- – - – - – - – - – - -

Frank Rich began his career as a national security analyst by reviewing musical comedies, so I’ve never exactly hung on his every word when it comes to the war on terror. I figured last September he’d be quiet for a while and then oppose anything President Bush did, regardless of its merits. Pretty prescient, huh?

To be fair, Rich did manage to cough up some praise for the Afghanistan campaign — but only after it was over. Rich’s style, anyway, is not to make an argument. He provides a stream-of-consciousness description of recent events, filtered through the mind of an Upper West Side liberal, desperately trying to out-rad-chic his peers. His columns are hard to refute because there are no hard refutable arguments, merely a series of prejudices, or alleged correlations, or mere observations designed to appeal to people who already agree with him. When all else fails, he does the Op-Ed equivalent of yelling “Ashcroft!” in a crowded Northampton Starbucks.

But his latest series of allegations against the administration ups the ante somewhat. Some petty things can be insinuated without proof, but major charges need a little more, shall we say, evidence? Among the latest Rich assertions is a particularly arresting one. It is that the Bush administration has dreamed up a war on Iraq to solve its domestic political problems. Last month, Rich argued that “what the administration is mainly hoping is that a march on Baghdad will make us forget about Al-Qaeda, wherever it may be lying in wait. It’s not good P.R. for our war on terrorism that Islamic terrorists have been linked to eight attacks abroad since Daniel Pearl’s murder in January, including the assassination of the Afghan vice president in Kabul and the slaughter of an American diplomat, among others, at a church in Islamabad.”

Think about that for a minute. A major columnist at the New York Times is accusing the president of risking thousands of young lives in a war on Saddam and risking thousands of others by being delinquent in the battle against al-Qaida — all merely in order to buttress his domestic P.R. The evidence for Bush’s treasonous cynicism? Rich has none. He even concedes that Saddam is an “authentic genocidal monster.”

Notice too how you could make Rich’s broader point fairly. You could argue — as Brent Scowcroft has — that a war against Iraq could hurt the broader war on terror, by diverting resources. But Rich is not so polite. It’s self-evident to Rich that the presidential motive is not misguided zeal or false information or even bad judgment — but pure self-interested cynicism.

The premise for this grave accusation is the following: “We are now gearing up to fight another war that has been grandfathered into the war on terrorism.” But how can anyone seriously make such a claim? Even if you oppose the war against Saddam, it’s been a clear administration priority for the better part of a year, and it’s inextricable from its campaign against terrorism. Here’s a passage from Bush’s Sept. 20 address to Congress: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated … Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism.”

What part of that does Rich not understand? Even at the time, many on the left and right interpreted Bush’s remarks as a challenge to Saddam.

Then, in the State of the Union, the president explicitly named Iraq as one of those states that sponsor terrorism, and from the beginning, Iraq was top of the list of terrorism sponsors. Last October, the New York Times reported that “on Sept. 19 and 20, the Defense Policy Board, a prestigious bipartisan board of national security experts that advises the Pentagon, met for 19 hours to discuss the ramifications of the attacks of Sept. 11. The members of the group agreed on the need to turn to Iraq as soon as the initial phase of the war against Afghanistan and Mr. bin Laden and his organization is over, people familiar with the meetings said.” Nor was this policy ever premised on the notion of proving Iraq’s involvement in the Sept. 11 massacre.

“‘The first thing we have to do is develop some confidence that Iraq is involved in terrorist incidents against us, not meaning Sept. 11,’ [former CIA chief James Woolsey] said,” according to the Times (my italics). “Mr. Woolsey cited Iraq’s alleged involvement in the assassination attempt against former President George Bush in the spring of 1993, together with its work to develop weapons of mass destruction as terrorist acts that made them ‘a prime candidate for regime replacement.’”

Now you may agree or disagree with the idea that Iraq is a state that sponsors terrorism. You may agree or disagree that such states should be opposed or attacked. You may have all sorts of reasons to oppose a war on Saddam. But to argue that the Bush administration has never been clear about this, that it has only recently conjured up a campaign against Saddam, or that “another war” has been “grandfathered” onto an old one, is ludicrous on its face. The issue of Iraq was on the table before the campaign against the Taliban had been waged; it was on the table before Enron hit the headlines; it was on the table when Bush’s ratings were in the stratosphere; it was on the table as long ago as 1990 when Colin Powell, in the last Gulf War’s endgame, helped pave the way for our current predicament.

Does Rich know this? Of course he does. And it says a huge amount about the incoherent opposition to the war on terror that he cannot admit it.

