There’s something happening here. And with apologies to the ’60s rock group Buffalo Springfield, what it is, is exactly clear. In times of war, governments naturally seek to clamp down on dissent and disagreement. And people mostly support such clamping; loose lips, after all, sink ships. Only occasionally, at least in the early stages of a conflict, does significant dissent emerge. Fortunately, today buds of dissent are sprouting. One is coming up through the concrete of Manhattan — and thereby, one can only hope, through the far harder stone of public indifference.
When a country is under attack, citizens “need to watch what they say,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told the nation on Sept. 26, 2001. There’s nothing new about this belief: James Madison warned two centuries ago that “the means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.” Yet, during the recent political conventions, Americans reacted little when they heard — if they heard — how increasingly militarized law enforcers “kept order.” Has anyone, other than a few ACLU types, objected to the police tactics in New York in particular, where the police practiced “preemption” on any assemblage that even looked as if it might become a protest?
It’s not just at special events that the police and parapolice have moved into high-national-security mode. Earlier this year, I was walking along Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Va., a Washington suburb, when I found myself sharing a sidewalk with three Men in Black — black uniforms, that is. At least one of them had a machine gun strapped to his thigh. The men’s look and gait were definitely intended to “shock and awe.” But whom? And to what purpose, on a Saturday afternoon? Whatever security needs are being met here, I thought to myself, there’s no doubt that some fetish needs are being met, too.
The kicker of this tale is that their badges read “WMATA,” for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. In other words, these were cops to guard the subway trains and buses of the nation’s capital. It’s important work, to be sure, but does it really require so much spit, swagger and firepower? One needn’t be French philosopher Michel Foucault to see how uniformed testosterone can lead to overeager, even brutal, “law enforcement.” As the Washington Post reported, D.C.-area subway cops have recently been using extraordinary force on citizens — a pregnant woman was recently detained for allegedly talking too loudly on her cellphone, and others have been arrested for eating a French fry or candy bar in the subway system. Such policing may or may not keep trains running on time, but for now, at least, armed and armored cops seem to be more threatening to ordinary Americans than to al-Qaida.
These anecdotes, to be sure, are from the Washington area. But if America is the empire, then D.C. is Rome; if the barbarians are going to strike at the seat of power, then Washington is the obvious target. So maybe Beltway Romans should expect to dial down a bit on their civil liberties in return for greater security.
That’s a convenient argument for head-in-the-sand ostriches, but the bright, shining truth is that a string of legal and political actions is affecting Americans’ freedoms everywhere. We might consider this string in an ascending order of seriousness; the first two cases may seem farcical, but we should all know by now that the censorious exercise of state power is never a joke.
First is the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show on Feb. 1. The $550,000 fine levied on broadcaster CBS by the Federal Communications Commission might seem small enough, relative to the worth of giant parent Viacom, but it nevertheless sets a precedent. (By the way, am I the only one who thinks that the “nipplegate” brouhaha served as a convenient diversion from presidential politics, just days after John Kerry was gaining momentum in the wake of his New Hampshire primary victory?)
Second is the continuing censorship storm over Howard Stern. The notorious shock jock may devote most of his attention to sex gags and bathroom humor, but he speaks his mind plenty about political issues. So the incessant hounding and fining he has suffered at the hands of the same FCC merit more solicitude from civil libertarians than he has received. Stern’s decision to abandon broadcast radio in favor of satellite radio may be a victory for a new medium, but it is still a defeat for free speech.
Third is the looming inquisition by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Declaring his intention to hold hearings to examine “procedures and mechanisms to protect the First Amendment,” Barton is particularly exercised about the “Rathergate” flap concerning President Bush’s National Guard service. Notwithstanding that CBS has already suffered enormous professional and financial damage from the case, Barton wants to pile it on — and pile it on the First Amendment, too. Perhaps I am being too alarmist; after all, Barton pledges that the hearings will be “fair and balanced.”
All these actions stand out against the general backdrop of the USA PATRIOT Act. (It’s worth remembering that the law’s sloganeering, stentorian title is an acronym for “uniting and strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism.”) And let’s not forget the administration’s attempt in 2002 to bring back Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter to oversee the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Total Information Awareness program. In the firestorm that followed, Poindexter became too hot to keep his job, and the TIA program was downscaled. But who wants to bet that the same programs for profiling, data mining and “life logging” aren’t continuing in some lower-profile precinct of the Pentagon?
