THE
STAKES
Why We
Care About Politics
Politics isn’t a game.
We’ve seen the first full week of national politics arrive
early in 2007, courtesy of a Democratic majority who understand
this. And as we look back at a week which saw the Democrats in
the House rapidly pass a full slate of progressive legislation,
only to have their achievements essentially ignored as Bush
stole the spotlight by “rolling out” his standard speech on
“changing direction in Iraq”, I think it’s important to
spend a moment reminding ourselves that the stakes are deadly
and real. This shouldn’t be treated as a chance to count coup,
score points, or exact a petty vengeance. This is a chance to
fix the country, put
America
back on track, and correct the wrongs which have been done in
our name.
One of the pervasive myths of politics,
promulgated by a mainstream media obsessed with process instead
of policy, is that there’s no difference between Republicans
and Democrats; no difference between liberals and conservatives.
This myth is corrosive, reducing elections to beauty pageants
and posturing. It disengages the common citizen from the
political process, which only makes it easier for those with a
vested interest in promoting public apathy to push their
personal agendas while staying out of the public’s eye.
But leadership matters. So as we perch
precariously on the razor’s edge between responsible
government and opportunistic payback, I’d like to take a
moment to look at the most recent and most vivid example of why
we should care about politics: The maddening margin of victory
which made George W. Bush and not Al Gore our 43rd
president. And four key events over the past six years in which
the world could have gone a different way.
9/11
On September 11th, 2001, as
we all know, the
United States
suffered a horrific attack. It was the first act of war on
U.S.
soil in over half a century, and the viciousness of its
barbarism shocked the world.
Could the 9/11 attacks have been
prevented? As with many national tragedies, it’s easy to
second-guess history with the benefit of perfect hindsight.
It’s easy to look at a dozen disparate pieces of evidence and
say, “Someone should have put those pieces together. Someone
should have figured this out. Someone should have stopped
this.”
But rather than playing the part of
detective after the mystery has already been solved, let’s
instead consider how the reaction
to one piece of information may have changed the course of history.
That piece of information is the August
6th, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief: “Bin Laden
Determined to Strike in
U.S.
” It said, in part:
Al Qaeda members -- including
some who are
U.S.
citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the
U.S.
for years, and the group apparently maintains a support
structure that could aid attacks.
[…]
Nevertheless, FBI information
since that time indicates patterns of suspicious
activity in this country consistent with preparations
for hijackings or other types of attacks, including
recent surveillance of federal buildings in
New York
.
The FBI is conducting
approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout
the
U.S.
that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are
investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May
saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the
U.S.
planning attacks with explosives. |
This document was the thirty-sixth PDB
regarding al-Qaeda and Bin Laden which had been given to the
President that year. It was designed to deliver a clear warning
to the President that al-Qaeda was active in the
United States
and presented an eminent threat. After the 9/11 attacks, the
President, Condoleezza Rice, and everyone else in the White
House administration would claim that this “report was
historical in nature”. But the 9/11 Commission Report directly
contradicted their claim:
Two CIA analysts involved in preparing
this briefing article believed it represented an
opportunity to communicate their view that the threat of
a Bin Ladin attack in the
United States
remained both current and serious. |
President Bush’s response to the PDB
– designed to communicate the threat of a Bin Laden attack in
the
United States
– was non-existent. He spent the entire month of August
vacationing.
How seriously should this threat have
been taken? According to Al Gore, very seriously. In a speech
delivered on October 18th, 2004, Gore said:
[T]he President himself was presented
with a CIA report with the headline – more alarming
and more pointed than any I saw in eight years of daily
CIA briefings: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the
U.S.” |
Al Gore wouldn’t have been alone in his alarm. According to
the 9/11 Commission Report, “most of the intelligence
community recognized in the summer of 2001 that the number and
severity of threat reports were unprecedented”.
