dynamics change, so can the future.
Still, it appears that if al-Qaeda's motive in attacking New York and Washington on 9/11 was to bait the United States into self-destructive actions in the Middle East and thus undermine America's position in the world, bin Laden and his associates may have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
The Real Lessons of 9/11
Sept. 11, 2009
On this eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it's worth reflecting on how even a mildly competent U.S. President might have prevented the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and drove the United States into a spasm of revenge that has wasted untold blood and treasure.
The evidence of George W. Bush's incompetence has emerged from official investigations, court cases and memoirs from key insiders but often has attracted less attention than the speculative arguments from conspiracy theorists about the 9/11 attacks being "an inside job."
Ironically, it was the evidence of Bush's stunning incompetence that gave momentum to the so-called "9/11 truth movement," which argued that the U.S. government couldn't be that inept and that therefore the Bush administration must have been complicit in the attacks.
That assumption then gave rise to a cottage industry of bizarre theories - such as "no plane hit the Pentagon" and “the Twin Towers were destroyed by controlled demolitions” - claims that have invited debunking by scientists and engineers and thus obscured a more important truth: that by 2001 a dangerous confluence of political factors had carried the United States to a place where Bush's swaggering bluster and neoconservative ideology were positioned to exploit the nation’s fear and anger with disastrous results.
The real lesson learned from 9/11 perhaps should be that rational behavior and competence matter - and that their willful rejection by a major political party (in this case, the Republicans), a sizable portion of the U.S. news media, and a large chunk of the American electorate - can have devastating consequences for the nation and the world.
That is a lesson which also remains relevant today as right-wing extremists continue their takeover of the Republican Party with the help of a powerful right-wing media machine.
Despite electoral reversals in 2006 and 2008, the Republicans seem bound to Bush's true legacy - the notion that words can reshape reality as long as you have a big enough media megaphone to shout out and repeat the distortions.
And, to a surprising degree, "the 9/11 truth movement" shared a common interest with the Bush administration - both groups needed to dismiss the evidence of Bush's incompetence, albeit for different reasons.
Bush's backers understood that incompetence was the President's Achilles's heel as would be revealed in the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in summer 2005 and from his inept management of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The "truthers" also had a stake in ignoring the evidence of Bush's incompetence, since their theories were dependent on the notion that Bush and his team were evil masterminds who had pulled off and then concealed the most audacious conspiracy in world history.
An Arrogant Buffoon?
The acceptance of the alternative interpretation - that Bush was an arrogant buffoon who rejected warnings about al-Qaeda terrorism in part because President Bill Clinton thought the issue was important - would have undermined both the Bush administration's bid for a second term and "the 9/11 truth movement."
So the Bush team tried to conceal many of the embarrassing facts and went on the attack against insiders - like ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke - who pulled aside the curtain on internal White House workings.
The administration's foot-dragging and name-calling kept much of the strongest evidence of incompetence under wraps until after Election 2004. In the years that followed, however, more and more evidence spilled out.
For instance, during the penalty phase of al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui's trial, it was revealed that FBI agent Harry Samit, who interrogated Moussaoui weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, sent 70 warnings to his superiors about suspicions that Moussaoui had been taking flight training in Minnesota because he was planning to hijack a plane for a terrorist operation.
But FBI officials in Washington showed "criminal negligence" in blocking requests for a search warrant on Moussaoui's computer or taking other preventive action, Samit testified at the court hearing on March 20, 2006.
Samit's futile warnings matched the frustrations of other federal agents in Minnesota and Arizona who had gotten wind of al-Qaeda's scheme to train pilots for operations in the United States.
For instance, FBI headquarters blew off a prescient memo from an FBI agent in the Phoenix field office. The July 2001 memo warned of the "possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama Bin Laden" to send student pilots to the United States. The agent noted "an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest" attending American flight schools.
CIA Warnings
Separate from the FBI field agents, CIA analysts were piecing the same puzzle together from tips, intercepts and other scraps of information.
By July 10, senior CIA counterterrorism officials, including Cofer Black, had collected a body of intelligence that they presented to CIA Director George Tenet, as Tenet recounted in his 2007 memoir, At the Center of the Storm.
"The briefing [Black] gave me literally made my hair stand on end," Tenet wrote. "When he was through, I picked up the big white secure phone on the left side of my desk - the one with a direct line to [National Security Adviser] Condi Rice - and told her that I needed to see her immediately to provide an update on the al-Qa'ida threat."
After reaching the White House, a CIA briefer, identified in the book only as Rich B., started his presentation by saying: "There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months!"
Rich B. then displayed a chart showing "seven specific pieces of intelligence gathered over the past 24 hours, all of them predicting an imminent attack," Tenet wrote. The briefer presented another chart with "the more chilling statements we had in our possession through intelligence."
These comments included a mid-June statement by Osama bin Laden to trainees about an attack in the near future; talk about decisive acts and a "big event"; and fresh intelligence about predictions of "a stunning turn of events in the weeks ahead," Tenet wrote.
Rich B. told Rice that the attack will be "spectacular" and designed to inflict heavy casualties against U.S. targets, Tenet wrote.
"Attack preparations have been made," Rich B. said about al-Qaeda's plans. "Multiple and simultaneous attacks are possible, and they will occur with little or no warning."
When Rice asked what needed to be done, the CIA's Black responded, "This country needs to go on a war footing now."
The CIA officials sought approval for broad covert-action authority that had been languishing since March, Tenet wrote.
Despite the July 10 briefing, other senior Bush administration officials pooh-poohed the seriousness of the al-Qaeda threat. Two leading neoconservatives at the Pentagon - Stephen Cambone and Paul Wolfowitz - suggested that the CIA might be falling for a disinformation campaign, Tenet wrote.
But the evidence of an impending attack continued to pour in. At one CIA meeting in late July, Tenet wrote that Rich B. told senior officials bluntly, "they're coming here," a declaration that was followed by stunned silence.
Bush Warned
On Aug. 6, 2001, more than a month before the attacks, the CIA had enough evidence to send Bush a top-secret Presidential Daily Briefing paper, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US." It was handed to Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he was on a month-long vacation after a half year on the job.
The CIA told Bush about "threat reporting" that indicated bin Laden wanted "to hijack a US aircraft." The CIA also cited a call that had been made to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 "saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."
The PDB noted that "FBI information ... indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related."
Bush apparently was not pleased by the CIA's intrusion on his vacation nor with the report's lack of specific targets and dates. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, "All right, you've covered your ass," according to an account in author Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine., which relied heavily on senior CIA officials.
"The system was blinking red," Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission.
In his memoir, Tenet described a special trip he took to Crawford later in August 2001 to get Bush to focus on an imminent threat of a spectacular al-Qaeda attack.
"A few weeks after the Aug. 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the President stayed current on events," Tenet wrote. "This was my first visit to the ranch. I remember the President graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna, none of which were native to Queens," where Tenet had grown up.
Tenet's trip to Crawford - like the July 10 meeting with Rice and the Aug. 6 briefing paper for Bush - failed to shock the administration out of its lethargy. While Tenet and Bush made small talk about "the flora and the fauna," al-Qaeda operatives put the finishing touches on their plans.
Bush's Justice Department and FBI headquarters were in the loop on the CIA reporting, but still didn't reach out to their agents around the country, some of whom, it turned out, were frantically trying to get the attention of their superiors in Washington.
Then-acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard told the 9/11 Commission that he discussed the intelligence threat reports with FBI special agents in a conference call on July 19, 2001. But Pickard said the focus was on having "evidence response teams" ready to respond quickly in the event of an attack.
Pickard "did not task field offices to try to determine whether any plots were being considered within the United States or to take any action to disrupt any such plots," according to the 9/11 Commission's report.
It wasn't until Sept. 4 - a week before 9/11 - when senior Bush administration officials, including Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "finally reconvened in the White House Situation Room" to discuss counterterrorism plans "that had been lingering unresolved all summer long," Tenet wrote in his memoir.
Averting 9/11
While it will never be known conclusively whether a different reaction by Bush and his national security team could have disrupted the 9/11 attacks, a variety of options were available.
Counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke said the 9/11 attacks might have been averted if Bush had shown some initiative in "shaking the trees" by having high-level officials from the FBI, CIA, Customs and other federal agencies go back to their bureaucracies and demand any information about the terrorist threat.
If they had, they might well have found the memos from the FBI agents in Arizona and Minnesota. They also might have exploited the information that two known al-Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawar al-Hazmi, had entered the United States. On Sept. 11, they boarded American Airlines Flight 77 and helped fly it into the Pentagon.
In his book, Against All Enemies, Clarke contrasted President Bill Clinton's urgency over the intelligence warnings that preceded the Millennium events with the lackadaisical approach of Bush and his national security team.
"In December 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al-Qaeda attacks," Clarke said in an interview about his book. "President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks.
"Every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.
"Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the President ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No." [CNN's "Larry King Live," March 24, 2004]
In a March 19, 2006, speech in Florida, former Vice President Al Gore also noted this contrast between how the Clinton administration reacted to terrorist threats and how the Bush administration did in the weeks before Sept. 11.
"In eight years in the White House, President Clinton and I, a few times, got a direct and really immediate statement like that [Aug. 6, 2001 warning], in one of those daily briefings," Gore said.
"Every time, as you would want and expect, we had a fire drill, brought everybody in, [asked] what else do we know about this, what have we done to prepare for this, what else could we do, are we certain of the sources, get us more information on that, we want to know everything about this, and we want to make sure our country is prepared.
"In August of 2001," Gore added, "such a clear warning was given and nothing - nothing - happened. When there is no vision, the people perish."
Other Priorities
In his book, Clarke offered other examples of pre-9/11 mistakes by the Bush administration, including a downgrading in importance of the counterterrorism office, a shifting of budget priorities, an obsession with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and an emphasis on conservative ideological issues, such as Ronald Reagan's Star Wars missile defense program.
A more hierarchical White House structure also insulated Bush from direct contact with mid-level national security officials who had specialized on the al-Qaeda issue.
The chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission - New Jersey's former Republican Gov. Thomas Kean and former Democratic Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton - agreed that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented.
"The whole story might have been different," Kean said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on April 4, 2004. Kean cited a string of law-enforcement blunders including the "lack of coordination within the FBI" and the FBI's failure to understand the significance of Moussaoui's arrest in August 2001 while training to fly passenger jets.
Though the 9/11 Commission steered away from overt criticism of policymakers, it did note that "no CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] or other NSC [National Security Council] meeting was held to discuss the possible threat of a strike in the United States as a result of this [Aug. 6] report."