Not since the Nixon years has there been such an assault on civil liberties as today, in the Age of Ashcroft. Back then, the White House, not satisfied with the considerable cooperation it was getting from the FBI and CIA, created its own rogue group, the so-called plumbers. And the same eager-beaver spirit trickled down, too. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration provided local cops with money to buy such crucial police tools as armored personnel carriers. The LEAA was eventually laughed out of existence, but now it’s back, pork-barreling away, in the guise of the infinitely larger and more permanent Department of Heimat — oops, make that Homeland — Security.
Another fond ambition of authoritarians through the ages is to cause enemies, and perceived enemies, to disappear. In the early ’70s, one of Richard Nixon’s hatchet men — perhaps the great Charles Colson himself, in his pre-born-again mode — might have labored over his copy of the “enemies list,” dreaming of putting, say, newsman Daniel Schorr into a cell on some American Devil’s Island. But back then, it never happened here.
Yet today, it is indeed happening here — just 100 miles off our Florida shore. In the wake of the Afghanistan operation, the United States established a detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to hold “enemy combatants.” That was a new category intended, by legal design, to circumvent the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. Of all the unilateral decisions taken by the Bush administration, this flouting of the law was perhaps the most breathtaking. That is, a few government lawyers sat down and dreamed up a category that would enable Uncle Sam, so they hoped, to skirt 150 years of evolving international law.
To be sure, few Americans seem to care about the fate of the some 600 individuals still held at Guantánamo Bay. Moreover, it’s quite possible that many of the prisoners, perhaps most, are fighters, some with American blood on their hands. Yet even so, Americans might at least heed the pragmatic argument for good treatment of the detainees; the Guantánamo setup has done immeasurable harm to our international image, not to mention the potential harm to future American POWs.
These issues become clear in “Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,” a stage production first performed in London and now playing in New York’s Greenwich Village. Co-creators Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo derived their script entirely from the letters and testimony of those incarcerated at the U.S. base in Cuba, as well as from the verbatim words of their families, lawyers and captors.
As a piece of theater, “Guantánamo” can’t quite escape its agitprop roots. But to the extent that its message is true — that the U.S. government has gone to great lengths to establish a Kafka-esque penal colony — the production only reinforces the findings of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press about the depth of anti-Americanism around the world. Such sentiments make it all the more difficult for America to gain support for its policies, as well as for pro-American candidates to win free elections — if such elections are, in fact, held — in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as the play emphasizes, Guantánamo is just one island in an ugly archipelago of penal colonies, reaching from “Gitmo” to Abu Ghraib in Iraq to Bagram in Afghanistan to an unknown number of sites in non-Marquess of Queensbury countries such as Egypt.
Still, most Americans probably don’t care. The United States has “moral clarity,” the administration assures us, and if the rest of the world is too blind to see the coming of “liberty century,” well, then, too bad — Uncle Sam will just have to go it alone. So even if the intelligence from Guantánamo Bay is, as the Observer reports, “hopelessly flawed” by a combination of carelessness in taking captives and zealousness in abusing those captives, it probably makes no difference in the court of American public opinion. After all, as the ninja cops in black strutting through Arlington on their way to save the subway remind us, much of the fun of “fighting terror” is dressing for the part and going through the motions. After that manly ritualizing, effectiveness is an afterthought.
So we come to the most powerful point of “Guantánamo”: If it can happen at Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta, it can happen here. In the words of Gareth Peirce, a British solicitor representing one of the inmates, Guantánamo is a transferable tool of “social control.” That is, once created, it can be replicated.
Think I’m exaggerating? Then consider, as a straw in the zeitgeist, Michelle Malkin’s new book, “In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror.” Malkin, increasingly styling herself as the raven-haired answer to Ann Coulter, has written a book defending not only profiling but also rounding up people by race, without due process — or any process — for indefinite confinement. It wasn’t that long ago that President Reagan agreed that Japanese-Americans had been done a grave injustice during World War II; in 1988, he signed a law awarding compensation to those victims. And in 2000, a permanent memorial to these Japanese-Americans was dedicated on Capitol Hill. But now, just a few years later, the wheel is turning, back to a dark time of involuntary mass movements to remote camps.
Anti-liberty lightning struck America once, and it might soon strike again.