And now we come to the crux of the
issue: We know that President Bush’s response to this alarming
report was to do absolutely nothing. He never lifted a finger,
and a little more than a month later nearly three thousand
Americans died.
Would the response of President Gore
have been any different? Let’s listen to his words again:
The only warnings of this nature
that remotely resembled the one given to George Bush
were about the so-called Millennium threats predicted
for the end of the year 1999 and less specific warnings
about the Olympics in
Atlanta
in 1996. In both cases, these warnings in the
President’s Daily Brief were followed, immediately,
the same day – by the beginning of urgent daily
meetings in the White House of all of the agencies and
offices involved in preparing our nation to prevent the
threatened attack.
By contrast, when President Bush
received his fateful and historic warning of 9/11, he
did not convene the National Security Council, did not
bring together the FBI and CIA and other agencies with
responsibility to protect the nation, and apparently did
not even ask follow-up questions about the warning. |
You’ll notice that Gore doesn’t talk about what he would
have done. He simply talks about what he and President Clinton did
do when faced with similar threats. (And if you want
confirmation of that, you can refer to the 9/11 Commission
Report for an impartial recounting of the events.)
Would the concerted and dedicated
response of President Gore, unlike the lackadaisical and
uncoordinated response of President Bush, have been enough to
stop the 9/11 attacks? We’ll never know. But such efforts had
worked in the past. And on August 16th, the FBI
arrested Zacarias Moussaoui for an immigration violation. There
were concerns that his flight training may have had violent
intentions, but the agents involved were unaware that President
Bush had been warned ten days earlier that “Bin Ladin wanted
to hijack a
US
aircraft”. There was no heightened sense of alert because
President Bush had not called for one.
We’ll never know if President Bush
could have saved the lives of everyone who died on 9/11. But we
do know that he didn’t even try.
Asian
Tsunami
On December 26th, 2004,
tsunamis triggered by an earthquake off the west coast of
Sumatra devastated the the
Indian Ocean
. Nearly
two hundred thousand people were killed in what became the
world’s deadliest disaster in more than twenty-five years.
It is, of course, absurd to suggest that
President Bush (or anyone else) could have prevented the
earthquake which caused this calamity. But the reason the Asian
Tsunami, as it came to be known internationally, proved to be so
deadly was due to the lack of a warning system in the
Indian Ocean
.
Such a system has, in fact, existed in
the
Pacific Ocean
since 1946. The
Pacific
Tsunami
Warning
Center
has probably saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions,
of lives over the past sixty years. If such a system had been
operational in the
Indian Ocean
in 2004, experts agree that tens
of thousands of lives could have been saved with a timely
evacuation of coastal regions.
Following the deadly tsunami, UNESCO
began work on establishing a warning system which became fully
active in June 2006. It’s too bad that no one thought to put
such a system in place before tragedy struck.
Except that someone did:
Al
Gore.
In 1998, Gore attempted to spearhead the
creation of the Global Disaster Information Network. This agency
would have developed worldwide emergency planning and worked to
advance and improve the science of disaster prediction. If
Gore’s vision had been followed, it is likely the GDIN would
have facilitated the creation of an
Indian Ocean
tsunami warning system. Unfortunately, the Republican congress
– eager to prevent Gore from scoring any legislative victories
which could be used in the 2000 Presidential campaign – killed
the funding for the GDIN, which exists today as essentially
nothing more than a website and forum.
Could President Gore have gotten a
Republican congress to fund the GDIN before hundreds of
thousands of people died on August 26th? Possibly.
Could a President Gore working with a Democratic congress have
done so? Almost certainly.
It’s like Bush says: “One
of the things I learned is, the vision thing matters.”
Hurricane
Katrina
On August 28th, 2005, less
than a year after the Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina struck
the southeast coast of the
United States
. It destroyed the levees of
New Orleans
and, with the ensuing floods, laid waste to the city.