As the clock ticked down to 9/11, the Bush administration continued to have other priorities.
On Aug. 9, 2001, Bush gave a nationally televised speech on stem cells, delivering his judgment permitting federal funding for research on 60 preexisting stem-cell lines, but barring government support for work on any other lines of stem cells derived from human embryos.
On side trips from his August vacation, Bush also made forays to Middle American cities that Bush said represented "heartland values" and the basic decency of Americans. Some residents living near the Atlantic and Pacific oceans viewed the hype about "heartland values" as a not-so-subtle snub at the so-called "blue" coastal states that favored Al Gore.
Despite the Sept. 4, 2001, meeting of senior Bush aides to review the counterterrorism initiatives that had been languishing since March, the administration still didn't seem moved by the urgency of the moment.
On Sept. 6, 2001, Rumsfeld threatened a presidential veto of a proposal by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, seeking to transfer money from strategic missile defense to counterterrorism.
Also on Sept. 6, former Sen. Gary Hart, who had co-chaired a commission on terrorism, was again trying to galvanize the Bush administration into showing some urgency about the threat. Hart met with Rice and urged the White House to move faster. Rice agreed to pass on Hart's concerns to higher-ups.
Leadership Vacuum
Yet, if President Bush had demanded action from on high, the ripple effect through the FBI might well have jarred loose enough of the pieces to make the overall picture suddenly clear, especially in view of the information already compiled by the CIA.
Ironically, that is almost the same argument that federal prosecutors made in unsuccessfully seeking Moussaoui's execution, rather than life imprisonment. It's not that he was directly involved in the Sept. 11 plot, the prosecutors said; it's that the government might have been able to stop the attacks if he had immediately confessed what he was up to.
In effect, the Bush administration was demanding Moussaoui's death on the notion that the failure to do something that might have prevented the tragedy of Sept. 11 should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
However, the Bush administration took almost the opposite position on its own negligence. Bush and other senior officials insisted they had nothing to apologize for.
Indeed, Bush made the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath the centerpiece of his presidency. Arguably, he rode the whirlwind from the attacks right through the war in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq to his second term.
Only in summer 2005 - after another case of botched leadership during the Hurricane Katrina disaster - did the air whoosh out of Bush's cult-of-personality balloon. Add in the disastrous decisions around the Iraq War and many Americans began to see a pattern of arrogant, incompetent leadership that failed to heed evidence or pay attention to details.
For some Americans, however, the Bush incompetence explanation didn't go nearly far enough to explain the breathtaking lapses that preceded 9/11.
Some 9/11 "truthers" argued that the destruction of the Twin Towers and the damage to the Pentagon must have been an "inside job" with some elements of the Bush administration conspiring with the attackers to create a modern-day Reichstag Fire that would justify invading Iraq and consolidating political power at home.
But the evidence from the Moussaoui case and other investigations - as well as later admissions by al-Qaeda leaders and the absence of any first-hand witnesses describing the supposed "inside job" collaboration - all tend to support the theory of Bush’s incompetence.
Without doubt, however, even as the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were still smoldering, Bush and his neoconservative advisers decided to exploit the nation's anger and fear to implement a long-held desire for preemptive wars abroad and a crackdown on dissent at home.
And that might well be the ultimate lesson of 9/11: how unscrupulous political leaders, supported by a fawning or complicit media, can exploit a tragedy and stampede a population into disastrous miscalculations.
[For more on these topics, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a two-book set for the discount price of only $19. For details, click here. [11]]
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About author Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com [12]. It's also available at Amazon.com [13], as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Published on The Smirking Chimp (http://www.smirkingchimp.com)
Chronicling America's 9/11 Descent
By Robert Parry
Created Sep 11 2011 - 11:11am
In retaliation for the terror attacks on Sept. 11, George W. Bush is vowing to strike at a shadowy network of international terrorists reaching into 60 countries. He has called this coming war a "crusade" and has led his friends to believe that he views his new duty as a mission from God.
"I think, in [Bush's] frame, this is what God has asked him to do," a close acquaintance told the New York Times. "It offers him enormous clarity." According to this acquaintance, Bush believes "he has encountered his reason for being, a conviction informed and shaped by the president's own strain of Christianity," the Times reported. [NYT, Sept. 22, 2001]
Few Americans would disagree that violent retribution should be inflicted on the masterminds of the mass murders at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - and on those who aided and abetted this crime that killed thousands of people. The unsettling question, which so far few have been willing to voice, is whether Bush is up to this delicate, complex and dangerous job.
Two weeks after the terrorist attacks, it appears that Bush still has little grasp of the long history of frustration that has met previous anti-terrorism campaigns. It’s also unclear whether he recognizes the risks in the geopolitical tradeoffs involved in building an international coalition and the potential costs of an open-ended war.
Bush's limited sense of the history goes beyond his use of the word "crusade," which has a European connotation of chivalrous knights in shining armor driving the infidels out of the Holy Lands, but conjures up very different memories in the Islamic world, of a bloody Christian holy war against Arabs. In 1099, for instance, the Crusaders massacred many of the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
Already, Osama bin Laden has seized on Bush's gaffe to rally Islamic fundamentalists. A typed statement attributed to bin Laden called the coming war “the new Christian-Jewish crusade led by the big crusader Bush under the flag of the cross.”
Wars on Terrorism
Bush's short-term knowledge of history seems sketchy, too.
Repeatedly, he has called this war on terrorism a new kind of conflict, the first war of the 21st Century. Yet, his father was vice president in the administration of Ronald Reagan that made combating terrorism a top priority of U.S. foreign policy, replacing the Carter administration's hallmark of human rights.
Reagan committed his administration to the war on terrorism in the wake of the Islamic revolution in Iran and the radical Arab nationalism of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi. The Reagan era’s war on terrorism met some success but also failure.
Reagan created special counter-terrorism task forces and authorized the CIA to hunt down suspected terrorists in preemptive attacks that bordered on assassinations. Some administration hard-liners, such as CIA Director William J. Casey, sought to trace virtually all terrorism back to the Soviet Union, combining anti-communism with anti-terrorism.
In Central America, the wars between right-wing governments and left-wing guerrillas also were squeezed under the umbrella of counter-terrorism, with Fidel Castro's Cuba listed as a chief sponsor of the terrorism. To wage a joint war against "terrorism" and "communism" in Central America, the Reagan administration armed and backed military repression in El Salvador, Guatemala and other countries.
Tens of thousands of Central American civilians were slaughtered in army sweeps of areas considered sympathetic to guerrillas, including massacres of Mayan Indians in Guatemala that a truth commission later deemed a genocide. The U.S.-backed armies also were linked to paramilitary "death squads" that murdered political dissidents, including labor leaders, academics, priests and nuns.
The war on terrorism even led the Reagan administration to engage in terrorism itself, both in Central America and the Middle East. To punish Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government for aiding insurgents elsewhere in the region, the Reagan administration supported the Nicaraguan contra rebels, who earned a reputation for torture, rape and murder as they swept through towns in northern Nicaragua.
One former contra director, Edgar Chamorro, described the contras' practice of dragging captured government officials into town squares and executing them in front of the residents. American news outlets also reported on larger contra massacres of peasants picking coffee, presumably to discourage economic activity. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History [1]]
To counter disclosures of these atrocities, the administration created special propaganda teams that engaged in “public diplomacy” to persuade editors, producers and bureau chiefs to stop these kinds of stories and to remove journalists who filed the reports.
Administration insiders called these largely successful public relations efforts "perception management." Today's influential conservative news media is, in part, an outgrowth of those Reagan-era efforts.
In George W. Bush's new war on terrorism, the nation can expect a similar strategy for shaping public opinion. In the 1980s, the head of State Department’s "public diplomacy" office, Otto Reich, is now Bush's nominee to be assistant secretary of state for Latin America.
Seeds of Violence
In the Middle East, the counter-terrorism campaigns of the 1980s also veered into terrorism itself, with some of the central players of that era still holding center stage today.
Under the leadership of then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. The goal was to crush Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, which was then widely regarded as a terrorist organization.
Allied with right-wing Lebanese forces, Israeli troops forced the PLO to flee Lebanon. But Israel's Lebanese allies then massacred Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, drawing U.S. Marines into Lebanon on what was initially a peacekeeping mission.
Gradually, U.S. forces began siding with the right-wing Lebanese army as it mounted paramilitary attacks on suspected Muslim terrorists. The loss of neutrality worsened when the Reagan administration ordered the U.S.S. New Jersey to begin shelling Muslim villages in the mountains. Irate Muslims countered by launching a suicide bombing attack against the U.S. Marine barracks outside Beirut, killing 241 Marines.
Though the surviving U.S. forces withdrew from Lebanon, the war of terror and counter-terror continued. In a 1985 strike against Hizbollah leader Sheikh Fadlallah, Casey helped finance an operation that included the hiring of operatives who detonated a car bomb outside the Beirut apartment building where Fadlallah lived.
As described by Bob Woodward in Veil, "the car exploded, killing 80 people and wounding 200, leaving devastation, fires and collapsed buildings. Anyone who had happened to be in the immediate neighborhood was killed, hurt or terrorized, but Fadlallah escaped without injury. His followers strung a huge 'Made in the USA' banner in front of a building that had been blown out."
The mixed experiences of the 1980s - and the efforts to contain terrorism that continued through the 1990s - should be both a guide and a warning as America seeks retribution against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 mass murders.
Tough Rhetoric
To date, Bush has opted for tough rhetoric but relatively modest action, such as beefing up U.S. military forces near Afghanistan and tightening financial restrictions on money flows to groups considered friendly to bin Laden's organization.
The initial military phase of the retaliation appears likely to be special operations attacks aimed at bin Laden and his top lieutenants at their Afghan base camps, combined with aerial attacks against his Taliban allies who rule most of Afghanistan.
As Bush moves forward, one of the few institutions that has applied some brakes to any rush toward war has been Wall Street. While joining in patriotic demonstrations, such as singing God Bless America before the start of trading on Sept. 17, institutional investors voted with their dollars when it came to showing confidence in the future U.S. economy.
With war looming, the stock markets went into free-fall. From Sept. 17 through Sept. 21, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 14.3 percent, its biggest percentage weekly drop since the Great Depression. The sell-off reversed somewhat on Monday as the expectation of a hasty U.S. military action faded and investors moved in to pick up some stocks at bargain prices.
A longer-term problem to big investors, however, is that the world that beckoned during the Clinton administration - one of rapidly advancing international cooperation with U.S. industry ideally positioned to profit from the growth - had receded since Bush's inauguration.