Clinton got his warning about Islamist terrorism very early on. Almost as soon as he got into office, terrorists struck at the World Trade Center in New York. Six people were killed and hundreds injured. Although the investigation found links to Osama bin Laden and a burgeoning network of Islamist terrorists, no commensurate response from the United States was unearthed by any of the major newspapers investigating the record. Was the danger conveyed to the president? “Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it,” Leon Panetta told the New York Times. The president preferred to focus on the economy. “In retrospect, the wake-up call should have been the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,” Michael Sheehan, counter-terrorism coordinator at the Clinton State Department, conceded to the New York Times. Some immigration laws were tightened marginally. But that was it. Why wasn’t the threat taken more seriously? According to George Stephanopoulos, the White House ignored the implications of the first WTC attack because “it wasn’t a successful bombing.” Clinton never even paid a visit to the site.

If six dead and hundreds more injured were not enough to galvanize the new commander in chief, neither was the murder of 18 American soldiers in Somalia shortly afterward. The State Department confirmed that bin Laden had helped train the terrorists who killed these soldiers and dragged the body of one through the streets of Mogadishu. Clinton did nothing to retaliate after the incident, blamed Gen. Colin Powell privately for the mess and, indeed, according to administration sources, learned from the fracas only the importance of staying out of dangerous foreign entanglements. For his part, bin Laden learned that the United States was not serious about countering the public murder of its own soldiers abroad or civilians at home.

By the end of Clinton’s first term, the government began to stir. The CIA finally set up a special unit to monitor al-Qaida. In the years since 1993, the network had gained traction and organization in its African client state of Sudan. Then the administration got an amazingly lucky break. The Sudanese government offered to hand over bin Laden to the United States, just as it had handed over Carlos the Jackal to the French in 1994. The Sudanese also offered to provide the United States with a massive intelligence file on al-Qaida’s operations in Sudan and around the world. Astonishingly, the Clinton administration turned the offer down. They argued that there was no solid legal proof to indict bin Laden in the United States. This was despite the fact that internal government documents had fingered bin Laden for ties to the first WTC bombing, the murders in Mogadishu and the 1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen. For all this, the administration still viewed al-Qaida as a matter for domestic civil and criminal law enforcement. Instead of seizing the terrorist, the administration wanted Saudi Arabia or some other third party to seize him. The Saudis demurred. “In the end they said, ‘Just ask him to leave the country. Just don’t let him go to Somalia,’” a Sudanese negotiator told the Washington Post. “We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they said, ‘Let him.’” The administration didn’t even use the negotiations with the Sudanese to disable bin Laden’s financial assets in the Sudan. He was able to transfer them to his new base, where he used them essentially to buy the Taliban regime.

Within a month, al-Qaida struck again in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American soldiers with a 5,000-pound bomb. Even senior Clinton officials concede that allowing bin Laden to go free was a massive mistake. “Had we been able to roll up bin Laden then, it would have made a significant difference,” a “U.S. government official with responsibilities, then and now, in counterterrorism,” told the Washington Post last October. “We probably never would have seen a Sept. 11.” Read that sentence again: We probably never would have seen a Sept. 11. That’s from someone working in the Clinton administration.

At the same time, during his reelection campaign, Clinton’s chief political advisor, Dick Morris, was worried about the nascent public perception that Clinton was soft on terrorism. He proposed a new initiative — not because it was necessary to protect Americans, but because he feared Clinton’s record on terrorism could be a political liability in the upcoming elections. Morris devised a mock attack ad against Clinton’s anti-terrorist record to try to persuade the president to take the issue more seriously. Here’s how the New York Times described Morris’ pitch:

“‘Out of control. Two airline disasters. One linked to terrorism,’ the advertisement said. ‘F.A.A. asleep at the switch. Terror in Saudi Arabia.’ Mr. Morris said he told Mr. Clinton that he could neutralize such a line of attack by adopting tougher policies on terrorism and airport security. He said his polls had found support for tightening security and confronting terrorists. Voters favored military action against suspected terrorist installations in other countries. They backed a federal takeover of airport screening and even supported deployment of the military inside the United States to fight terrorism.”