But while the Indian Ocean lacked the
tsunami warning system which could have mitigated the crisis,
the
United States
had a decades-proven solution already in place to cope with the
catastrophe: The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Or, at least, we should have had it.
Unfortunately, the Republicans
have loathed FEMA for decades. It’s never been
entirely clear to me why, exactly, they bear such hatred
towards a federal agency dedicated solely to aiding
Americans in the hour of their most dire need, but anti-FEMA
propaganda has streamed out of conservative think-tanks
and magazines for more than twenty years. Here’s a typical
example from the Cato Institute’s James Bovard in
1997:
But, as the actions of the
Vernon
town council show, FEMA's growth may not really be good
government at all. Instead, it may be one more cause of
the decline of individual responsibility—or even a
semblance of respect for such responsibility — in our
political culture. |
Now, you might think that after 9/11 the Republicans would
change their tune. After all, who could be so heartless as to
claim that the victims in the World Trade Center should just
buck up and accept a little individual responsibility for
working in a building which had already been targeted by
terrorist attacks once before. And with President Bush talking
about the need to be ready and secure against the next terrorist
attack, surely it would be folly to condemn the federal agency
responsible for responding in the wake of those attacks.
Well, you might think that. But,
instead, President Bush and the Republican Congress massively
defunded FEMA.
For a specific example of the effect of
this defunding, you don’t have to look any farther than
Project Impact. James Lee Witt, the director of FEMA under
Clinton
, created Project Impact to take preemptive action and mitigate
the effects of disasters before they happened. As Eric Holdeman described
in a Washington Post article:
One of the best examples of the impact
the program had here in the central Puget Sound area and
in western Washington state was in protecting people at
the time of the Nisqually earthquake on Feb. 28, 2001.
Homes had been retrofitted for earthquakes and schools
were protected from high-impact structural hazards.
Those involved with Project Impact thought it ironic
that the day of that quake was also the day that the
then-new president chose to announce that Project Impact
would be discontinued. |
Having defunded and crippled FEMA, President Bush delivered the
killing blow by appointing an
incompetent political crony named Michael Brown to run the
agency. Brown’s only significant management experience prior
to being appointed to head FEMA was as the stewards and judges
commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. (A
position he was forced to resign from due to incompetence.)
Defunded and under the hapless
leadership of Brown, it took FEMA days to respond to the crisis
in
New Orleans
. Ironically, the Cato Institute offers perhaps the most apt
description of the criminal incompetency which came about as a
result of President Bush following their advice:
FEMA issued a sternly worded
release on August 29, the same day the hurricane made
landfall along the
Gulf
Coast
, titled "First Responders Urged Not to Respond to
Hurricane Impact Areas." FEMA wanted all the
responders to be coordinated and to come when they were
called. And that was one plan they followed. As the New
York Times reported September 5:
When Wal-Mart sent three trailer
trucks loaded with water, FEMA officials turned them
away, [Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard] said.
Agency workers prevented the Coast Guard from delivering
1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and on Saturday they cut
the parish's emergency communications line, leading the
sheriff to restore it and post armed guards to protect
it from FEMA, Mr. Broussard said. |
(Of course, the Cato Institute claimed this as a vindication
of their long-standing criticisms of FEMA. This is typical
Republican doublethink: They take over the government and then
run it like a drunk driving a demi. Then they claim that cars
should be banned because they’ve been driving drunk. Thus,
they defund FEMA and place an incompetent in charge of it.
Having hopelessly crippled the agency, they then use its
failures as evidence that the agency shouldn’t exist.
The correct response, of course, is to take away the drunk’s
keys and never let them
drive again.)
President George H.W. Bush demonstrated that he was out of touch
with the American people when he didn’t know the price of
milk. President George W. Bush demonstrated that he was not only
out of touch with the American people but with the
responsibilities of his office when he claimed that no
one anticipated that the levees could break. No one, that
is, except for the millions of people who watched CNN, MSNBC,
and even the Weather Channel in the 48 hours leading up to the
disaster, when that exact scenario was presented countless times
and the hypothetical possibilities (which later became tragic
realities) were considered over and over again. Not to mention
the Clinton-era initiatives which would have improved and
repaired the levees… only to have President Bush and the
Republican Congress gut
their funding.