So “Guantánamo” stands as sentinel, reminding any who might care that our freedoms are at risk. The play, backstopped by the scrappy-lefty Center for Constitutional Rights, is at least a sprig of hope poking through the heavy slate of discipline and control.
In the play, Lord Johan Steyn adds a poetic flourish, recalling the 17th century meditation of John Donne: We all must be “involved in mankind” because the loss of any of us diminishes all of us. And so, Steyn concludes, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Those wonderful but oft-invoked words have become a cliché, but in these times, they are exactly the call to conscience that Donne intended.
Whaddya know. Two investigations, both spawned by the Pentagon, have cleared the Pentagon in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Cleared the higher-ups, at least. The lower-downs are on their own, fodder for the judicial and reportorial cannons. A shocking, shocking turn of events — although perhaps not as shocking as a third investigation, in which a defense official who boasted about snapping a picture of Satan has been cleared for further duty.
On Tuesday, the Schlesinger commission, consisting of four establishment stalwarts handpicked by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, issued its findings on the abuse at Abu Ghraib: “There was direct responsibility for those activities on the part of the commanders on the scene up to the brigade level,” declared commission chairman James Schlesinger, a former defense secretary. “There was indirect responsibility at higher levels.”
Nobody except the inordinately conscience-stricken has ever left his or her job because of “indirect responsibility.” And afflicted introspection is not exactly Rumsfeld’s trademark. For his part, Schlesinger was indignant at the thought that Rummy might have to go. After all, the two men have been colleagues since the Nixon administration; Rumsfeld succeeded Schlesinger as Gerald Ford’s defense secretary in 1975.
And then on Wednesday came another report from the bosom of the Pentagon, by Army Maj. Gen. George Fay and Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones, which found that 27 military personnel and civilian contractors were potentially culpable in abuse charges. And where did this alleged abusive behavior come from? Why, from their own 27 bad brains, of course. “The primary causes are misconduct (ranging from inhumane to sadistic) by a small group of morally corrupt soldiers and civilians, [and] a lack of discipline on the part of the leaders and soldiers,” wrote Fay and Jones. And oh, by the way, stuck on at the end, “a failure or lack of leadership.” That’s at least a more sober and earnest conclusion than was provided by Schlesinger, who summed up Abu Ghraib as “animal house.” So, in other words, the pithiest sound bite from either report conjures up images of John Belushi drinking too much beer and smashing a guitar.
The bottom line is that Rumsfeld has taken a hit and walks away. “Rumsfeld’s War Plan Shares the Blame” was the headline atop a tough-minded analysis piece in the Washington Post, but Bush has made it clear that no amount of bad press (unless it’s really a lot) will ever break up his iron guard of war viziers. A bit lower down, on the other hand, many officers — starting with Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq — will now find their careers capped out. That’s a loss to Republican politicos who might have hoped to turn Sanchez into the Hispanic equivalent of Secretary of State Colin Powell, but as everyone knows, political war is hell.
Further down, some colonels and majors and the like will find themselves involuntarily retired. And at the bottom of the Great Chain of Command, some sergeants and privates will end up in prison. And so order will be returned to the Pentagonshire, with each getting justice according to his or her station.
Of the two Abu Ghraib-related reports, the Schlesinger report delves more broadly into policy matters. And the policy, of course, is to get the Bush administration off the hook. Schlesinger & Co. buy in to the White House’s relentlessly ahistorical argument that 9/11 “changed everything.” As the report reads, “With the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the President, the Congress, and the American people recognized that we were at war with a different kind of enemy.”
The first point to make in response is that every American war has been fought against a different kind of enemy, from the redcoats to the Comanches to the kamikazes. And the second is to note the blithe presumption that all 300 million of us bought in to the idea that we were in a “new kind of warfare” against a “unique brand of ideological extremists,” so it made sense that the old rules had to be revised, if not junked.
The Schlesingerians even seek to turn the tables on the venerable International Committee of the Red Cross. All the ICRC ever did, before criticizing what happened at Abu Ghraib, was win three Nobel Peace Prizes. But in the spirit of campaign-style rapid response, any critic must be countered. So while the report counsels the Defense Department to “continue to foster its operational relationship” with the ICRC, it then takes its shot: “The Panel believes the ICRC, no less than the Defense Department, needs to adapt itself to the new realities of conflict which are far different than the Western European environment from which the ICRC’s interpretation of [the] Geneva Conventions was drawn.” In other words, we screwed up, but why don’t you scolds confess to screwing up, too?