President Clinton pushed multilateral strategies around the world, including peace initiatives in the Middle East. In so doing, he presented the prospect of a world transforming into a single market. New technologies, such as the Internet, also created a sense that communication could transcend traditional national boundaries and bridge cultural divides.
Faced with these new opportunities for growth, U.S. business prospered. Along with the expectations of rapid growth went the stock markets. During the Clinton administration, the Dow more than tripled, from about 3,200 to above 10,000. The technology-heavy Nasdaq more than quadrupled, even counting the dot-com losses last year.
A Declining Economy
Over the past eight months, that rosy future has darkened and the stock market has fallen.
Instead of innovative technologies and alternative energy sources leading the way toward solutions to the world's energy and environmental problems, the Bush administration has advocated drilling more oil and digging more coal. Instead of international strategies for addressing global problems, the Bush administration favored a go-it-alone approach, at least prior to Sept. 11.
In 1999, the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization prompted the Clinton administration to begin addressing the inequities that came with the global economy. Clinton’s team began work on international standards for environmental protections and labor rules.
By contrast, the Bush administration has taken a staunchly free-market approach to free trade. Bush's economists maintain that trade organizations should confine their attentions to trade issues and stay away from worldwide regulatory standards.
Bush also repudiated the Kyoto global warming agreement in defiance of the European nations and Japan. Further offending longtime U.S. allies, Bush vowed to scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in favor of implementing Ronald Reagan's dream of a missile shield.
On the sensitive issue of the Middle East, Bush pulled U.S. diplomats away from negotiations seeking to stop the spiral of violence in Israel and the West Bank. He alienated pro-U.S. Arab states by directing his toughest criticism about the violence at Palestinian leader Arafat.
On Sept. 3, U.S. representatives walked out on a United Nations anti-racism conference because a proposal was under discussion equating Israeli treatment of Palestinians with racism.
Bush appeared to be implementing a foreign policy drawn from the most conservative commentators on the Op-Ed pages.
The economic consequences of the Bush policies also have not been good. The economy teetered on the brink of recession, hundreds of thousands of jobs were eliminated, the non-Social Security budget surplus disappeared. Millions of Americans lost big chunks of their savings and retirement plans in the stock market drop.
Even Bush's wealthy backers have not been spared from economic misfortune. For instance, members of the wealthy Bass family of Texas - which built a fortune in oil and invested heavily in Bush’s political career - were forced to sell a 6.4 percent stake of the Disney Company in what Wall Street insiders called a distress sale. [NYT, Sept. 21, 2001]
If Bush’s war on terrorism expands over the next several months, economists agree a full-scale recession could follow. Some estimates see unemployment soaring from the 4.5 percent range of the late Clinton years to about 7 or 8 percent.
Though American investors had come to see the Dow 10,000 as a launching pad for higher growth, it may actually represent a level that was realistic only if the world continued coming together as a single marketplace. With that future fading, the Dow and other indexes might be expected to retreat as well, though probably not all the way back to the Dow 3200 of George H.W. Bush’s administration.
Open Societies
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan made a similar point about the value of world cooperation in congressional testimony on Sept. 20. He stressed the importance of the free flow of goods and ideas to future growth.
“We have developed a really major and, in many respects, extraordinary economic system on a global basis in the last 10, 15 years, resting on technology and the free movement of people, capital goods. And most interesting enough, during the period we’ve seen increasing evidence that the interaction between economies has enhanced global growth, and, indeed, the growth of everybody,” Greenspan said.
“The openness of societies, the openness of economies are very crucial for economic growth, and they can be open only if they are not hampered by violence,” the Fed chairman continued. “Violence is complete destruction of the institutions of free markets and of global economic systems.”
So, the inexperienced president now is faced with a two-pronged challenge: how to live up to his strong words about an unrelenting war on terrorism and how to do so without tanking the economy and creating deeper divisions in the world.
Bush also must recognize that some of the tradeoffs in fighting terrorism can create potentially worse dangers. To gain support for isolating Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, for instance, Bush waived sanctions that had been placed on Pakistan and India for developing and testing nuclear weapons.
The nightmare scenario is that one of those nuclear weapons - or one from the old Soviet stockpiles - will end up in the hands of a terrorist group intent on an even more dramatic attack on a major U.S. city.
To date, Bush has drawn strength from the unity of the American people horrified by the mass murders of Sept. 11. He also has shown restraint in avoiding a rash retaliation that might have satisfied a thirst for revenge while killing innocent civilians in Afghanistan - and enflaming anti-American passions in the Middle East.
But Bush's challenge now is to implement a measured - and effective - response to the Sept. 11 attacks. To do that, Bush must recognize the shades of gray that have marked the path behind and surely will mark the struggle ahead.
Missed Opportunities of Sept. 11
Jan. 13, 2002
The ouster of the Taliban and the disruption of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network may have bought the U.S. public some added safety four months after the Sept. 11 attacks. But those gains could prove illusory because George W. Bush has ignored the root causes of the violence.
Some of those root causes, such as the world’s unequal economic development, may require long-term attention. But others could have been addressed in the aftermath of Sept. 11 as fitting responses to the atrocities.
Missed, for instance, was the opportunity to call on the American people to commit themselves to serious energy conservation and thus to free the hand of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. Bush also missed a unique opportunity to demand a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And he has been silent about the danger of mixing politics with religious fundamentalism.
In each case, Bush displayed a lack of presidential vision or was frozen by the political and economic entanglements of his supporters.
Perhaps most significantly, at a time when Americans were eager to do something meaningful as a way to pay tribute to the 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks, Bush most memorably urged the U.S. public to go shopping and take vacations, a call made in a national address to Congress and now featured in tourist industry TV commercials.
The White House could have explained how the nation's over-dependence on fossil fuels prevents the U.S. government from pressuring Arab states, especially the Saudi Arabians, to reform corrupt and authoritarian governments, one of most immediate causes for Islamic terrorism. But Bush has close ties to the oil industry, both in the United States and the Middle East.
The Saudi royal family and other undemocratic Arab regimes have long understood the leverage that oil gives them over the United States. The implicit deal was expressed bluntly in one State Department cable dated July 5, 1979. "The basis of this relationship - our need for oil and the Saudi need for security - will continue," predicted the cable. [For details, see Robert Parry's Trick or Treason.]
To fulfill the U.S. side of the relationship, the CIA has collaborated with Saudi security forces by training palace guards and disrupting political opposition. The United States adopted similar relationships with other undemocratic leaders throughout the Middle East - from the Shah of Iran, before the 1979 Iranian revolution, to the Emir of Kuwait, who was reinstalled by a U.S.-led military force that reversed the Iraqi invasion in 1991.
In return for U.S.-supplied security, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms have kept the oil flowing. But they also paid what amounts to protection money to Islamic fundamentalist leaders who share bin Laden’s hostility to the West. In effect, these “allies” subsidized bin Laden’s attacks on Americans.
Home Video
In December, when a home-made videotape was released of bin Laden speaking to guests, some Saudi clerics mentioned on the tape were “fairly influential and well-known,” according to Saudi experts quoted in The Wall Street Journal.
One Saudi religious leader, Suleiman al-Ulwan, who had been considered a moderate, is described on the tape as having issued a fatwa, or religious decree, that endorsed the Sept. 11 attacks and judged the dead Americans as not innocent. [WSJ, Dec. 19, 2001]
U.S. intelligence has been aware of the growing Saudi danger for years, at least since the 1990s when the Saudis frustrated U.S. efforts to investigate acts of terrorism emanating from Saudi soil.
In 1995, when a U.S.-run military school in Riyadh was bombed and five Americans were killed, the FBI rushed in agents to question four suspects. Before the questioning could begin, the Saudi government beheaded the suspects.
A similar lack of Saudi cooperation frustrated the investigation into the Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 American soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia in 1998. [For a detailed account, see The New Yorker's Jan. 14, 2002, article on former FBI counter-terrorist specialist John O'Neill, who died at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.]
Bin Laden himself is a Saudi whose family grew rich from construction contracts awarded by the Saudi king. He saw up close the decadence and corruption of the Saudi princes. These men preside over a system of strict Islamic law, even executing women who commit adultery, while the princes have wild parties during frequent trips to Europe and with Western women flown into the kingdom.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks also were Saudis. Yet U.S. diplomats still tiptoe around the issue of official Saudi complicity because the U.S. remains dependent on foreign oil and Saudi Arabia sits atop about a quarter of the world’s proven supply.
Curbing U.S. energy use would give U.S. diplomacy crucial maneuvering room to confront the Saudi royal family. By raising fuel-efficiency standards for motor vehicles and investing in alternative energy sources, the U.S. government also could improve relations with Western allies concerned about U.S. inaction on global warming.
The American people were ready to make the sacrifice after Sept. 11 if Bush had asked. Instead, Bush made no conservation appeal to the public and continued to oppose legislation that would require better gas mileage in cars.
In his new budget, he moves to cut government spending on alternative fuels and scraps a program to introduce high-mileage cars over the next few years. Instead, Bush will propose long-range research on fuel-cell technology whose promise is a decade or more down the road.
"They're letting Detroit off the hook on delivering real fuel-economy breakthroughs in the next few years," said Dan Reicher, assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration. "This is in exchange for potential improvements that are more than a decade off." [Washington Post, Jan. 10, 2002]
Oil Pals
Besides giving car manufacturers a pass, Bush's decision means oil consumption will remain high, a boon to Bush's political backers from the Texas oil fields and their Arab business pals.
"Many of the same American corporate executives who have reaped millions of dollars from arms and oil deals with the Saudi monarchy have served or currently serve at the highest levels of U.S. government," the Boston Herald reported in an investigative series.
"Those lucrative financial relationships call into question the ability of America's political elite to make tough foreign policy decisions about the kingdom that produced Osama bin Laden and is perhaps the biggest incubator for anti-Western Islamic terrorists," the Herald article said. "Nowhere is the revolving U.S.-Saudi money wheel more evident than within President Bush's own coterie of foreign policy advisers, starting with the president's father, George H.W. Bush."
The former president has served as a senior adviser at the Carlyle Group, an investment house which employed other key Bush aides. One Carlyle consultant was James A. Baker III, George W. Bush's chief lawyer in the Florida recount battle and his father's secretary of state. Another was Colin Powell, the younger Bush's secretary of state.
