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COMMENTARY
May 18, 2002
Wobble wobble?
That the Bush administration had taken a hit was evident when first National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice then Vice President Dick Cheney then First Lady Laura Bush and finally her husband came out firing back. In what in retrospect must seem a remarkably stupid oversight President George W. Bush failed to publish soon after the terror strikes of Sept. 11 the small in themselves useless fragments of warning that had been collected at various U.S. intelligence posts. On the other hand neither did he broadcast the steps he had been taking in secret to deal with the threat from Osama bin Laden on the basis of just such information -- the like of which had been gathering for years. The issue of course is would anyone have been able to guess what was planned for Sept. 11 and thus prevent the strikes if all the little bits had been presented at the same time. I for one on the basis of at least some idea how the bureaucratic mind processes information frankly doubt it. It would take a Sherlock Holmes to amplify all the little dots above the background noise and then join them together. But the Holmes types shoot-up drugs and work in private digs on Baker Street in the imagination of such as Arthur Conan Doyle. They don't work for government. On the other other hand the insinuation that an American president even if he was Bill Clinton would risk the public exposure that he had known about an attack in advance and raised no finger to stop it can be left to the Oliver Stone school of late surrealist filmmaking. There will always be people who think that Franklin Delano Roosevelt let the U.S. fleet be destroyed at Pearl Harbour to get America into the war or for that matter that Jews were behind the attack on the World Trade Centre. There are drugs to help these people too but first they must want to be helped. Within a few days of the strike the President made the one simple and possible managerial decision to prevent a repetition of what he himself had long preached is the characteristic failure of large and scattered bureaucracies. He contrived to have his CIA and FBI briefings brought together so the one agency might have a clue what the other had heard or was doing. (It was the U.S. Congress which after all put the firewall between the two agencies.) He did not decide to tear both agencies to shreds guessing that their performance would not be enhanced by that method. Instead he lit fires under them. He even retained George Tenet as director of the CIA over Senate attempts to make him the fall guy: for Mr. Tenet had himself been struggling against his own agency's inertia as well as against restrictions upon its activities by the legislative branch. Why set a new broom back at the beginning of the learning curve? You probably have to become president of the United States to fully understand the limitations of the position. The modern ship of state is a very large thing powered by many million tiny vested interests. It turns very slowly no matter how quickly the captain turns the wheel. In open water it is not even in his power to sink it. From within Mr. Bush Mr. Tenet Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and many other energetic persons are doing their best to make things ship-shape and Bristol-fashion. But it can't be done in a snap. One notices for instance the lengths to which Mr. Rumsfeld had to go and the amount of political capital he had to expend just to kill a minor artillery programme that was designed for another era. The big question now is can this huge cumbersome apparatus -- not merely the vast bureaucracy but the political class that is its "guidance system" -- be made to serve such nimble tasks as the removal of several dangerously-situated Middle Eastern psychopaths? Mr. Bush may have the will but does he have the stamina or even the means to pursue "the war against terrorism" wherever it may lead? According to commentators chiefly on the American right the present President Bush is in the act of going wobbly. (It was Margaret Thatcher who girded the loins of Bush pere when he hesitated before his Iraq expedition with the remark This is no time to go wobbly, George. ) To outside appearance the world's diplomats and his own state department have got him fully enmired in the intractable swamp of Israeli-Arab relations on one side of Iraq while on the other Pakistan and India are once again threatening to go off-script with nuclear weapons. The latest jihadi hit Tuesday near Jammu involving the deaths of several dozen mostly wives and children of Indian army officers was enough to sound the alarms in the White House and worse is to come as the spring melt reopens infiltration routes from Pakistani into Indian Kashmir. There are persistent reports of Al Qaeda operatives finding sanctuary in Pakistani Kashmir and of other Islamists put under arrest being released the moment U.S. backs are turned. And once again the Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf is not quite acknowledging the gravity of the situation -- is reported by the Pakistani press to be contemplating ostentatious missile tests as an alternative to answering legitimate Indian questions -- so that the electrodes may have to be reapplied to his person once again. (Colin Powell the U.S. secretary of state last clipped them on in September.) This on top of growing evidence the Iranians are behind a major infiltration of arms and operatives into Afghanistan to fill the vacuum left by Al Qaeda. But balanced by U.S. diplomatic successes in getting co-operation from Egypt Syria Saudi Arabia and Gulf states on a variety of matters both on and off the record. And the fact Europe has ceased carping for a moment to resume the contemplation of its navel. President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld have quietly rearranged U.S. assets around Iraq and Iran to provide a shock force should one suddenly be required; but in the meantime four months after the expectations created by his "axis of evil" speech to Congress no major order has yet come down from the President to the Pentagon to prepare for anything resembling an invasion of Iraq. And suddenly the U.S. mid-term elections are approaching and with it all the domestic distractions the Democrats can throw in Mr. Bush's way. Has the President forgotten about his war on terrorism? This is what his conservative critics allege but I don't think it's the kind of thing one could forget. For even if you did happen to forget there are terrorists out there eager to remind you. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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