What’s most interesting about the Schlesinger report is its profound lack of interest in the origin of this criminal and counterproductive behavior. As Talleyrand might have said, in surveying the impact of Abu Ghraib, it’s worse than a crime — it’s a blunder.
Where did the blundering begin? Even the Schlesinger commission has to admit that it started from the top: “On February 7, 2002, the President issued a memorandum asserting that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to either al-Qaeda, nor to the Taliban.” One needn’t be too much of a student of bureaucratic behavior to understand that when the commander in chief opens a loophole, underlings can — and may feel compelled to — open it even farther.
The commission notes that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller was sent to Iraq to bring “strong command-wide interrogation policies” to that nascent democracy. And Brig. Gen. Janis Fallpersonski — oops, make that Karpinski — who commanded the Abu Ghraib prison, recalls Miller telling her last year that he had been sent by the secretary of defense to “Gitmo-ize” her facility — that is, establish Guantánamo-style techniques. The chances that the one-star Karpinski would get in the way of the two-star Miller were small to begin with, but if Miller had Rumsfeld’s writ, she would be hard-pressed to be more than a wallflower inside her own walls.
Relying heavily on the passive voice, so as to better insulate the instigators, the Schlesinger report relates that “with the active insurgency in Iraq, pressure was placed on the interrogators to produce ‘actionable intelligence.’” And then, a bit later, amid the safety of anonymity, the report allows, “Senior officials expressed, forcibly at times, their need for better intelligence.”
And then this: “In November 2003, a senior member of the National Security Council Staff visited Abu Ghraib, leading some personnel at the facility to conclude, perhaps incorrectly, that even the White House was interested in the intelligence gleaned from their interrogation reports.” What part of such a symbolism-soaked visit is to be doubted as interest from the White House?
With all this pressure coming down, are we really so sure that the misdeeds of guards and interrogators were, as the report put it, “purposeless sadism”? Is there no chance that any of it was trickle-down intensity — or maybe even, denials notwithstanding, the result of direct orders from officers who expressed the need for better intelligence, “forcibly at times”?
It’s possible that some additional uncovering of the Abu Ghraib scandal will come from the military trials going on in Mannheim, Germany — defense lawyers are trying to call Rumsfeld as a witness — but don’t hold your breath. Go see “Breaker Morant” instead.
Indeed, inside the Pentagon, the people in the military intelligence cone might be in for a reward in the form of a bigger budget. Who says throwing money at problems is a bad idea?
The top “milint” man is Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone, a longtime Rumsfeldite. Cambone testified earlier this year on Capitol Hill, and lawmakers didn’t so much as nick him. And now, with two more fat documents as body armor, he’s snug in Rummy’s rug.
Finally, it’s worth remembering Cambone’s sidekick, the colorfully crazy Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, deputy undersecretary for intelligence. Boykin caused a stir last year when it was reported that he had been touring around Christian churches, declaring that the United States was, in fact, engaged in a religious war — which is to say that Boykin embraced, albeit from the opposite side, the apocalyptic analysis of Osama bin Laden. He said the United States was fighting terrorism “because we’re a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian … and the enemy is a guy named Satan.”
Lest anyone think that I am exaggerating, here’s a 2003 report on Boykin’s utterances:
“A year ago last June, a two-star Army general stood in the pulpit of First Baptist Church of Broken Arrow, Okla., and identified the source of all America’s problems.
“Pointing to a dark shadow on several photographs he shot of Mogadishu’s skyline from a helicopter shortly after 18 Americans were killed in the ‘Black Hawk Down’ debacle, Army Lt. Gen. William ‘Jerry’ Boykin assured the congregation that, indeed, they were witnessing the faint outline of Satan hovering over Somalia.
“Gen. Boykin isn’t one to resort to metaphors when speaking of the battle between good and evil. ‘It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy,’ he said, indicting the devil for the murder of 18 American soldiers.”
Quoted in a different article, Boykin further describes the dark shadow in the photos: “Whether you understand it or not, it is a demonic spirit over the city of Mogadishu. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s not a fake, that’s not a farce.”