Complimenting Michael Brown for having
down “a heckuva job” while thousands of people died in New
Orleans only served to confirm that President Bush had not only
utterly failed in his duties, but was also so clueless that he
was incapable of even realizing
the disaster he had created through his lack of foresight and
leadership.
Let me put it this way: Remember the
Great Flood of 1993? It was among the most deadly and most
costly floods in American history. $15 billion were recorded,
extending across a flood region more than 1200 km long. Dozens
of major communities along the
Mississippi
were flooded, with some of them remaining inundated for nearly
two hundred days.
There is no question it was a disaster.
There is also no question that President
Clinton promptly responded with a well-funded and
well-coordinated effort spearheaded by FEMA. Private charity and
public agencies worked together to ease suffering, mitigate
damage, and prevent deaths.
There is little doubt that if Al Gore
had been president, he wouldn’t have followed the urgings of
the Cato Institute and other conservative think-tanks. He
wouldn’t have dismantled FEMA and other first-response
infrastructure. He wouldn’t have placed an incompetent in
charge.
Words can never capture the enormity of
the tragedy which gripped
New Orleans
as a direct result of President Bush’s failures. They can
never capture the multitude of private horrors which were
suffered. But here’s one small example: In the days following
the breaking of the levees and the flooding of
New Orleans
, 16,000 people were directed to take refuge in the Superdome…
and then left
there to rot.
A 2-year-old girl slept in a pool of
urine. Crack vials littered a restroom. Blood stained
the walls next to vending machines smashed by teenagers.
‘We pee on the floor. We are like animals,’ said
Taffany Smith, 25, as she cradled her 3-week-old son,
Terry. … By Wednesday, it had degenerated into horror.
… At least two people, including a child, have been
raped. At least three people have died, including one
man who jumped 50 feet to his death, saying he had
nothing left to live for. There is no sanitation. The
stench is overwhelming. |
On Wednesday, children were being raped. But it wasn’t until
Thursday that Michael Brown even realized that there were people
at the Superdome… despite the fact that the national media had
been carrying the story for days.
Words
simply fail.
Iraq
Just as it is impossible to find the
words to describe the full tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and
President Bush’s botched response to it, so it is impossible
to succinctly describe the President’s failures in
Iraq
. Whether it was selling the war on false pretenses, not putting
enough boots on the ground, failing to put in place a plan for
the nation’s security following the fall of Baghdad, the lack
of any coherent plan for a post-Saddam government, the false
confidence of claiming the mission was accomplished when it had
scarcely begun, or any of the dozens of other mistakes the Bush
Administration has made in Iraq, it’s beyond the scope of this
essay to document them. Entire books could be dedicated to the
subject (and they have been).
Here’s what it can be boiled down to:
If it was a war against an ally of al-Qaeda, then its conception
was fundamentally flawed (there was never an alliance between
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda). If it was a war to find weapons of
mass destruction, it was doomed to failure from the start (the
WMDs didn’t exist). If it was a war to stifle global
terrorism, then it has demonstrably failed (acts of terrorism
have increased).
And if it was a war of regime change,
then one is forced to ask why President Bush and his
administration failed to give any meaningful thought to the
question of what they wanted to change the regime to.
Words like “freedom”, “liberty”, and “democracy” are
cheap. Actually achieving
freedom, liberty, and democracy is the only thing with meaning
– and it literally took the administration years
before they could even describe the government they hoped to establish in
Iraq
.