Clinton did little that was effective. The 1996 anti-terrorism bill, while modestly helpful, was focused on domestic terrorism after Oklahoma City and was still reactive, not proactive. Its key provisions — enabling the death penalty for terrorist offenses and placing chemical tags in explosives — were very weak weapons for dealing with the real threat, al-Qaida. More was politically unnecessary. Clinton had such a commanding lead over Bob Dole that the difficulties of corralling Congress, browbeating the bureaucracy, or mounting a sustained military campaign against terrorism didn’t seem worth the effort. Notice that he was not actually constrained by public opinion. Morris’ polling had shown such measures would actually have been popular. Instead, Clinton ordered his trusty vice president to chair a commission on airline safety and security. By February 1997, it recommended a whole slew of proposals, including a federalized airline screening service, computer cross-checks for different airlines to vet potential terrorists, and so on. The report was never implemented. If it had been, simple computer checks could have exposed two of the terrorists who boarded American Airlines flights under their own names on Sept. 11.

The Clinton White House also allowed new constraints to be placed on the CIA, forbidding it from hiring or using any undercover agents with dubious or criminal pasts. In fact, for the entire period of Clinton’s presidency, there was not a single undercover agent in Afghanistan who could speak Arabic, a deficiency highlighted by former CIA Middle East specialist Reuel Marc Gerecht in the Atlantic, the Weekly Standard and elsewhere. To make matters worse, even as late as 1997, al-Qaida was not listed as an official terrorist organization by the U.S. government. This, despite the fact that a top-level defector had warned in late 1996 that al-Qaida was planning a direct attack on the United States. No one in the upper reaches of the administration seemed to take his warnings seriously.

In 1998, the gravity of the threat became clearer. The African embassy bombings showed beyond any shadow of a doubt the danger and professionalism of bin Laden’s network. Hundreds were killed on sovereign American soil. Clinton responded not with an overhaul of security and intelligence or a coordinated military strategy to defeat al-Qaida but by lobbing cruise missiles at al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan. In these actions, the president bypassed normal command procedures in a way that clearly suggested he wanted a quick attack to distract from his own impeachment woes, rather than an earnest attempt to cripple al-Qaida. The strikes failed to wound bin Laden, missing him by an hour or so, helped cement al-Qaida’s reputation as an elusive threat capable of attacking the United States and getting away with it, and made Clinton more nervous about taking the offensive in the future.

To his credit, Clinton approved three subsequent attempts to kill bin Laden, none of which took place because of faulty intelligence (in part a result of the new restrictions placed on the CIA). He also launched an attempt to target al-Qaida’s financial apparatus, but a serious effort to cripple al-Qaida’s finances was shot down by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, according to anonymous Clinton officials cited in the New Yorker. Rubin allegedly believed it was impossible to isolate the terrorist financial networks without disrupting the markets and spooking international investors. The administration soon became frustrated by the options available. Once the Clinton administration had allowed bin Laden to flee the Sudan and set up a proto-terrorist state in Afghanistan, the options became far more difficult and required far more of a military commitment. Clinton was nervous, especially in his scandal-ridden state, that he could never marshal public support for such an ambitious undertaking. So he hoped it would go away, or that assassination efforts requiring minimal intelligence might work. Clinton’s own State Department terrorism expert, Michael Sheehan, knew that more was necessary — pressure on Pakistan and the Taliban and a broader global offensive against a terrorist network that could operate independently of its leader. But no greater effort was expended. “Our reaction was responsive, almost never proactive,” Sheehan told the Times.

The administration made fitful attempts to maintain surveillance of bin Laden, and Clinton himself pressed for assassination. But intelligence was never good enough, and al-Qaida prospered. Spy planes were sent over Afghanistan, to no avail. Still, home-front security was an option, and the National Commission on Terrorism reported that the United States was dangerously vulnerable. The commission proposed a swath of measures — from immigration to law enforcement to airline security — to ameliorate the terrorist threat. It was prescient enough to have a picture of the World Trade Center on its cover, with crosshairs superimposed over the upper floors. Civil liberties groups whined and the bureaucracies complained. A writer in this magazine described the commission’s warnings of a domestic terrorist attack as “a con job with roughly the veracity of the latest Robert Ludlum novel.” James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, described the commission’s recommendations as reminiscent of “the darkest days of the McCarthy era.” (Full disclosure: In a broader context, I also worried in print about some of the Clinton administration’s record on civil liberties.) Spooked by the opposition, and running low on political capital, the Clinton administration let the proposals die in the Congress. Even the bombing of the USS Cole did not lead to a major bombing campaign of bin Laden’s terrorist camps or a resuscitation of the commission’s proposals. And when at the end of 1999 a terrorist was apprehended bringing vast amounts of explosives into the United States, the sense of urgency didn’t measurably increase.