One of the deals between the Carlyle Group and the Saudi monarchy was an "Economic Offset Program," a kind of kickback scheme in which U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to Saudi Arabia return some money as contracts to Saudi businesses, most with links to the royal family. The Carlyle Group served as an adviser on this program, the Herald article reported. [Boston Herald, Dec. 11, 2001]
Bush Oil-igarchy
The Bush family itself has built its wealth through the oil industry, going back more than half a century when a young George H.W. Bush moved his family from Connecticut to the oil fields of Midland, Texas. [For details, see "The Bush Family Oil-igarchy [2]" at Consortiumnews.com]
George W. Bush has never forgotten the interests of those oil friends. During the first months of his administration, one of the few foreign policy initiatives that attracted his personal interest was the border conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, a dispute that jeopardized the development of oil fields around the Caspian Sea.
The law firm representing the oil companies trying to extract that oil and build a pipeline was headed by James Baker, who had directed the bare-knuckled strategy for nailing down the Florida electoral votes that put Bush in the White House. The Bush administration's coziness with the energy industry has been underscored again in the scandal surrounding the now-bankrupt Enron Corp.
Between the U.S. public's dependence on foreign oil and the profits going to the U.S. economic elite in cahoots with oil-rich Arab sheiks, it may not be surprising that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has propped up a variety of anti-democratic and unsavory regimes.
This expedient view of democracy - that it is an important principle elsewhere but can't be allowed to destabilize oil production - has given traction to anti-American charges in the Middle East that Washington is hypocritical about its most cherished principles or is simply prejudiced against Arabs.
Bush has avoided any public discussion of these thorny political realities in the Middle East. Instead, he has framed the post-Sept. 11 debate in the quasi-Christian language of a “crusade” to eradicate “evil,” with bin Laden as the “evil one.”
Politics & Religion
Another missed opportunity of Sept. 11 has come in Bush's failure to explain the danger of mixing politics and religious fundamentalism.
Bush has urged Americans to avoid blaming all believers in Islam for the violence of some extremists. But Bush's own close political ties to Christian fundamentalists are an obstacle for him in championing the American constitutional principle of the separation of church and state.
The Founding Fathers devised this principle out of a close historical understanding of the bloody religious wars of Europe's Dark Ages, the Inquisitions and the clashes among Christian faiths, as well as between Christians and Muslims. The principle recognized that the government should allow all to worship as they choose without the government promoting one religion over others.
By building a wall between religion and government, the Founders enabled the United States to avoid the worst of the internecine conflicts that have marred other societies with diverse populations. The Founders' genius has fresh relevance today as a blueprint for how to function successfully as a society of differing religious beliefs.
Bush, however, cannot espouse this important principle without offending many of his Christian Right backers who view the separation of church and state as a "myth" that must be overturned. They demand the imposition of "Christian law," much as Islamic fundamentalists do when they insist that only the words of the Koran can form the basis of government.
So Bush fudged on the discussion of Islamic fundamentalism, confining his critique to charges that bin Laden had "hijacked" the religion. Bush failed to delve more deeply into the complicated problem of fundamentalism, which does not arise only in Islam.
Other Fundamentalisms
Islamic fundamentalism is mirrored by Jewish and Christian fundamentalism, movements that profess similar though contradictory certainties about God's choice of them as the guardians of all that is right and just.
One of the major sore points between the West and the Islamic world has been the activism of Jewish fundamentalists in Israel. By placing settlements in Palestinian areas of the West Bank and denying Palestinians basic human dignity, these fundamentalists claim they are exercising a divine right to the land.
Bush appears incapable of drawing a line against this fundamentalism, partly because the Israeli Right and the American Christian Right have been closely allied since the late 1970s and 1980s. Sharing an interest in advancing conservative power in the United States, the leaders of Israel's Likud Party, such as Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, threw in their lot with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.
The alliance changed the political reality in both countries. A new harsh tone, driven by the certainty of religious fundamentalism, entered the politics of both the United States and Israel.
"Liberal Jewish peace activists, both in Israel and America, were denounced as traitors, and new alliances were forged with the Christian Evangelical right in the United States," wrote journalist Robert I. Friedman in his 1992 book, Zealots for Zion. "Israel's popular TV advertising slogan, 'Come to Israel, stay with friends,' was drowned out by Prime Minister Menachem Begin's cry, 'We don't care what the goyim think!'"
Theocratic Agendas
In the U.S., Christian fundamentalists also escalated their political activism in opposition to America's secular political traditions. Falwell’s Moral Majority and other Christian Right groups led campaigns to demonize feminists, homosexuals, "secular humanists" and liberals in general.
A key figure in supplying a mysterious flow of capital for this undertaking was the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a South Korean theocrat who espouses a totalitarian form of Christianity that would eradicate American democracy and place the world under his authority. While publicly avowing love for America, Moon privately tells his followers that America is "Satanic" and represents "Satan's harvest."
In one speech to his believers, Moon said his eventual dominance over the United States would be followed by the liquidation of American individualism.
"Americans who continue to maintain their privacy and extreme individualism are foolish people," Moon declared. "The world will reject Americans who continue to be so foolish. Once you have this great power of love, which is big enough to swallow entire America, there may be some individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be digested."
Since 1982, Moon has financed one of the conservative movement's most influential media outlets, The Washington Times, as a way to build popular support for conservative politicians and undermine liberals and centrists. Moon also subsidized conservative direct-mail operations and sponsored conferences that paid money to influential politicians.
The Reagan-Bush administration worked closely with Moon's apparatus. Ronald Reagan called Moon's Times his "favorite" newspaper. After leaving office, George H.W. Bush gave paid speeches in support of Moon, including an appearance in Argentina where Bush hailed Moon's Washington Times for bringing "sanity" to Washington and called Moon "the man with the vision." [For details, see "The Dark Side of Rev. Moon [3]" series at Consortiumnews.com]
With devastating effect, Moon and more traditional Christian fundamentalists have targeted political leaders associated with "liberalism." For instance, President Clinton was pursued for eight years in a relentless campaign to destroy him and his political influence.
Paula Jones
One of the Christian fundamentalist groups joining in the anti-Clinton assaults was the Rutherford Institute, which was inspired by the teachings of Rousas John Rushdoony, an advocate of Christian Reconstructionism, a movement that would replace democracy with "Biblical law."
The Rutherford Institute financed the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit against Clinton. Rutherford's leader John Whitehead, who appeared on cable news shows on behalf of Jones, has advocated the reorganization of the United States as a "Christian Nation."
In his book, The Separation Illusion, Whitehead opposes religious pluralism and argues that the doctrine of separation of church and state causes "the true God" to be an "outcast" and a "criminal." [See Frederick Clarkson's "Paula's Onward-Marching Christian Soldiers [4]" at Consortiumnews.com]
In his political rise, George W. Bush cultivated Christian fundamentalists by wearing his born-again religious fervor on his sleeve.
Bush courted Christian Right leaders with speeches at leading fundamentalist institutions such as Bob Jones University in South Carolina. He won Robertson's key backing in defeating Sen. John McCain's primary challenge.
Bush also enjoyed the strong support of Moon's Washington Times, which aggressively promoted stories questioning Al Gore's mental stability and his supposed tendency toward "delusions." [See "Al Gore vs. the Media [5]" at Consortiumnews.com]
Since taking power in January, Bush has rewarded his Christian Right followers. He has chipped away at the church-state separation by touting his "faith-based" initiative to put government money into religious organizations engaged in social services.
Bush imposed strict limits on federally funded stem-cell research. He named fundamentalist-favorite John Ashcroft to be attorney general. And Bush has vowed to appoint conservative anti-abortion justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Separation of church and state may be a principle that shines with new relevance today amid the bloodshed that stretches from Jerusalem to Kabul to New York City. But Bush has failed to explain the principle’s practical logic to the world.
Israel-Palestine
Bush also has failed on a third front, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, again letting politics and ideology obscure a possible route to a solution.
During his first months in office, Bush repudiated Clinton's Middle East policy of pressing for a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. Clinton's policy had been staunchly opposed by right-wing commentators, such as the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, a neoconservative supporter of Israel.
Bush chose to follow the hard-line strategy against the Palestinians charted by Krauthammer and others. Some foreign-policy sources say Bush picked that route out of a belief that his father lost in 1992, in part, because of Israel's suspicion that the elder Bush privately favored the oil-rich Arab countries and couldn’t be trusted.
Possibly with 2004 in mind, Bush cast aside any appearance of balance in the first several months of his presidency. Bush singled out Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat for primary blame for the continued Israeli-Palestinian violence and essentially let Likud leader Ariel Sharon off the hook.
Bush voiced no public sympathy for the worsening conditions of Palestinians living in the squalor of Gaza and other fenced-in areas. In early September, Bush ordered U.S. diplomats to walk out of a United Nations racism conference because of draft language criticizing Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
The tragedy of Sept. 11 did not alter Bush's basic strategy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many Americans might have favored a stern demand to both sides to accept a reasonable compromise that protected Israel's security while granting the Palestinians an economically viable homeland - or perhaps a solution that forged a single secular state with constitutional protections for all religions.
But Bush made no such move. His emissaries continued to insist that cease-fires of specific lengths were necessary before more substantive negotiations. However, the time limits turned into deadlines for Islamic suicide bombers to inflict bloody outrages against Israeli civilians. The Israeli government then responded with helicopter attacks and targeted killings of Palestinian leaders.
Four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush seems clueless about how to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Meanwhile, the post-Sept. 11 public pressure for action has dissipated and the tit-for-tat killings have taken on a grim look of business as usual.
Missed Warnings
Not only has Bush failed to address the larger threats that continue to give rise to terrorism, he did not protect the United States from the Sept. 11 attacks themselves.
Though columnist Andrew Sullivan and other conservative writers have gone to great lengths to blame former President Clinton for failing to stop the Sept. 11 attacks, the reality is that the Clinton administration did thwart previous attacks, including the millennium bombers, and waged covert campaigns to disrupt and kill leaders of al Qaeda.
While Clinton and his predecessors can be faulted for not doing more about terrorism, George W. Bush deserves blame for ignoring the more immediate dangers. It wasn’t as if there were no warnings.
On Jan. 31, 2001, just 11 days after Bush’s inauguration, former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman unveiled the final report of a blue-ribbon commission on terrorism that bluntly warned that urgent steps were needed to prevent an attack on U.S. cities.
“States, terrorists and other disaffected groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction, and some will use them,” the report said. “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.”
Hart specifically noted that the nation was vulnerable to “a weapon of mass destruction in a high-rise building.”
Little, however, was done. Between a news media that still obsessed over “Clinton scandals,” such as the later debunked stories of his aides “trashing” the White House, and a new Bush administration focused on domestic concerns, such as tax cuts, the warning drew scant attention.