Let’s be as blunt as we can. The No. 2 man in the Pentagon’s intelligence operation sees Satan in photographs. How different is that from seeing white unicorns? Or pink elephants? Or little green men? If we put hallucinators in charge, is it any wonder that we’ve had trouble with our intelligence?
Those news reports about Boykin caused a stir, but not enough of one. Last November, the conservative National Review opined, “It is hardly good for the morale of the troops to understand that their commander is a wacko who goes around photographing Satan zooming overhead. General Boykin is manifestly insubordinate, and should be sacked. Yesterday.” But Boykin had some fans in the right places, too. Writing in the Washington Times last fall, Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor, was inspired to write, “I thank God that we have such a man as General Boykin in our midst.”
At the insistence of Congress and other forces of enlightenment, the Pentagon launched an investigation of Boykin’s crusading. But at the insistence of the Pentagon (when the story broke, Rumsfeld announced, preemptively, that Boykin had an “outstanding record”), the investigation concluded with a wrist slap. Boykin, it said, shouldn’t have been wearing his uniform when he encouraged the Christian soldiers onward. But as the Washington Post reported, senior defense officials considered the findings to be a “complete exoneration.”
So Boykin is still on the job, free to further foment the clash of civilizations.
And the rest of us are left to wonder what comes next. If our intelligence services find room at the top for zealots who create more enemies than they negate — and who hallucinate even more foes than that — then papery reports seem almost useless. Because after the token courts-martial, the light letters of reprimand and the occasional grudging mea culpa, the real problem America confronts is not its painful past but a fiery future.
Remember the days when the Washington Post was the enemy of the Republican administration in the White House? Those days are gone. Today, the neoconservative voice of the Post’s editorial page is one of President Bush’s most valuable allies. It’s possible, of course, to find more hawkish voices than that of the Post, but none have the same wide circulation or impact — and none have the Post’s liberal reputation. Which is a gift to the neocons, who can say, “Even the liberal Washington Post agrees with us!”
What a difference a few decades make. Back in 1971, the Post, along with the New York Times, began publishing the leaked Pentagon Papers, the documents that proved that America’s entry into Vietnam in the previous decade had been predicated on lies. The Nixon administration took both newspapers all the way to the Supreme Court in an effort to squelch the publication of the documents — and lost.
That same year, the Nixon hard men, spearheaded by Chuck Colson in his pre-prison, pre-Christian days, put together an enemies list that mentioned simply “the Washington Post” — presumably the entire newspaper, from publisher Katharine Graham down to the lowliest news aide. In the days when officials of the White House and Justice Department openly contemplated murder and arson as “rat-fucking” tactics, the Post showed no small amount of courage. In 1972, John Mitchell, the former U.S. attorney general, then serving as Nixon’s reelection campaign manager, memorably warned Post reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.”
That was then. Now the Post’s editorial page is helping the current Republican president win reelection. To be sure, the Post rarely praises Bush, but it frequently pokes at John Kerry. Which amounts to the same difference.
Exhibit A is the Post’s lead editorial on July 30, the morning after Kerry’s acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, titled “A Missed Opportunity.” The editorial takes Kerry to task for not embracing Bush’s war in Iraq.
That nonembrace made Kerry’s speech “a disappointment,” according to the paper. The Post fretted that “Kerry last night elided the charged question of whether, as president, he would have gone to war in Iraq. He offered not a word to celebrate the freeing of Afghans from the Taliban, or Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, and not a word about helping either nation toward democracy.” At a time when even conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson have backed away from their once rock-solid support for the war, surely the Democratic nominee’s waning enthusiasm for the war in Iraq is not a shock.
The Post spotted creeping dovishness in Kerry’s speech — and that’s the plumage the paper wanted to pluck. The editorial continued, “Kerry could have spoken the difficult truth that U.S. troops will be needed for a long time. He could have reaffirmed his commitment to completing the task of helping build democracy.” In other words, Kerry could have completely signed on to the Bush policy, but instead, the paper lamented, “he chose words that seemed designed to give the impression that he could engineer a quick and painless exit.”
The horror! If I didn’t know better — the Washington Post is, after all, by great reputation, a liberal newspaper — I would think that the Post was trying to sabotage the Democratic candidate by seeking to talk him into upholding an open-ended war policy that antagonizes most Democrats and independents. It was in another wartime election year, 1968, that such misplaced hawkishness arguably cost Democrat Hubert Humphrey the White House. In clinging to LBJ’s war policy, the Minnesotan, once the icon of liberal Democrats, depressed his own turnout in dovish states like Iowa, New Jersey and Vermont, all of which he lost to Nixon.