“That was a wake-up call,” a senior law enforcement officer told the New York Times, “not for law enforcement and intelligence, but for policy makers.”

“If you understood al-Qaida, you knew something was going to happen,” Robert M. Bryant, deputy director of the FBI, told the Times. “You knew they were going to hit us, but you didn’t know where. It just made me sick on Sept. 11. I cried when those towers came down.”

But in July 2000, Clinton’s famous luck helped him again. A major donor to his campaign, Mansoor Ijaz, approached the administration with an offer from a Gulf state to help apprehend bin Laden. The deal was designed to be unofficial, according to the Sunday Times of London, which retrieved e-mail copies of some of the negotiations. The Clinton administration went directly to the United Arab Emirates to confirm the offer. The UAE, upset that the secrecy of the operation had been violated, denied that there was an offer. Subsequently, according to the Sunday Times, “a third more mysterious offer to help came from the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, then led by Prince Turki al-Faisal, according to Washington sources. Details of the offer are still unclear although, by one account, Turki offered to help to place a tracking device in the luggage of bin Laden’s mother, who was seeking to make a trip to Afghanistan to see her son. The CIA did not take up the offer.” This final inconclusive offer represented the third chance that the Clinton administration had to apprehend bin Laden. The final two offers were certainly less promising than the 1996 Sudan opportunity. But given how dangerous bin Laden had become, it is astonishing that more effort wasn’t made to clinch the deals.

There have been, of course, several spirited attempts to exonerate the record of Bill Clinton. The record of the new Bush administration surely wasn’t much better. But at least by the summer, the new president had ordered up a new strategy for dealing with al-Qaida that was more ambitious than “swatting at flies,” as Bush described the previous strategy. The proposal for a real campaign was to reach the new president’s desk Sept. 10. It was too late. But it remains a fact that the new administration had devised in eight months a strategy that Bill Clinton had delayed for eight years.

There are other mitigating arguments made in Clinton’s defense. The first is that hindsight is easy and that no one realized the extent of the threat until Sept. 11. This is simply untrue. Government report after report warned of serious vulnerabilities. Bombing after bombing by bin Laden showed his capabilities. As early as 1993, the press was full of warning signs. Here’s one: “The crater beneath the World Trade Center and the uncovering of a plot to set off more gigantic bombs and to assassinate leading political figures have shown Americans how brutal these Islamic extremists can be,” wrote Salman Rushdie in the New York Times after the first WTC bombing. By 1998, the punditocracy was full of prescience. Here’s Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post after the cruise missile attacks in response to the embassy bombings: “There are troubling signs that this president could once again stage a pinprick raid, announce the problem solved and turn back to his own domestic and personal preoccupations. A single night of missile strikes against remote desert sites will not leave America’s self-declared enemies off balance for long.” That, of course, is exactly what Bill Clinton did.

Here’s Paul Bremer in the Post in August 1998: “The ideology of such groups makes them impervious to political or diplomatic pressures … We cannot seek a political solution with them.” He then proposed the following: “Defend ourselves. Beef up security around potential targets here and abroad … Attack the enemy. Keep up the pressure on terrorist groups. Show that we can be as systematic and relentless as they are. Crush bin Laden’s operations by pressure and disruption. The U.S. government further should announce a large reward for bin Laden’s capture — dead or alive.” Whatever excuses the Clintonites can make, they cannot argue that the threat wasn’t clear, that the solution wasn’t proposed, that a strategy for success hadn’t been outlined. Everything necessary to prevent Sept. 11 had been proposed in private and in public, in government reports and on op-ed pages, for eight long years. The Clinton administration simply refused to do anything serious about the threat.

Others have argued that Clinton was being persecuted by the Republicans and so was unable to function properly as president when the al-Qaida threat was looming. This, of course, has an element of truth to it. Some (but not all) of the attacks on Clinton were unwarranted and extreme in the period from January 1998 onward. But that still doesn’t excuse Clinton’s negligence up until 1998, the period of the most serious failures, when al-Qaida was most vulnerable to disruption. And it assumes, as all such Clinton defenses assume, that the president could have done nothing about the scandal. This is a false assumption. A president who put his country ahead of himself would have settled the Paula Jones suit. He would have realized that the presidency is not a part-time job, and that it is more important to be free to tackle vital matters of state than to avoid the humiliation of a settled sexual harassment suit. A responsible president puts his constitutional duties first, the most important of which is the protection of American citizens from attacks by foreign entities. By fighting the Jones suit to the bitter end, by lying under oath and adopting brutal political warfare to defend himself, the president essentially put his own interests above the nation’s. At the time, many of us believed we were simply lucky to have such a scandal in what we saw as peaceful times. We were wrong. While Clinton was defending himself, al-Qaida was girding to attack a defenseless nation.