When congressional hearings on the findings were set for early May, the Bush administration intervened to stop them, an article in the Columbia Journalism Review reported. Presumably, Bush did not want to seem behind the curve.
So, instead of embracing the Hart-Rudman findings and getting to work on the recommendations, Bush set up a White House committee, headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, to examine the issue again and submit a report in the fall.
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had joined President Clinton in creating the Hart-Rudman panel, acknowledged that Bush’s actions delayed progress. “The administration actually slowed down response to Hart-Rudman when momentum was building in the spring,” said Gingrich in an interview cited by the CJR study of press coverage of the terrorism issue.
Alarm Bells
By late spring 2001, other alarm bells were ringing.
Credible evidence of what became the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks began pouring in to U.S. intelligence agencies. "It all came together in the third week of June," said Richard Clarke, who was the White House coordinator for counter-terrorism. "The CIA's view was that a major terrorist attack was coming in the next several weeks." [See The New Yorker, Jan. 14, 2002]
The intelligence community also learned that two suspected terrorists had penetrated the United States, but the FBI could not find them.
As these dangers grew, Bush focused not on terrorism but on stem-cell research and other domestic issues that played well with his Christian Right allies. Bush took off the month of August for a working vacation that interspersed relaxation on his Texas ranch with his speech on stem-cell policy and trips to non-coastal cities to praise "heartland" values.
Former Sen. Hart tried to rekindle interest in what he viewed as the pressing threat of terrorism. On Sept, 6, he went to the White House for a meeting with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and urged the White House to move faster. Rice agreed to pass on Hart’s concerns to higher-ups.
Five days later, despite all the warnings, Bush and his administration were caught flatfooted. Two of America’s greatest landmarks were leveled, with thousands of people killed. For the first time in history, the Pentagon was attacked and partially destroyed.
After the attacks, however, the nation rallied around Bush. He won praise for unleashing the U.S. military against Afghanistan and pulling together a coalition that backed the war. Ironically, the attacks that his administration had done nothing to stop boosted Bush’s approval ratings to historically high levels.
God’s Will
The news media’s praise for Bush was unbridled. On Dec. 23, 2001, for instance, NBC’s Tim Russert joined New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and First Lady Laura Bush in ruminating about whether divine intervention had put Bush in the White House to handle this crisis.
Russert asked Mrs. Bush if “in an extraordinary way, this is why he was elected.” Mrs. Bush disagreed with Russert’s suggestion that “God picks the president, which he doesn’t.”
Giuliani thought otherwise. “I do think, Mrs. Bush, that there was some divine guidance in the president being elected. I do,” the mayor said.
McCarrick also saw some larger purpose. “I think I don't thoroughly agree with the first lady. I think that the president really, he was where he was when we needed him,” the cardinal said.
Theologically speaking, it was less clear why God didn’t simply let Bush actually be elected, rather than having him get a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to stop the vote count in Florida - or why God didn’t give Bush the foresight to act on the Hart-Rudman warnings so he could thwart the terrorist attacks altogether.
More mundane realities can explain Bush’s subsequent failure in squandering an unparalleled opportunity to take decisive action against some of the root causes that have fed - and will continue to feed - terrorism. The hard fact is that Bush, weighed down with political and ideological baggage, missed the moment.
Bush's New War Lies
Sept. 10, 2003
In a healthy democracy, the grave act of going to war wouldn't be justified under false pretenses and false impressions. Plus, government officials responsible for spreading false rationales wouldn't be allowed to slide away from the first batch of lies and distortions to begin offering a new set of slippery excuses.
But the United States is not a healthy democracy at this time. It is dominated by a politician who chooses to manipulate rather than lead; who would rather trick the people into following him than engage them in a meaningful debate; who has demonstrated such a shallow regard for democracy that he took office despite losing the national popular vote and then only by blocking a full counting of ballots in one key state.
A healthy democracy wouldn't put up with this trifling of the people's will. But in today's United States, there appears to be little shame in gullibility. Indeed, for some, it is a mark of patriotism. Others just act oblivious to their duties as citizens to be informed about even basic facts, even when the consequences are as severe as those of wartime.
This sad state of affairs was highlighted in a new Washington Post poll, which found that seven in 10 Americans still believe that Iraq's ousted leader Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks although U.S. investigators have found no evidence of a connection.
As the Post notes, this widely held public misperception explains why many Americans continue to support the U.S. occupation of Iraq even as the other principal casus belli - trigger-ready weapons of mass destruction - has collapsed. [Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2003.]
Bush’s Speech
The search for Iraq’s WMD apparently has become such a farce that George W. Bush barely mentioned it during his nationally televised speech on Sunday.
He slipped into the past tense in saying the former regime “possessed and used weapons of mass destruction,” without attaching a year or a decade to his statement. Iraq’s alleged use of chemical weapons dates back to the 1980s and its possession of effective WMD may have ended in the 1990s, according to some information that U.S. intelligence has received from former senior Iraqi officials.
While downplaying the WMD case, however, Bush continued to work the subliminal connection between the 9/11 murders and Iraq.
Indeed, after listening to Bush on Sunday juxtapose references to the 9/11 murders, their al-Qaeda perpetrators and Iraq, it shouldn't be surprising how seven out of 10 Americans got the wrong idea. It's pretty clear that Bush intended them to get the wrong idea. In speech after speech, Bush has sought to create public confusion over these connections.
Though no Iraqis were involved in the terror attacks two years ago - and though Osama bin Laden and most of the attackers were Saudis - Bush and his top aides routinely have inserted references about Iraq and the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the same paragraphs. They often used unsubstantiated assertions that Iraq was sharing or planning to share WMD with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda as the connection.
That practice of blending Sept. 11 with Iraq continued into Bush's speech Sunday night defending the U.S. occupation of Iraq and asking for $87 billion more to pay for it. "Since America put out the fires of September the 11th, and mourned our dead, and went to war, history has taken a different turn," Bush said. "We have carried the fight to the enemy."
Given that Iraq was the context of the speech, a casual listener would assume that Iraq attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and the United States was simply hitting back. An average American, who wasn't steeped in the facts of the Middle East, would be left with the impression that Saddam Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda were allies.
The reality is that Hussein and bin Laden were bitter rivals. Hussein ran a secular state that brutally suppressed the Islamic fundamentalism that drives al-Qaeda. Indeed, many of the atrocities committed by Hussein's government were done to suppress Islamic fundamentalists, particularly from Iraq's large Shia population.
Bin Laden despised Hussein as an "infidel" who was repressing bin Laden’s supporters and corrupting the Islamic world with Western ways.
Bush History
Other inconvenient facts that Bush has left out of all his speeches about Iraq include that his father, George H.W. Bush, was one of the U.S. officials in the 1980s who was assisting and encouraging Hussein in his bloody war with Iran to contain the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.
The younger Bush also doesn't mention that the CIA and its allies in Pakistani intelligence - not Iraqis - were involved in training al-Qaeda fundamentalists in the arts of explosives and other skills useful to terrorists. That was part of the U.S. covert operation against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Bush also trusts that the American people will have forgotten that other little embarrassment of the Iran-Contra Affair, when the elder Bush and President Reagan were involved in a secret policy of shipping missiles to Iran's government. At the time, Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist regime was designated a terrorist state by the U.S. government.
Nor does the public hear much about how the U.S. government taught the dictators of Saudi Arabia techniques of suppressing political dissent to keep that oil-rich kingdom in pro-U.S. hands. Saudi leaders also financed Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East as part of the Saudi strategy for buying protection for their dictatorial powers.
Out of this mix of repression and corruption emerged an embittered Osama bin Laden, a scion of a leading Saudi family who turned against his former patrons.
If Americans knew more about this convoluted history, they might draw a very different conclusion than the one George W. Bush wants them to draw. Rather than seeing black-hatted villains who need a taste of Bush's Western-style justice, the American people might conclude that Bush's father and other top U.S. officials were at least as implicated in supporting Osama bin Laden and other international terrorists as Saddam Hussein was.
Indeed, if the full history were known, Hussein might appear less like a rogue leader than a U.S. client who was useful during his violent rise to power but then went awry. Not only did the CIA collaborate with Hussein's Baathist Party as a bulwark against communism in the 1960s and 1970s, but Hussein personally sought U.S. advice at key moments from the 1980s to as late as 1990.
In ordering invasions of two neighboring countries - Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 - Hussein may well have believed he had received "green lights" from the United States. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Missing U.S.-Iraq History [6]."]
U.S. intelligence also understood the implausibility of Hussein sharing WMD with his arch Islamic fundamentalist rivals. A year ago, a CIA assessment was released acknowledging this reality.
The CIA told Congress that Hussein would not share weapons of mass destruction with Islamic terrorists unless he saw a U.S. invasion as inevitable. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Misleading the Nation to War [7]."]
In seeking to manipulate U.S. public opinion now, however, the Bush administration has done all it can to "lose" this history and these nuances. With a few exceptions, the U.S. news media has gone along, as journalists appear more interested in proving their "patriotism" - and keeping their high-paying jobs - than telling the full story.
The American people have been fed a steady diet of false impressions and misleading arguments.
New Half Truths
Now, as the bloody reality of conquering Iraq intrudes on the pre-war fantasies of happy Iraqis showering U.S. troops with rose petals, the administration's misleading rhetoric has switched from exaggerating the danger posed by Saddam Hussein's government to exaggerating the gains attributable to the invasion.
New half-truths and lies are quickly replacing the old ones, lest Americans begin to wonder how they got fooled by the earlier bogus rationales. In Bush's speech Sunday night, he highlighted two of these new arguments for a long-term military occupation of Iraq.
One of the new reasons is that the resistance to the U.S. occupation can be attributed to two groups - die-hard Hussein loyalists and foreign terrorists slipping into Iraq.
"Some of the attackers are members of the old Saddam regime who fled the battlefield and now fight in the shadows," Bush said. "Some of the attackers are foreign terrorists who have come to Iraq to pursue their war on America and other free nations."
But what Bush leaves out is that there is a third force in Iraq: nationalist Iraqis who resent foreign occupation of their country. Many of them had no fondness for Hussein and may have welcomed the overthrow of the brutal dictator.
Some of these nationalists may have served in Iraq's army while others appear to be young Iraqis who have begun fighting the U.S. occupation of Iraq much as young Palestinians have battled the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Other Iraqi fighters may be driven by revenge for the thousands of Iraqis killed in the U.S. invasion.