But in fact, the Post is seemingly doing its best to undo its port-side editorial reputation. The July 30 editorial was followed by one on July 31 that laid out the neocon marching orders for Iraq. Adopting the peremptory style that has worked so well for U.S. diplomats in the past few years, the paper declared, “The United Nations … must step up to the job” of providing peacekeeping forces for Iraq. But then, the Post quickly added, if other nations “won’t provide the troops … the United States should fill the gap.” Which is to say, the Post’s editorial war stance is about the same, these days, as that of the Wall Street Journal.
And while the Post doesn’t join in the Journal’s generalized right-wingery, it does seem determined to keep up with the Dow Joneses on advocating additional foreign adventures. The July 30 editorial argued that “for many in the hall last night, the intelligence lapses in Iraq prove the wrongness of Mr. Bush’s preemption strategy, and Mr. Kerry seemed to agree, saying that ‘the only justification for going to war’ would be ‘a threat that was real and imminent.’ Yet a President Kerry, too, would face momentous decisions based on inevitably imperfect information, whether about Iran or North Korea or dangers yet to emerge. How would he respond? Will it always be safe to wait?”
The Post doesn’t mention, or seem to mind, that many top Bush appointees, still securely in their jobs, pressured the intelligence community to cough up such “imperfect information” — and to further tout such dreck a “slam-dunk” casus belli.
Yet the Post is ahead of the Journal in advocating robust action against Sudan. On Aug. 1 the paper rehashed familiar neocon arguments: It’s wrong to consider “realism” or “national interest” in deciding whether to intervene militarily; those words are code for prudence, for looking before you leap — exactly what the neocons hate. And it’s equally wrong to accept the idea that the United States might be perceived as launching a “crusade” against Muslims; they will greet us, of course, as humanitarian liberators. No, the correct line, the Post insists, is to think that national sovereignty is “a less useful principle than it once was.” So maybe in Sudan we’ll find out — again — whether Muslims and others around the world agree with this bold-strokes neocon view of intervention.
To be sure, the Post’s editorial voice is not neoconservative in the same sense as is, say, Charles Krauthammer, one of the Op-Ed page’s aces. But to the degree to which the word “neoconservative” evokes a new kind of “internationalist” militarism, the editorial positions of today’s Washington Post surely meet that definition.
If the bugle-blowing Post of today had been around in the ’60s, the war in Vietnam might have taken a different turn. And in the ’70s, the presidency of Richard Nixon might have taken a different turn, too.
When I think about Ronald Reagan’s legacy, one question haunts me: Was his national energy policy also, inadvertently, a terror-subsidy policy? A quarter-century later, it appears that Reagan’s presidency helped bring to America a plentiful supply of energy — and also oil-financed terrorists.
In 1973, during America’s first energy crisis, brought on by the Arab oil embargo, President Nixon declared a national goal of “energy independence” by 1980. For the rest of that decade, Republican and Democratic presidents alike emphasized such independence, to be achieved by a combination of statist means — price controls, conservation decrees, Uncle Sam-funded ventures such as the Synthetic Fuels Corp. But they didn’t work. In 1973, oil imports accounted for 26 percent of U.S. consumption; seven years later, in 1980, imports had risen to 38 percent of the national total. In the meantime, oil prices had soared 1,300 percent.
Enter Reagan, a free marketeer and avowed opponent of “utopian schemers.” On July 17, 1980, as he accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, he declared, “Those who preside over the worst energy shortage in our history tell us to use less, so that we will run out of oil, gasoline and natural gas a little more slowly.” The Gipper continued, “Well, now, conservation is desirable … But conservation is not the sole answer to our energy needs. America must get to work producing more energy.” Reagan’s idea was to liberate the oil companies from controls, as part of his belief in “getting government off our backs.” In my role as a low-level staffer on his campaign, I cheered those libertarian words.
And I cheered more as the newly inaugurated 40th president swept away all the Nixon-Ford-Carter-era rules and regulations — although he also helped kill off solar-power programs, a legacy of the loathed Carter presidency. Yet at that time, few complained. Indeed, what came next was a miracle of the marketplace: During Reagan’s two terms, oil prices fell by three-fourths, and the real output of the U.S. economy grew by a third.