Was Clinton the only one to blame? Surely not. Plenty of bureaucrats put their own petty turf wars before a successful anti-terrorist strategy. Others responsible include a hostile Congress, an inept FBI and CIA, and a general public insouciance toward a threat that few took seriously. But none of this exculpates the commander in chief. It is his job to warn the country of danger. It is his job to bang bureaucratic heads together to avoid a national security disaster. Again, it is simply not true that the public would have balked at serious measures to deal with terrorism if the president had taken the initiative. Dick Morris’ own polls showed this. And Clinton had seen those polls in his first term. Indeed, Clinton had all the information he needed and all the authority he needed and all the luck he needed to do what had to be done. And he didn’t do it.

No objective review of the Clinton administration’s record on terrorism can escape this simple conclusion. The bulk of the domestic responsibility for the security and intelligence failures that led to Sept. 11 must be laid at the feet of the commander in chief for the bulk of the previous eight years. No, he was not responsible for Sept. 11. Full responsibility lies with al-Qaida. But he was more responsible than anyone for the gaping holes in national security and intelligence that made Sept. 11 possible. The buck must stop with him — this time. The most damning verdict is in the words of a “senior Clinton official” who said the following to Joe Klein of the New Yorker: “Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defense than any other president in recent memory. He could learn an issue very quickly, but he wasn’t very interested in getting his hands dirty with detail work. His style was procrastination, seeing where everyone was, before taking action. This was truer in his first term than in his second, but even when he began to pay attention he was severely constrained by public opinion and his own unwillingness to take risks.”

In most matters, this kind of caution, wishful thinking and procrastination can be forgiven and even overlooked. In matters of vital national security, it is close to criminal negligence. The Clinton legacy may have many good things in it — economic growth and welfare reform among them. But it must also be revised now to include thousands of casualties in the ashes of ground zero — ordinary people who trusted their president to protect them, and whose president ultimately betrayed that trust.

First, the caveats. It’s clear by now that Bush’s style is to put the executive into the executive branch. He tends to manage, not explain. He clearly feels that his first responsibility is to get the job done — even if it means he is out of the public eye too much, or not insistent enough on explaining the reasons for his actions. When faced with a massive propaganda campaign, as the media directed after the inevitable withdrawal from the unworkable Kyoto Protocol, he has often failed to fight back coherently or eloquently enough. Sept. 11 showed the disadvantage of this impulse. Bush was placed in a uniquely confusing and destabilizing situation. Coded warnings were delivered to Air Force One that the president’s plane and the White House were targets. We have no evidence to undermine this statement, and much evidence to believe it’s true.

The security agencies decided to scramble the president’s itinerary to foil any attacks. Maybe Bush should have returned directly to Washington. But at the time, it seems to me that the most important priority was to ensure that the president was in a secure place to direct whatever needed to be done. Instead of carping that he was not in Washington immediately, we should perhaps credit him with taking a political hit in order to fulfill his ultimate responsibilities as president. Congressman Martin Meehan opined that this explanation was “spin.” On the contrary, it was the opposite of spin. It was a politically damaging act of civic responsibility. It says something of our priorities that we damn a president for this, rather than praise him.

Bush was back in Washington by evening to make his first, critical speech. It was barely adequate. It was designed merely to show that he was back, and that a war was underway. But from the beginning, Bush understood exactly what had happened and in his terse way, communicated the essentials. This was a war; and it was not only a war against terrorists but the regimes who harbor and protect them. On the day of the attack, he quietly framed the conflict. His subsequent statements and actions seem to me to be a paragon of what presidential leadership is about. He didn’t lash out with a self-defeating and politically expedient strike, as other less resolute presidents have done. He gathered his experienced aides and directed a diplomatic, military and domestic strategy that already shows some signs of success. Frankly, we cannot know yet whether this war will be won quickly or how it will be handled. There will be time yet for such analysis. But Bush has started a process calmly, effectively and professionally.

And his emotions have been perfectly in tune with the mass of the country. Some have criticized him for tearing up in the Oval Office while recalling the tragedy. Personally, I found it deeply moving. It was real emotion — not fake. It undergirded his resolve to fight back. In this, he is the antithesis of Clinton — a man who used emotion for effect and idled while our national security weakened. And unlike Clinton, Bush didn’t organize his schedule for photo-op political purposes. He went to New York not right away, when the media would have lapped it up. He let Rudy Giuliani perform miracles alone in a limelight that was more than rightly his. Bush doesn’t need to elbow in on others’ responsibilities or achievements.