This likelihood of widespread resistance was known by Bush and his advisers before the war. "U.S. intelligence agencies warned Bush administration policymakers before the war in Iraq that there would be significant armed opposition to a U.S.-led occupation, according to administration and congressional sources familiar with the reports," the Washington Post reported on Sept. 9, 2003.
But this information shared the fate of other facts that didn’t support Bush’s propaganda themes. It disappeared. The American people now are supposed to believe that the resistance is only a mixture of Saddam "dead-enders" and "foreign terrorists."
The second new myth is that by killing "terrorists" in Iraq and elsewhere, the U.S. homeland will be made safer. "The surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans," Bush said Sunday night. "We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities."
While this argument is another not-so-subtle appeal to the residual fears from Sept. 11, 2001, and America's hunger for revenge, it is not a logical formulation. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that killing Iraqis and other Middle Easterners in Iraq won't incite other people to attack Americans in the United States or elsewhere. Indeed, many savvy U.S. military analysts expect just such a response as revenge for the deaths inflicted by Bush's invasion of Iraq.
It also is clear that Bush still is resisting the time-tested lessons of counterinsurgency — that blunt force is no more likely to achieve peace than is abject cowardice, that peace and security are achieved through a combination of factors: a measured application of force combined with a sensible strategy for achieving political justice and economic improvements.
History also teaches that there are limits of national power no matter how noble a cause might be, that in geopolitics as in personal lives, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.
In Bush’s televised speech, however, he presented the ongoing war as a choice of weakness or strength, good or evil, with no sense of the subtleties of history or the gray areas of past diplomacy. "We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness," Bush said.
P.R. Tricks
Beyond the speech, the Bush administration has issued reports that engage in such obvious P.R. tricks that they must assume the American people have the sophistication of pre-schoolers.
For instance, to commemorate Aug. 8, the 100th day since Bush donned his flight suit and celebrated "mission accomplished," the White House released a report entitled "Results in Iraq: 100 Days Toward Security and Freedom." The paper, which offered 10 reasons in 10 categories to support the thesis, declared "substantial progress is being made on all fronts."
The artificial construct, requiring 10 reasons in each of the 10 categories, led to much stretching of facts and some repetition of examples. For instance, Reason No. 9 under "signs of cultural rebirth" used a quote from a member of Baghdad's city council declaring that "if you want to civilize society, you must care about education." The same trite-and-true quote crops up again three pages later as another example in another category.
But more significantly, the report repeats much of the elliptical reasoning and selective intelligence used before the war to exaggerate Iraq's WMD threat and to connect Iraq with al-Qaeda.
"Saddam Hussein's regime posed a threat to the security of the United States and the world," the report asserts. "The old Iraqi regime defied the international community and 17 U.N. resolutions for 12 years and gave every indication that it would never disarm and never comply with the just demands of the world."
There is no acknowledgment in the report that U.S. troops have failed to find any WMD. Nor is there any reference to the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors, such as Hans Blix, believed that Iraq was demonstrating greater compliance in the weeks before the U.S. invasion, or that the invasion was carried out in defiance of a majority on the U.N. Security Council.
The White House report also continues to use selective information to support the administration's case, while leaving out contrary facts or a fuller context.
For instance, the report states that "a senior al-Qaeda terrorist, now detained, who had been responsible for al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, reports that al-Qaeda was intent on obtaining WMD assistance from Iraq." The report leaves out the fact that nothing resulted from this overture.
The report also repeats the story that an al-Qaeda associate, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, went to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, but leaves out that no evidence has surfaced that the Iraqi government was aware of his presence or cooperated with him.
Similarly, the report notes that "a safe haven in Iraq belonging to Ansar al-Islam - a terrorist group closely associated with Zarqawi and al-Qaeda - was destroyed during Operation Iraqi Freedom." Left out is that the Ansar al-Islam base was in a northern section of Iraq that was outside the control of the Baghdad government and under the protection of a U.S. no-fly zone.
But the report, like Bush's Sunday speech, is just another indication that the administration never wanted a real debate about its war policy in Iraq. The goal has always been to tilt the evidence - often with a dose of public abuse for anyone who asks too many questions - so the American people can be herded like sheep into Bush's desired direction.
Weakened Democracy
As the nation plunges deeper into a costly and bloody war, there is little about this process that resembles a healthy - or even meaningful - democracy. Though Bush claims that his goal is to bring democracy to Iraq, he apparently thinks very little of the process at home. Rather than invite a full debate, he tries to rig the process to manufacture consent.
Bush's contempt for an informed electorate on the issue of war in the Middle East also doesn't stand alone. In December 2000, his respect for democracy didn't even extend to the basic principle that in a democracy, the candidate with the most votes wins.
Not only did Bush lose the popular vote to Al Gore by more than a half million ballots, Bush blocked a full and fair counting of votes in Florida for the simple reason that he was afraid of losing. Instead, he ran to his father's powerful friends on the U.S. Supreme Court and got them to shut down the troublesome recount, which had been ordered by the state supreme court. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "So Bush Did Steal the White House [8]."]
But Bush is only partly to blame for this steep decline in American democratic traditions and for the nation’s stumble into the dangerous quicksand of a Middle East occupation.
As in any democracy - even a troubled one - it remains the ultimate responsibility of the people to shoulder the burden of citizenship, which includes getting the facts and acting on them. That responsibility also demands that the people hold politicians accountable when they lead the country to war with lies and distortions.
9/11's Dark Window to the Future
Sept. 11, 2006
As the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks unfolds, it has come to look less like a sad remembrance of the past and more like a troubling glimpse into the future, a window to a new-age totalitarianism that looms before the United States, where a powerful right-wing government tells lies aided and abetted by friendly media corporations.
So, even as the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee finally acknowledge some of the many Iraq War falsehoods told by George W. Bush and his senior advisers, Bush's misfeasance and malfeasance are obscured by Disney's ABC-TV "docu-drama" pinning most of the blame for the 9/11 catastrophe not on Bush, but on Democrats.
With Disney's selection of a right-wing director and with the secrecy that surrounded the project - that gave Democrats little time to react - "The Path to 9/11" also had the sickening feel of a collaboration between a giant corporation and the Republican government in power.
So, less than two months before a pivotal national election, with Americans increasingly wondering how the nation got into the mess it faces today, this joint project of Disney and pro-Bush operatives provides a narrative that focuses not on Bush blowing off CIA warnings of an impending attacks in 2001 but on events dating back to 1993.
"The Path to 9/11," which ABC touted as a public service shown "with no commercial interruptions," makes some of its right-wing judgments with sneering asides from characters, such as wondering if Attorney General Janet Reno had "any balls," and others by mixing real and fabricated events to put Democrats in the worst possible light.
When the mysterious project finally was unveiled to mainstream media reviewers and when Democrats started complaining about fabricated scenes, the right-wing media responded with a counter-attack accusing the protesting Democrats of threatening the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.
In other words, at a time when Republicans control the White House, the Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and increasingly the American media, the Democrats still get transformed into the ones threatening free speech, for protesting their harsh and at times false depiction in events that led to the deaths of almost 3,000 people.
Looking Forward
Media manipulation also appears likely to play a major part in the Republican strategy for beating back Democratic challenges in the Nov. 7 election. In the eight weeks ahead, Republicans can be expected to exploit their financial and media advantages to wage personal attacks against Democratic challengers, district by district, state by state.
About four months ago, a Republican political operative told me about this strategy to "disqualify" Democratic candidates through a combination of negative research, called "oppo," and the timely dissemination of attack lines to conservative allies in the local and national media. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Why Democrats Lose [9].]
The pattern first surfaced in a special congressional election near San Diego, where Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham had resigned over a lobbying-bribery scandal and gone to prison.
To succeed Cunningham, the Republicans boldly put up a professional lobbyist, Brian Bilbray, while Democrats chose Francine Busby, who was counseled by Democratic consultants to avoid controversial Democratic positions in a traditionally Republican district. Democrats felt that Cunningham’s disgrace would be enough to guarantee success.
Indeed, despite a lackluster campaign, Busby appeared headed for victory. But then she blurted out to a mostly Latino audience that "you don't need papers for voting," hastily clarifying her meaning to say "you don't need to be a registered voter to help."
Conservative radio and TV talk show hosts across southern California seized on Busby's verbal slip and began accusing her of urging illegal immigrants to vote. Busby then spent the last several days of the campaign apologizing and backtracking before losing by about four percentage points. [Washington Post, June 7, 2006]
In explaining Busby's defeat, some Democratic activists raised suspicions that the election had been stolen by Republican vote fraud (though no hard evidence materialized). National Democratic consultants also pointed to the fact that the Republican Congressional Committee pumped more than $4.5 million into the district.
But whatever the truth, the Republicans had tested out their 2006 model for victory - and for continued one-party rule in Washington. They would exploit their advantages in finances, media and campaign tactics to prevent the Democrats from achieving a majority in either the House or Senate.
‘Defining’ Democrats
In a front-page article on Sept. 10, 2006, the Washington Post added more details about this Republican strategy: "Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said."
The Post reported that the National Republican Congressional Committee had earmarked more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget to negative advertising that would disseminate the findings of researchers who have been combing through tax and legal records searching for exploitable themes against Democrats.
"The hope is that a vigorous effort to 'define' opponents, in the parlance of GOP operatives, can help Republicans shift the midterm debate away from Iraq and limit losses this fall," the Post wrote.
An early example of the strategy has been a Republican ad directed against physician Steve Kagen, a Democratic congressional candidate in Wisconsin who is being labeled "Dr. Millionaire" because over the years his allergy clinic has sued 80 patients, mostly for unpaid bills.
Against inexperienced or little-known Democratic candidates, "it will take one or two punches to fold them up like a cheap suit," Republican strategist Matt Keelen told the Post. [Washington Post, Sept. 19, 2006]
The Republicans also have a huge advantage because their negative themes reverberate through a giant right-wing media megaphone that extends from the national level down to the states and districts, where Republicans have identified specific hosts on local right-wing radio stations and friendly newspaper editors.
I was told that Republican operatives have an apparatus to electronically communicate instantaneous talking points to these local media outlets, promoting "bad votes" or exploitable quotes from individual Democratic candidates. Republicans will be putting negative spins on Democratic candidates before the Democrats can even reach a microphone.
The Left’s Failure
By contrast, the Democratic response mechanism - concentrated mostly on personal Internet sites and under-funded Air America Radio stations - is amateurish and relatively slow. Much of it depends on volunteers with day jobs finding time to do a little blogging.
While the Right has built up its media machinery over three decades, spending billions of dollars and integrating its media with its political operations, the Left has invested sparingly on media and focused mostly on "grassroots organizing."