Today, after nearly four years of war,
it’s trivial to see the abject failure of President Bush’s
war. But on September 22nd, 2002, before the war
began, Al Gore saw the failure of vision and he predicted the
abject futility of Bush’s half-thought war. At a speech given
to the Commonwealth Club, Gore
said:
I believe we should focus our efforts
first and foremost against those who attacked us on
September 11th and who have thus far gotten away with
it. The vast majority of those who sponsored, planned
and implemented the cold-blooded murder of more than
3,000 Americans are still at large, still neither
located nor apprehended, much less punished and
neutralized. I do not believe that we should allow
ourselves to be distracted from this urgent task simply
because it is proving to be more difficult and lengthy
than was predicted. Great nations persevere and then
prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to
another. We should remain focused on the war against
terrorism. |
In recent months we have seen the resurgence of the
Taliban, but back in September 2002 Al Gore predicted it:
Nevertheless, President Bush is telling
us that America's most urgent requirement of the moment
- right now - is not to redouble our efforts against Al
Qaeda, not to stabilize the nation of Afghanistan after
driving its host government from power, even as Al Qaeda
members slip back across the border to set up in
Afghanistan again; rather, he is telling us that our
most urgent task right now is to shift our focus and
concentrate on immediately launching a new war against
Saddam Hussein. And the president is proclaiming a new,
uniquely American right to preemptively attack
whomsoever he may deem represents a potential future
threat. |
It wasn’t that Al Gore though that
Saddam Hussein shouldn’t be prevented from developing weapons
of mass destruction. It wasn’t that Al Gore thought any war
designed to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime was doomed. He
simply wanted to make sure that the war was being pursued for
the right reasons and at the right time. And he wanted to make
sure, if and when the time for war came, that it would be done
the right way:
Nevertheless, all Americans should
acknowledge that Iraq does indeed pose a serious threat
to the stability of the Persian Gulf region, and we
should be about the business of organizing an
international coalition to eliminate his access to
weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq
's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven
impossible to completely deter, and we should assume
that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.
Now, let's be clear, there's no international law that
can prevent the
United States
from taking action to protect our vital interests when
it is manifestly clear that there is a choice to be made
between law and our survival. Indeed, international law
itself recognizes that such choices stay within the
purview of all nations. I believe, however, that such a
choice is not presented in the case of
Iraq
. Indeed, should we decide to proceed, our action can be
justified within the framework of international law
rather than requiring us to go outside the framework of
international law. In fact, even though a new United
Nations resolution might be helpful in the effort to
forge an international consensus, I think it's
abundantly clear that the existing U.N. resolutions
passed 11 years ago are completely sufficient from a
legal standpoint so long as it is clear that Saddam
Hussein is in breach of the agreements made at the
conclusion of the Persian Gulf War. |
As I write this today, American
casualties in
Iraq
have long-ago surpassed the death toll of 9/11. No war can be
bloodless. But one is forced to wonder how many of those brave
men and women would still be alive today if they had served
under a competent and effective Commander in Chief gifted with
foresight and wisdom.
Conclusion
Bush is incompetent. People die.
That's the story of his administration.
And, in a broader scope, it's the story of the Republican
Revolution.
This isn't radical hysteria. It's simple
truth. With nothing more than basic competency, there are
thousands of Americans -- and hundreds of thousands of people
around the globe -- who would not be dead today. But because
Bush and the Republicans were incapable of exercising even that
basic measure of competency – and because they believed that
scoring political points was more important than relieving the
suffering of real men and women – thousands have died. And
that is to say nothing of those teeming millions whose lot in
life would be better if Bush had not repeatedly failed in his
duties as Commander in Chief, Leader of the Free World, and
(most importantly) President of the United States.
To understand the nightmare scenario
that plagues my thoughts, simply imagine this: What would have
happened if Bush had been president during the Cuban Missile
Crisis? What would happen if something like the Cuban Missile
Crisis were to happen before January 2009?
We'd all be dead.
Welcome to the nightmare. Share it with
all those you can. Remember it when the next election cycle
rolls around.
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