And when he did visit New York, and hugged and chatted and bonded with the heroes of the recovery effort, he showed a side that New Yorkers have been so far reluctant to embrace. Even the New York Times melted at the sight of this young president clambering through the rubble to wave Old Glory. And when Bush ad libbed into a megaphone, he paid an immediate tribute to the men to whom we all owe an enormous debt. In the words of the New York Times, “Climbing atop a charred fire truck, draping his arm around a 69-year-old retired firefighter, Mr. Bush grabbed a bullhorn. ‘We can’t hear you!’ someone yelled. ‘I can hear you,’ the president bellowed back. ‘The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.’” So much for his vaunted inarticulateness in unscripted moments. This was a dignified president, able and willing to mingle and bond and mourn with the ordinary heroes of working class America, and also to connect their sacrifices and heroism to the struggle ahead. I’m sorry, but I didn’t find these scenes fake or phony.

And while he rightly gave grave warnings about the conflict to come, Bush also took time to make a symbolic visit to Washington’s Islamic Center, removing his shoes and standing shoulder to shoulder with America’s peaceful followers of Islam. His words were eloquent; the tone pitch-perfect; the message exactly right. I have yet to read a word of praise from liberals for this occasion, or any comment on Bush’s widespread support among Arab-Americans. Yet this now strikes me as an essential foundation for the just war we must now engage.

People still joke about Bush’s lack of intelligence. But they make the usual mistake of conflating theoretical intelligence and practical wisdom. Wars require thinkers and strategists and complex minds. But above all they require an ability to focus, to stay on course, to make quick and difficult decisions, and to manage a complex political-military bureaucracy well. In all these respects, we have the right man in the job. He has assembled one of the most experienced national security teams in memory; he knows how to delegate; and he seems to have a composure and peace of mind that are critical in a war leader. Again, Truman comes to mind. You don’t need a Ph.D. to win a war. You need a clear understanding of what war it is, how to win, and how to bring a country with you. I have nothing against Al Gore as a patriot and politician. But he cannot communicate or bond with ordinary people — a terrible flaw in a war leader. Similarly, John McCain would speak wonderfully and lead courageously. But would he have the prudence and restraint to make the right decisions all the time? I trust Bush more on that one.

Lastly, his words. The story line that Bush is the dumbest, least articulate president in living memory is too good to alter. But it’s simply not true. Take his recent press conference. Here’s his stream of consciousness:

I believe — I know that an act of war was declared against America. But this will be a different type of war than we’re used to. This is — in the past there have been, you know, beaches to storm and islands to conquer …

But I know that this is a different type of enemy than we’re used to. It’s an enemy that is — likes to hide and burrow in. And their network is extensive. They have no — there’s no rules. It’s barbaric behavior. They slit throats of women on airplanes in order to achieve an objective that is beyond comprehension. And they like to hit, and then they like to hide out. But we’re going to smoke them out. And we’re adjusting our thinking to the new type of enemy. These are terrorists that have no borders.

And by the way, it’s important for the world to understand that we know in America that more than just Americans suffered loss of life in the World Trade Center. People from all kinds of nationalities lost lives. That’s why the world is rallying to our call to defeat terrorism. Many world leaders understand that that could have easily — that the attack could have easily happened on their land. And they also understand that this enemy knows no border.

This is a very thorough and persuasive account of where we are and what we have to do. It involves the world as it should. It doesn’t flinch from the right descriptions of the evil men we now face. It is in a language any American can readily understand. It’s not Churchill or Reagan, but it’s not far off Truman, another plain-spoken man who was dismissed when he first came into office as inadequate for the job.

Then there are his formal words. The set speeches that Bush has so far given in his young presidency are among the most eloquent since Reagan. No, he didn’t write them. But he picked the people who do, and they have performed superbly. Take these words from the National Cathedral: “It is said that adversity introduces us to ourselves. This is true of a nation, as well. In this trial, we have been reminded, and the world has seen, that our fellow Americans are generous and kind, resourceful and brave. We see our national character in rescuers working past exhaustion, in long lines of blood donors, in thousands of citizens who have asked to work and serve in any way possible … As we’ve been assured: Neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth can separate us from God’s love. May he bless the souls of the departed, may he comfort our own, and may he always guide our country.”