In effect, the Left counted on the mainstream news media to provide the necessary information and thus ceded control of the national narrative, while the Right created its own narrative and aggressively pressured the mainstream media to go along, labeling any out-of-step journalists as "liberal."
The consequences of these two competing strategies cannot be overstated. Beyond enabling the Right to build a political following with consistent messages day in and day out, its media machine gives the Right enormous advantages at key moments, such as during a run-up to war or in the weeks before an election.
Increasingly, too, the mainstream media finds itself under the influence of the Right's narrative and under pressure to accept the Right's "facts." Individual journalists may first bend their coverage to the Right to avoid the career-threatening "liberal" label but often even that doesn't work.
Eventually, targeted news personalities, such as Dan Rather, get weeded out and replaced with unthreatening ciphers, like Katie Couric, who, in turn, put opinion segments on the CBS Evening News that range from Thomas L. Friedman, an Iraq War hawk with some second thoughts, to Rush Limbaugh, an Iraq War hawk with no second thoughts.
In another sign of the times, Disney, which has faced right-wing attacks for supposed tolerance of homosexuality and for some executives who have contributed to Democrats, turned to a Limbaugh friend, Cyrus Nowrasteh, to direct its docu-drama on 9/11.
Disney saw little downside in promoting a favorite right-wing theme - blaming the 9/11 attacks on Democratic President Bill Clinton - despite the evidence that Clinton took the al-Qaeda threat much more seriously than did Bush, who famously brushed aside warnings from the CIA and downplayed terrorism in his first eight months in office.
As another favor to the Right - and as proof that the motive wasn't financial - Disney's ABC-TV presented its anti-Clinton mini-series without commercial breaks. It is inconceivable that Disney or any media corporation would give similar treatment to a TV special that worked as hard to put Bush in an unfavorable light.
Fake Testimony
On a smaller scale but also instructive, right-wing operatives continue to spread a disinformation campaign that has doctored Iran-Contra testimony to have former White House aide Oliver North prophetically describing his concerns about terrorist Osama bin Laden in 1987 - while Democrats, supposedly including then-Sen. Al Gore, behave cluelessly.
Over the past five years, I have been asked about this supposed North testimony at least a dozen times. Heading into the 9/11 anniversary, the North "testimony" was circulating again, distributed widely across the Internet as further "evidence" of Republican farsightedness and Democratic fecklessness.
But North did not cite concerns about bin Laden in 1987, when bin Laden was actually a U.S. ally receiving military assistance from the Reagan administration to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. North's concerns were about another terrorist, named Abu Nidal. Sen. Gore also wasn't on the Iran-Contra committee.
Yet, this bogus history - much like the Disney docu-drama and Bush's longstanding lies about Iraq - are combining in big ways and small to create an Orwellian future for the American people.
Internationally, Bush has outlined an endless war against the vague concept of "Islamic fascists" with the underlying reality that the United States is committing itself to a bloody "World War III" against many of the world's one billion Muslims.
At home, Karl Rove and other Republican strategists project what effectively will be a one-party state, with the Republicans controlling all branches of government, using the federal courts to redefine the Constitution and keeping Democrats around as foils and boogey men to stir up the conservative base with warnings about the enemy within.
On this fifth anniversary of 9/11, President Bush and his Republican supporters are trying hard to revive the lost sentimental unity that followed the attacks. But the saddest legacy of that tragic day may be that it marked the path toward the end of the noble American Republic and the start of a new totalitarianism.
Did al-Qaeda Succeed?
Sept. 11, 2008
Ten years after the neoconservatives laid out plans for permanent U.S. global dominance - and seven years after the brutal 9/11 attacks gave them the opening to carry out those plans - the neocons instead have guided the United States onto the shoals of a political/military disaster and the prospect of rapid decline.
This grim result from the neocons' overreach is an unstated subtext of the U.S. intelligence community's project for assessing the world in 2025, a point 17 years into the future when the United States is likely to have lost its current world dominance, according to a preview [10] offered by the government's top intelligence analyst.
Speaking at a Sept. 4 conference in Orlando, Florida, Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said the United States might still be "the preeminent power" in 2025, but that "American dominance will be much diminished."
Further, Fingar projected that the United States would see the greatest declines in the most important areas of global influence, the economic and the cultural, while likely maintaining military supremacy, which would be of lesser importance.
"The overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military," Fingar said.
"But part of the argument here is that by 15 years from now, the military dimension will remain the most preeminent [but] will be the least significant - or much less significant than it is now."
In other words, U.S. intelligence is looking toward a future in which the United States may serve as the world's policeman, but without the more subtle and profitable influence that comes from economic, cultural and political strength - known as "soft power."
Though Fingar did not tie the "accelerating" erosion of American power to the policies of the neocons and the Bush administration, it is hard to avoid that conclusion.
In 1998, the neocons were unveiling their Project for the New American Century with its vision of never-ending U.S. global dominance. When potential threats did arise, the neocons argued, the United States must react with "preemptive wars," striking before a rival could pose a serious threat.
After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush embraced these neocon theories, vowing to not just exact revenge on the 9/11 perpetrators but to wage a "global war on terrorism" with the ultimate goal of eradicating "evil" itself.
Quick Pivot
So, after invading Afghanistan and blasting al-Qaeda base camps, Bush made a quick pivot toward Iraq to fulfill the neocon dream of eliminating Saddam Hussein, a longtime thorn in Washington’s side.
The U.S. occupation of Iraq also would establish an American military outpost "East of Suez," projecting U.S. power into the region, guaranteeing access to its oil and protecting Israel from its Muslim neighbors.
However, the neocons' neocolonial strategy foundered on the rocks of Iraq's violent resistance and sectarian warfare. More than five years into the conflict, about 140,000 American troops are tied down in Iraq while a force of about 30,000 U.S. troops finds itself facing worsening security in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders not only survived the U.S. retaliatory strikes after 9/11 but exploited the Bush administration's obsession with Iraq to reestablish themselves inside Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country.
The damage to U.S. interests also extends beyond the war zones. The military adventures are putting the U.S. government more than $1 trillion deeper into debt, drawing away resources that the United States desperately needs to retool its industries, develop alternative energy sources and improve its education, infrastructure and health care.
Plus, the neocon hubris about American dominance has alienated much of the world's population, squandering goodwill built up since World War II. Instead of the nation that established the Nuremberg principles and wrote the United Nations Charter, the United States is seen as the country of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and torture.
In almost every corner of the globe - and especially in strategic regions such as Europe and the Middle East - respect for the United States as a beacon of political freedom and international progress has fallen to historic lows.
While the rest of the world appears eager to get on with expanded commerce and technological competition, the United States looks like it can't stop clumsily throwing its military weight around, amid chants of "USA, USA."
So, as U.S. intelligence continues work on its projections for 2025, the nation finds itself at a crossroads. It can give the neocons around John McCain another four-year lease on the White House - so they can keep doing what they've been doing - or the country can take another direction.
As Fingar made clear in his Sept. 4 speech, the future of 2025 is not yet set in stone. It is only the intelligence community's best estimate based on current dynamics. If those dynamics change, so can the future.
Still, it appears that if al-Qaeda's motive in attacking New York and Washington on 9/11 was to bait the United States into self-destructive actions in the Middle East and thus undermine America's position in the world, bin Laden and his associates may have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
The Real Lessons of 9/11
Sept. 11, 2009
On this eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it's worth reflecting on how even a mildly competent U.S. President might have prevented the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and drove the United States into a spasm of revenge that has wasted untold blood and treasure.
The evidence of George W. Bush's incompetence has emerged from official investigations, court cases and memoirs from key insiders but often has attracted less attention than the speculative arguments from conspiracy theorists about the 9/11 attacks being "an inside job."
Ironically, it was the evidence of Bush's stunning incompetence that gave momentum to the so-called "9/11 truth movement," which argued that the U.S. government couldn't be that inept and that therefore the Bush administration must have been complicit in the attacks.
That assumption then gave rise to a cottage industry of bizarre theories - such as "no plane hit the Pentagon" and “the Twin Towers were destroyed by controlled demolitions” - claims that have invited debunking by scientists and engineers and thus obscured a more important truth: that by 2001 a dangerous confluence of political factors had carried the United States to a place where Bush's swaggering bluster and neoconservative ideology were positioned to exploit the nation’s fear and anger with disastrous results.
The real lesson learned from 9/11 perhaps should be that rational behavior and competence matter - and that their willful rejection by a major political party (in this case, the Republicans), a sizable portion of the U.S. news media, and a large chunk of the American electorate - can have devastating consequences for the nation and the world.
That is a lesson which also remains relevant today as right-wing extremists continue their takeover of the Republican Party with the help of a powerful right-wing media machine.
Despite electoral reversals in 2006 and 2008, the Republicans seem bound to Bush's true legacy - the notion that words can reshape reality as long as you have a big enough media megaphone to shout out and repeat the distortions.
And, to a surprising degree, "the 9/11 truth movement" shared a common interest with the Bush administration - both groups needed to dismiss the evidence of Bush's incompetence, albeit for different reasons.
Bush's backers understood that incompetence was the President's Achilles's heel as would be revealed in the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in summer 2005 and from his inept management of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The "truthers" also had a stake in ignoring the evidence of Bush's incompetence, since their theories were dependent on the notion that Bush and his team were evil masterminds who had pulled off and then concealed the most audacious conspiracy in world history.
An Arrogant Buffoon?
The acceptance of the alternative interpretation - that Bush was an arrogant buffoon who rejected warnings about al-Qaeda terrorism in part because President Bill Clinton thought the issue was important - would have undermined both the Bush administration's bid for a second term and "the 9/11 truth movement."
So the Bush team tried to conceal many of the embarrassing facts and went on the attack against insiders - like ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke - who pulled aside the curtain on internal White House workings.
The administration's foot-dragging and name-calling kept much of the strongest evidence of incompetence under wraps until after Election 2004. In the years that followed, however, more and more evidence spilled out.
For instance, during the penalty phase of al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui's trial, it was revealed that FBI agent Harry Samit, who interrogated Moussaoui weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, sent 70 warnings to his superiors about suspicions that Moussaoui had been taking flight training in Minnesota because he was planning to hijack a plane for a terrorist operation.
But FBI officials in Washington showed "criminal negligence" in blocking requests for a search warrant on Moussaoui's computer or taking other preventive action, Samit testified at the court hearing on March 20, 2006.
Samit's futile warnings matched the frustrations of other federal agents in Minnesota and Arizona who had gotten wind of al-Qaeda's scheme to train pilots for operations in the United States.