Lower prices? More wealth? What’s not to like? Only this: The market produces miracles, but it’s nonetheless blind; it makes no distinction between a barrel of oil pumped in Oklahoma and a barrel pumped in Saudi Arabia. If the foreign crude is 1 cent cheaper, that’s what Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” selects. Oil, said the Reaganites, is just another commodity; it doesn’t matter where it comes from. So while the economy boomed, the vision of energy independence withered.
And thus the catch: The free market lowered the price of energy, but since the United States was a high-cost producer, domestic production was a big loser. And the long-term decline in U.S. oil production — accelerated, too, by environmental concerns — continued through the Reagan years and has kept on ever since. Today, the United States imports 59 percent of its oil; it has gone from being one-quarter dependent on foreign sources to three-fifths dependent.
And what happens to the dollars we export in return for this oil? Many of them go to our mortal enemies. New York Gov. George Pataki, referring to the trillions that the United States and the West have sent to Arab “oilocracies” over the past 30 years, has spoken of a “terror tax.” That is, we send them money and they send us al-Qaida. And the problem could get worse. Even assuming that Saudi Arabia follows through on its plan to increase production, the desert kingdom could easily take in $100 billion in the coming year, around a quarter of that from the United States.
Yet despite — or perhaps because of — all that money, Saudi Arabia is becoming “Osama Arabia.” In light of the continuing attacks on Americans and other foreigners working in that nation, it is worth taking a closer look at what it is doing with its petrodollars. The desert kingdom recently announced a crackdown on “charities” caught funding terror, but the targeted groups were relatively small. The just-dissolved Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, for example, distributed a mere $50 million a year. Meanwhile, the Saudis are promising to set up a new, “transparent” philanthropic entity, the Saudi National Commission for Charitable Work Abroad, which is to give away $100 million a year. Even assuming that that $100 million is all “clean,” one is left wondering what the Saudis will do with the other $99.9 billion they’ll receive for oil over the next 12 months. A Washington source told me that Saudi Arabia has in fact given an average of $4 billion a year in “foreign aid” over the past decade.
Where’s all the money going? Nobody really knows. And nobody — at least in the United States — seems very interested in finding out. On Saturday, the New York Times reported that a task force on Saudi terror funding at the Council on Foreign Relations is about to announce that Riyadh has “not fully implemented its new laws and regulations, and because of that, opportunities for the witting or unwitting financing of terrorism persist.” But, the Times notes, one sentence was deleted from the task force’s final document — “The Bush administration has done very little to push the implementation of the rules and regulations” — possibly at the behest of the Bush White House.
Thus even after 9/11 and the resulting war on terror, the U.S.-Saudi relationship appears fundamentally unchanged. Saudi Arabia sells us oil while telling us — via high-priced P.R. spokesmen and lobbyists — that it is our ally. In return, America offers the Al-Saud family a geopolitical security blanket and a cloak for financial transactions.
The consequences of the free market’s “invisible hand” are now visible: People who hate America are engorged with American money. Having worked for the Gipper for five years, I believe that if he were in office today, he would concede that blind fealty to the free market has brought unintended consequences — big-time. And so he would take a second look at renewable energy. Although Reagan believed in free markets and limited government, he was pro-science; he strongly supported the space program, for example, and the never-built superconducting supercollider. Reagan also would understand what was required to win the war on terror — the de-funding of those who are funding terrorists, even at the risk of upsetting big GOP constituencies.
It’s time for a geostrategic shift — and a return to the idea of energy independence. It’s time to revisit energy conservation; we must get serious about hydrogen, solar, wind and other renewable-energy sources.
It won’t be easy to gain complete energy independence from the oilocratic foes we are financing, but at least we can start reducing the terror tax. After a long detour — and after realizing that the free market is paradoxically aiding our worst enemies — we can get back on the path to energy independence.
As a sense of gloom about Iraq escalated along with the fighting the past two weeks, so did neoconservative calls to “stay the course” — even if it’s a course to nowhere.