I suppose some will balk at the faith behind these words. But it was a prayer service and the words sprung from a faith that most Americans share. We are right to resist jingoism or blind support of a president in a national crisis. Dissent is necessary. But it shouldn’t be knee-jerk. It shouldn’t dismiss a man before he has barely begun to grapple with a war we all need to win. If there’s one thing we know about Bush, it’s his capacity to grow. Those of us who followed him in the beginnings of his campaign barely recognized the man by the final stretch. In office, he has grown further. In one short week, he went from adequacy to eloquence, from awkwardness and shock to an ease and fluency we had not yet seen. If the past is any guide, the man could grow much further in this conflict, and the world will be much safer and freer for it.

There will be time for criticism of the way the war is waged, its timing and efficacy and impact. But for now, when so much is uncertain, is it too much to ask that those who have long disliked the man or opposed his policies take a moment to give him a chance? Bush is a new president. He will make mistakes. He is far from perfect or flawless. Remember Clinton at this juncture? But if it is said, as Bush remarked, that adversity introduces us to ourselves, perhaps we should use this awful adversity to reintroduce ourselves to our president. We may even be pleasantly surprised by what we find.

Sure, I became a Clinton critic in the mid-1990s, but I never extended my contempt to Gore, whom I always took to be a decent, earnest man. I found the social agenda of the Republican Congresses of the 1990s to be disgusting — from their anti-immigrant posturing to their gay baiting. And I found much that the New Democrats did — from welfare reform to the expansion of the earned-income tax credit to NAFTA — to be admirable government policy. I also believed that the New Democrats represented a good start toward undoing the identity politics of the previous years, a politics that has done nothing but further marginalize minorities in a well-meaning attempt to help them.

So why George W. Bush? The answer turns out to be a pretty simple one. When I look at what he is proposing to do, I agree with him far more than I do with Al Gore. For me to support Gore on his current big-government, leftist platform would simply mean renouncing most of the principles I have long believed in and cherish. Let me explain.

The surplus. Bush’s tax cut is too big for an already overheated economy. But I do believe that the bulk of the surplus should go either toward paying down the debt or toward reducing tax rates for all of us. Leave that money in Washington and it will be guzzled up by a thousand pork-barrel projects or by the bottomless pits we call Medicare and Social Security. Gore has no real tax cuts. He merely has a bunch of new tax shelters, designed to pander to certain constituencies. Our tax code is already way too complicated without adding another layer of micromanagement.

Gore also wants to funnel most of the rest of the surplus into an unreformed Social Security system. To my mind, that’s money wasted. Social Security was a system designed in the 1930s, and the way it siphons vast amounts of productive capital into low-paying government investments is explicable only in the context of a country terrified of another Great Depression. It should, in my view, be privatized along the British model, a part-public, part-private system that has led to a transformation in that country’s fiscal standing. Bush’s plan is half-assed and vague. With any luck, it will be improved and fully analyzed before it is ever implemented. But at least Bush has put reform on the table. If he’s defeated, we won’t have a chance to revisit it until it’s too late. Gore’s know-nothing response to the looming Social Security crisis, his desire to keep it as an election issue and his pandering to the elderly to preserve it have basically cost him my respect.

Healthcare. It’s quite clear now where Gore wants to take the country — toward a government-controlled medical system. His support for a new prescription drug entitlement under the existing Medicare program is the surest sign of this. He wants to give a benefit that’s soaring in price to the wealthiest group in society: the already pampered elderly. Apart from winning Florida and Pennsylvania, Gore’s aim in this is surely to increase the federal government’s leverage with the drug companies and thereby force drug prices down. The next step is price controls, and a slowly expanding federal role in medicine.

All of this would, in my view, be disastrous. We would hear another giant sucking sound as Medicare costs, unrestrained by HMOs, soared. We would see a swift decline in research and development as the drug companies saw their profit margins clobbered. We would move one step closer to the socialized healthcare systems of Europe, where everyone gets the same, crappy care, except for the superrich, who can escape. I feel particularly strongly about this because I have HIV. Gore’s attacks on the pharmaceutical industry — and by extension, the industry’s research — represent a far bigger threat to people with AIDS than anything Bush is proposing. But the AIDS establishment is so intermeshed with the Democratic money machine that it will never tell HIV-ers the truth.