For instance, FBI headquarters blew off a prescient memo from an FBI agent in the Phoenix field office. The July 2001 memo warned of the "possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama Bin Laden" to send student pilots to the United States. The agent noted "an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest" attending American flight schools.
CIA Warnings
Separate from the FBI field agents, CIA analysts were piecing the same puzzle together from tips, intercepts and other scraps of information.
By July 10, senior CIA counterterrorism officials, including Cofer Black, had collected a body of intelligence that they presented to CIA Director George Tenet, as Tenet recounted in his 2007 memoir, At the Center of the Storm.
"The briefing [Black] gave me literally made my hair stand on end," Tenet wrote. "When he was through, I picked up the big white secure phone on the left side of my desk - the one with a direct line to [National Security Adviser] Condi Rice - and told her that I needed to see her immediately to provide an update on the al-Qa'ida threat."
After reaching the White House, a CIA briefer, identified in the book only as Rich B., started his presentation by saying: "There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months!"
Rich B. then displayed a chart showing "seven specific pieces of intelligence gathered over the past 24 hours, all of them predicting an imminent attack," Tenet wrote. The briefer presented another chart with "the more chilling statements we had in our possession through intelligence."
These comments included a mid-June statement by Osama bin Laden to trainees about an attack in the near future; talk about decisive acts and a "big event"; and fresh intelligence about predictions of "a stunning turn of events in the weeks ahead," Tenet wrote.
Rich B. told Rice that the attack will be "spectacular" and designed to inflict heavy casualties against U.S. targets, Tenet wrote.
"Attack preparations have been made," Rich B. said about al-Qaeda's plans. "Multiple and simultaneous attacks are possible, and they will occur with little or no warning."
When Rice asked what needed to be done, the CIA's Black responded, "This country needs to go on a war footing now."
The CIA officials sought approval for broad covert-action authority that had been languishing since March, Tenet wrote.
Despite the July 10 briefing, other senior Bush administration officials pooh-poohed the seriousness of the al-Qaeda threat. Two leading neoconservatives at the Pentagon - Stephen Cambone and Paul Wolfowitz - suggested that the CIA might be falling for a disinformation campaign, Tenet wrote.
But the evidence of an impending attack continued to pour in. At one CIA meeting in late July, Tenet wrote that Rich B. told senior officials bluntly, "they're coming here," a declaration that was followed by stunned silence.
Bush Warned
On Aug. 6, 2001, more than a month before the attacks, the CIA had enough evidence to send Bush a top-secret Presidential Daily Briefing paper, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US." It was handed to Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he was on a month-long vacation after a half year on the job.
The CIA told Bush about "threat reporting" that indicated bin Laden wanted "to hijack a US aircraft." The CIA also cited a call that had been made to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 "saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives."
The PDB noted that "FBI information ... indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related."
Bush apparently was not pleased by the CIA's intrusion on his vacation nor with the report's lack of specific targets and dates. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, "All right, you've covered your ass," according to an account in author Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine., which relied heavily on senior CIA officials.
"The system was blinking red," Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission.
In his memoir, Tenet described a special trip he took to Crawford later in August 2001 to get Bush to focus on an imminent threat of a spectacular al-Qaeda attack.
"A few weeks after the Aug. 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the President stayed current on events," Tenet wrote. "This was my first visit to the ranch. I remember the President graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna, none of which were native to Queens," where Tenet had grown up.
Tenet's trip to Crawford - like the July 10 meeting with Rice and the Aug. 6 briefing paper for Bush - failed to shock the administration out of its lethargy. While Tenet and Bush made small talk about "the flora and the fauna," al-Qaeda operatives put the finishing touches on their plans.
Bush's Justice Department and FBI headquarters were in the loop on the CIA reporting, but still didn't reach out to their agents around the country, some of whom, it turned out, were frantically trying to get the attention of their superiors in Washington.
Then-acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard told the 9/11 Commission that he discussed the intelligence threat reports with FBI special agents in a conference call on July 19, 2001. But Pickard said the focus was on having "evidence response teams" ready to respond quickly in the event of an attack.
Pickard "did not task field offices to try to determine whether any plots were being considered within the United States or to take any action to disrupt any such plots," according to the 9/11 Commission's report.
It wasn't until Sept. 4 - a week before 9/11 - when senior Bush administration officials, including Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "finally reconvened in the White House Situation Room" to discuss counterterrorism plans "that had been lingering unresolved all summer long," Tenet wrote in his memoir.
Averting 9/11
While it will never be known conclusively whether a different reaction by Bush and his national security team could have disrupted the 9/11 attacks, a variety of options were available.
Counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke said the 9/11 attacks might have been averted if Bush had shown some initiative in "shaking the trees" by having high-level officials from the FBI, CIA, Customs and other federal agencies go back to their bureaucracies and demand any information about the terrorist threat.
If they had, they might well have found the memos from the FBI agents in Arizona and Minnesota. They also might have exploited the information that two known al-Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawar al-Hazmi, had entered the United States. On Sept. 11, they boarded American Airlines Flight 77 and helped fly it into the Pentagon.
In his book, Against All Enemies, Clarke contrasted President Bill Clinton's urgency over the intelligence warnings that preceded the Millennium events with the lackadaisical approach of Bush and his national security team.
"In December 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al-Qaeda attacks," Clarke said in an interview about his book. "President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks.
"Every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.
"Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the President ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No." [CNN's "Larry King Live," March 24, 2004]
In a March 19, 2006, speech in Florida, former Vice President Al Gore also noted this contrast between how the Clinton administration reacted to terrorist threats and how the Bush administration did in the weeks before Sept. 11.
"In eight years in the White House, President Clinton and I, a few times, got a direct and really immediate statement like that [Aug. 6, 2001 warning], in one of those daily briefings," Gore said.
"Every time, as you would want and expect, we had a fire drill, brought everybody in, [asked] what else do we know about this, what have we done to prepare for this, what else could we do, are we certain of the sources, get us more information on that, we want to know everything about this, and we want to make sure our country is prepared.
"In August of 2001," Gore added, "such a clear warning was given and nothing - nothing - happened. When there is no vision, the people perish."
Other Priorities
In his book, Clarke offered other examples of pre-9/11 mistakes by the Bush administration, including a downgrading in importance of the counterterrorism office, a shifting of budget priorities, an obsession with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and an emphasis on conservative ideological issues, such as Ronald Reagan's Star Wars missile defense program.
A more hierarchical White House structure also insulated Bush from direct contact with mid-level national security officials who had specialized on the al-Qaeda issue.
The chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission - New Jersey's former Republican Gov. Thomas Kean and former Democratic Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton - agreed that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented.
"The whole story might have been different," Kean said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on April 4, 2004. Kean cited a string of law-enforcement blunders including the "lack of coordination within the FBI" and the FBI's failure to understand the significance of Moussaoui's arrest in August 2001 while training to fly passenger jets.
Though the 9/11 Commission steered away from overt criticism of policymakers, it did note that "no CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] or other NSC [National Security Council] meeting was held to discuss the possible threat of a strike in the United States as a result of this [Aug. 6] report."
As the clock ticked down to 9/11, the Bush administration continued to have other priorities.
On Aug. 9, 2001, Bush gave a nationally televised speech on stem cells, delivering his judgment permitting federal funding for research on 60 preexisting stem-cell lines, but barring government support for work on any other lines of stem cells derived from human embryos.
On side trips from his August vacation, Bush also made forays to Middle American cities that Bush said represented "heartland values" and the basic decency of Americans. Some residents living near the Atlantic and Pacific oceans viewed the hype about "heartland values" as a not-so-subtle snub at the so-called "blue" coastal states that favored Al Gore.
Despite the Sept. 4, 2001, meeting of senior Bush aides to review the counterterrorism initiatives that had been languishing since March, the administration still didn't seem moved by the urgency of the moment.
On Sept. 6, 2001, Rumsfeld threatened a presidential veto of a proposal by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, seeking to transfer money from strategic missile defense to counterterrorism.
Also on Sept. 6, former Sen. Gary Hart, who had co-chaired a commission on terrorism, was again trying to galvanize the Bush administration into showing some urgency about the threat. Hart met with Rice and urged the White House to move faster. Rice agreed to pass on Hart's concerns to higher-ups.
Leadership Vacuum
Yet, if President Bush had demanded action from on high, the ripple effect through the FBI might well have jarred loose enough of the pieces to make the overall picture suddenly clear, especially in view of the information already compiled by the CIA.
Ironically, that is almost the same argument that federal prosecutors made in unsuccessfully seeking Moussaoui's execution, rather than life imprisonment. It's not that he was directly involved in the Sept. 11 plot, the prosecutors said; it's that the government might have been able to stop the attacks if he had immediately confessed what he was up to.
In effect, the Bush administration was demanding Moussaoui's death on the notion that the failure to do something that might have prevented the tragedy of Sept. 11 should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
However, the Bush administration took almost the opposite position on its own negligence. Bush and other senior officials insisted they had nothing to apologize for.
Indeed, Bush made the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath the centerpiece of his presidency. Arguably, he rode the whirlwind from the attacks right through the war in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq to his second term.
Only in summer 2005 - after another case of botched leadership during the Hurricane Katrina disaster - did the air whoosh out of Bush's cult-of-personality balloon. Add in the disastrous decisions around the Iraq War and many Americans began to see a pattern of arrogant, incompetent leadership that failed to heed evidence or pay attention to details.
For some Americans, however, the Bush incompetence explanation didn't go nearly far enough to explain the breathtaking lapses that preceded 9/11.
Some 9/11 "truthers" argued that the destruction of the Twin Towers and the damage to the Pentagon must have been an "inside job" with some elements of the Bush administration conspiring with the attackers to create a modern-day Reichstag Fire that would justify invading Iraq and consolidating political power at home.
But the evidence from the Moussaoui case and other investigations - as well as later admissions by al-Qaeda leaders and the absence of any first-hand witnesses describing the supposed "inside job" collaboration - all tend to support the theory of Bush’s incompetence.
Without doubt, however, even as the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were still smoldering, Bush and his neoconservative advisers decided to exploit the nation's anger and fear to implement a long-held desire for preemptive wars abroad and a crackdown on dissent at home.
And that might well be the ultimate lesson of 9/11: how unscrupulous political leaders, supported by a fawning or complicit media, can exploit a tragedy and stampede a population into disastrous miscalculations.
[For more on these topics, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a two-book set for the discount price of only $19. For details, click here. [11]]
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About author Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com [12]. It's also available at Amazon.com [13], as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
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