Once, the right painted visions of cakewalks, of jubilant Iraqis welcoming their own conquest, of blossoming secular pro-Western democracy. Now that mirage has dissipated. Following President George W. Bush’s press conference last Tuesday, neocon Bill Kristol told the Los Angeles Times, “I was depressed.” The publisher of the Weekly Standard freely conceded that for those Americans who were “doubtful or worried,” Bush failed to close the sale. “He didn’t explain how we are going to win there.”
So what do the neocons do now? Their optimistic vision of Iraq as the first domino to fall in their favor may have failed, but they are never at a loss for words. So they have a new line. Instead of offering us carrots, they’re threatening us with sticks. OK, they seem to be saying, there’s not much upside, but look at the downside.
“The consequences of failure in Iraq would be unthinkable,” the president told the nation on Tuesday night. To sum up the hawks’ arguments, if we leave Iraq we will have:
1) Instability and maybe civil war.
2) Encouragement to terrorists. Bush says that our “will is being tested” in this series of “Black Hawk Down”-like horrors. And if we flunk this test, the “Somalia syndrome” awaits.
3) Loss of prestige and influence in the Arab world and beyond. As Osama bin Laden said in November 2001, the U.S. is the “weak horse” in this race, so others will be looking to the stronger horse.
4) Loss of the ability to use or threaten force elsewhere. We’ll be paper-tigerized.
5) A nourishing of future violence. “We must fight them in the Middle East,” say the hawks, “so we don’t have to fight them in Middle America.”
Columnist Mona Charen is one of many neoconservatives urging fortitude. She quotes James Burnham: “Where there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.” Then she explains further: “The work of transforming the Middle East is going to be messy and difficult. But there is no alternative.”
Burnham, of course, holds a sainted place in the hearts of the neocons, because back in the ’50s he was one of the first Trotskyites to become a “rollback of communism”-type conservative. So citing Burnham is a way of recalling the days when the Gen. Patton right wanted “regime change” in Moscow.
But what the neocons don’t want you to notice is this: Those same disasters will befall us if we stay in Iraq.
In other words, if we remain in Iraq we will have:
1) Instability and maybe even civil war.
2) Encouragement to terrorists. Actually, we’re recruiting them for the other side. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has estimated that our post-Saddam “harvest” will be “a hundred bin Ladens.”
3) Loss of prestige and influence in the Arab world and beyond. According to last month’s Pew Research Center international opinion survey, “Discontent with America and its policies has intensified rather than diminished … the war in Iraq has undermined America’s credibility abroad.” Here’s the view from key countries: By a 46-37 margin, Moroccans think that Iraq will be worse off post-Operation Iraqi Freedom; the “worse off” margin is 45 points in Jordan and 53 points in Pakistan.
4) Loss of the ability to use or threaten force. As retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey told Time magazine, “There are no more U.S. troops to send to Iraq” — without a draft, that is. So we don’t hear the White House saying much about the rest of the “axis of evil” anymore, because the North Koreans and Iranians know that the U.S. can’t attack when it’s mired in Mesopotamian quicksand. Meanwhile, North Korea is reported to be showing off at least three of its nuclear weapons.
5) A nourishing of future violence. Those who don’t have a TV to see the gates of hell opening in Iraq might contemplate these additional numbers from the Pew Center: By a 46-36 margin, Pakistanis support suicide bombings against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq. In Morocco, suicide-bomber proponents outpolled opponents 66-to-27. And in Jordan, 70-to-24.
So it’s damned if we stay, damned if we go. And one more thing: damned if we question. If the 9/11 commissioners ask too many questions, they’re accused of playing a partisan blame game. Even White House correspondents, who are paid to ask questions, are liable to get whacked, too — in some cases, by other journalists. Pressies are piranha-ing the president in their “second-guessing eased by hindsight,” snipes Joseph Curl of the Washington Times. For Curl, reportorial questions seem not only annoying, but tedious: “False premises. Errors in judgment … Mistakes, mistakes, mistakes.” So much for speaking truth to power.
Another group that shouldn’t be questioning is the widows of those who were killed on 9/11. “This spectacle of the widows, awash in their sense of victims’ entitlement, as they press ahead with ever more strident claims about the way the government failed them,” is appalling to Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal, so she wrote a takedown of them on Thursday.
The Iraq war was the neocons’ baby, so it’s not surprising that they still love it. But the rest of us should ask: Who got us into this lose-lose situation? James Burnham was wrong: Where there’s no alternative, there is indeed a problem — and it’s a big one.