Identity politics. One reason I liked New Democrats was their resistance to the victimology culture of the ethnic and sexual interest groups. I believe in an equal society with equal rights for individuals — not a balkanized society where membership in certain groups guarantees special privileges and rights. Gore, to my great surprise, has turned out to embrace groupthink in all its forms. He believes in crude affirmative action, just when most people realize it’s counterproductive and immoral. He supports a hate crimes law, a fascistic device to bring group rights into the criminal justice system and use law as an instrument of the thought police. He opposes measures, like gay marriage and school vouchers, that would grant equality to individuals of any group and demand responsibility in turn.

Bush leaves a lot to be desired on these issues. He has ducked a forceful rejection of affirmative action, he believes in hate crimes laws for some groups but not others and he thinks gay people should live as criminals under sodomy laws (which is almost enough to send me back to Gore). Bush would represent an uneven and unprincipled check on the balkanization of America. But a check is better than the expansion of the racial and sexual apartheid favored by Gore.

The campaigns. Quite simply, if Gore runs the country the way he has run his campaign, we’re in huge trouble. He micromanages, he bloviates, he condescends, he panders, he demonizes. He compares some Americans to vermin, he equates opposition to him as evil, he attacks the very people he takes money from, he changes themes from day to day and hour to hour. He has no ability to relate to most Americans, resorting to the corniest rhetoric and cheapest of cheap shots on a daily basis. What passes for his intellect is the most pretentious, pseudo-intellectual drivel you’re likely to hear this side of a Bill Moyers special.

Can you imagine how he’d run the country? We’d have more chiefs of staff in four years than versions of AOL.

Bush is no hero. He’s incurious, he’s inarticulate and he bears all the marks of the privilege into which he was born. But he has at least been vaguely consistent, he’s kept his pledges (to campaign in California, for example), he has avoided the puritanism of past Republican campaigns and he clearly won all three debates. His veep pick has survived the test of time better than Gore’s. To be honest, I never expected him to campaign with this kind of skill. Is he too dumb? It wasn’t Bush who compared running the country to a bagel or went on about the “self-sameness” principle. It wasn’t Bush who managed to turn what should easily be a landslide victory into a squeaker by his sheer political stupidity. Bush is no intellect, but he’s no dumber than Dwight Eisenhower or John F. Kennedy. And he’s surely sharper than Gore.

Two final thoughts. I can hear you all now wailing: How can a gay man support George W. Bush? If you tote up the policies on any number of gay-related issues, it’s undeniable — Gore is far better. I don’t want to hide from that. But on some of those issues — hate crimes law, for example — I actually agree with Bush. On marriage rights, I obviously disagree about as strongly as anyone could. But a president has little power over the issue. The worst he can do has already been done — by Clinton, when he signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which was eagerly supported by Gore.

On the military, Gore is clearly better. But forgive me for skepticism. Gore was in part responsible for almost doubling the rate of discharge of gay people from the military in the last seven years. He says he’ll end the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Don’t believe him. He can’t do it alone; and there won’t be enough votes in Congress to do it for him. He’d much rather push legislation, like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which keeps gays in their assigned place as victims, and keeps him as the recipient of all the money gay rights groups funnel his way. On the plus side, Bush has clearly signaled an end to the gay baiting of the recent Republican past. The way Dick Cheney handled the question of marriage rights in the debate was encouraging to say the least; and having an open lesbian in the second family can only help. In my judgment, it is far more important for gay people in this country in the long term that the Republicans moderate their hostility than that the Democrats continue their co-optation.

A victory for Gore and the Human Rights Campaign (sorry for the redundancy) would mean the same pattern of the last few years: little progress, continued polarization and more corruption of a civil rights movement that needs to get distance from pandering pols. In short: Gore’s better, but not so much better that a self-respecting homo couldn’t vote for Bush (or even Nader) for broader political or economic reasons.

Another defensive crouch: I’m not supporting Bush for purely selfish white/rich/whatever reasons. In some ways, my life would be a lot easier if I endorsed Gore. Heck, my paycheck is paid by one of Gore’s closest confidants and supporters. Almost all my friends are liberal Democrats. You think I’m going to get a warm embrace from the Republicans? And I’m not desperate for a tax cut. I’m writing this simply because, in my conscience and judgment, it’s the right call. I may be wrong.

But one reason I have become so disenchanted with the left is its politics of personal emotional blackmail. One more vicious letter comparing me in truly hateful language to Clarence Thomas and I’ll lose it. One reason I have come to respect Bush is that he has not indulged in the same tactics. I hold some slim hope that if he wins Tuesday, our politics might even become more civil, open and, yes, tolerant. I see few signs at present that Al Gore, after the vicious, divisive negativism of his campaign, could achieve the same result.