CHOOSE ONE
When I hear
people talk about "the war," I wonder which war they're
referring to: the one in a far-distant country, which most
Americans know or care little about, or the one right here
in our own back yards or, I should say, in our own mailboxes
that dominates the news.
THE REAL WAR
The other
day my mailman came to the door wearing blue latex gloves
and sporting a sheepish smile. That same day, California Governor
Gray Davis revealed that there was a "credible threat" to
practically every bridge on the West Coast, and instituted
a state of near-emergency: I say "near" because, although
National Guardsmen were stationed by the Golden Gate Bridge
and the Bay Bridge, all they did was chat up the cops and
soak up some sun. As far as can be determined, not a single
vehicle was stopped or searched. Instead of making anyone
feel safer, the announcement of an imminent attack only spread
panic throughout the Golden State and made us realize how
helpless the government is, at every level, in the midst of
our nation's greatest crisis.
PANIC TIME
Some Republicans
took Davis to task for that, but at least his warning was
specific: after all, the federal government had just enunciated
its own red alert, declaring that they knew something
perhaps far worse than September 11 was about to take
place, but they didn't know what it was, where it would happen
or, presumably, how to deal with it. If ever a public declaration
was designed to throw the public into an absolute panic, then
surely this has got to be it. Especially in the context of
both the Pentagon and the FBI asking the public for its suggestions
in how to fight this war, the warning hardly inspired confidence
in the ability of the authorities to cope. What are we paying
these guys for, anyway? Is anybody in charge in Washington?
RUDY'S COUP?
The elevation
and much-ballyhooed "branding" of former Pennsylvania Governor
Tom Ridge as the chief of "Homeland Security" whose visage
alone was supposed to instill in the people a sense of safety
has instead led to a widespread sense of insecurity.
Stumbling, bumbling, and essentially powerless against the
entrenched bureaucracies of Washington, Ridge is reportedly
already on the way out, to be replaced, some say, by New York
City mayor Rudy Giuliani. It'll never happen, of course: Rudy
would no sooner get in there and he would have his own version
of the Oval Office up and running before you could say "coup
d'etat."
UNITED WE STAND
We are fighting
two wars, on two fronts, and nearly 100 percent of the average
American's attention is naturally fixated on the home front.
Oh yes, the Northern Alliance is preparing to march on Kabul,
but first they must win the battle of Mazar el-Sharif who
cares when the enemy is about to blow up the Golden
Gate Bridge? That's why, for most Americans, when someone
asks: "Where do you stand on the war?" the question, in this
context, almost answers itself. No American, with the exception
of the mentally unbalanced and the Marxists (or do I repeat
myself?) wants their own country to be invaded and defeated.
It is a simple truism to say that everyone, even the much-demonized
peace movement in this country, wants the US to win the war
on the home front. Americans may differ on the merits of bombing
Afghans who have, after all, been invaded and victimized
by Al Qaeda but nobody wants to see the Golden Gate Bridge
or the Bay Bridge blown to smithereens. Nobody is pro-anthrax
except, it often seems, those
neocons so eager to pin Saddam as the source.
CONFUSION REIGNS
Baffled
by the anthrax attacks, the
FBI is floating one theory domestic terrorism, perhaps
from the far right and pursuing another, recently
arresting one Middle Eastern immigrant in Trenton, New Jersey,
in connection with the anthrax investigation. The discovery
of alleged anthrax attacks as far away as Pakistan at the
offices of the Daily Jang newspaper, a computer company,
and a government office has murked up the domestic terrorism
angle, and confusion reigns, with the authenticity of these
attacks in doubt. Pakistan's health minister has declared
he
doubts the accuracy of tests so far administered, and
plans to have his own agency do them over.
WHO KILLED
KATHY NGUYEN?
Meanwhile
the really baffling development is the discovery of anthrax
transmitted via US diplomatic
pouch as far away as Lima, Peru, and Vilnius,
Lithuania. These incidents could be traceable to the site
of the original attack on the US Capitol, including the mail
room of the US State Department, but now an even more ominous
development has everyone's attention. A Newsweek story
entitled "Who Killed Kathy
Nguyen?" sums up the question that has law enforcement
stumped: how did a perfectly ordinary South Vietnamese immigrant,
no Tom Daschle or Brokaw but a plain ordinary person, with
no known connection to the tainted mail, die of anthrax?
STORM WARNINGS
Without
a plausible theory to support their actions, authorities have
responded with a flurry of activity and mass arrests, invoking
the Draconian powers granted them by the "Patriot" Act and
other pseudo-totalitarian legislation, figuring that they're
bound to come up with something if they simply sweep
up everything in their path. The same broad brush better-"safe"-than-sorry
policy is exemplified by the approach of John Ashcroft's Justice
Department to the subject of how and when to warn the public
of imminent danger. As a top intelligence official cited by
Newsweek observed:
"The
rule for Ashcroft and his White House higher-ups, he said,
appears to be 'anything you hear, you put out.' He bitterly
observed that the debate among Bush's top law-enforcement
and intelligence deputies came down to: 'If we don't share
the information and something happened and there was a catastrophe,
people could say, 'Why didn't you warn us?'"
'HEADS WILL
ROLL'
The same inevitable process of politicization
is at work in the conduct of the other war, that is,
the one in Afghanistan, where the Pentagon seems as clueless
as the FBI in pursuit of an increasingly elusive breakthrough.
At this point, just
about any victory, no matter how small, would do. In wartime,
even more than usual, it's the foreign press particularly
the British media that Americans must turn to in order
to find out what's happening in their own country. The London
Telegraph gives its readers a
fly-on-the-wall perspective of a Pentagon meeting in which
the truth about the war was stated in totally truthful and
uncompromising terms by none other than the chief hawk in
Washington, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:
"'The
war isn't going well,' said the usually mild-mannered Mr.
Rumsfeld, his voice rising as he complained at the lack of
progress against the Taliban. 'Either we have something spectacular
this weekend or heads will roll.'"
TAKING IT PERSONALLY
Politics,
narrowly conceived, and not the national interest, or military
necessity, is driving the war overseas, just as it fuels the
frenzied pronouncements of government officials on the home
front. Carpet-bombing the Taliban front lines has led to nothing
but setbacks for the much-vaunted Northern Alliance, and the
expected "split" in the Taliban appears to have backfired
badly: Mullah Omar and his government are more firmly in the
saddle than ever. Indeed, all the real defections appear to
have been from the rebels to the Taliban. Gee, I guess that's
what happens when you bomb someone's country they tend
to take it personally.
IF THIS BE
TREASON
A series
of embarrassing hits on Red Cross facilities, at first denied,
then acknowledged, plus the visual similarity between yellow
cluster bombs and those yellow food packages being dropped
simultaneously all this adds up to an unmitigated disaster,
and if it be "defeatist," or even treason, to say so, then
so be it. The Afghan campaign has so far been a military and
a public relations catastrophe. Don't anybody tell me the
Age of Irony is dead, not when this abject failure has led
to an intensification rather than a correction of an
incorrect strategy.
THE WORTHLESS
ALLIANCE
The Rumsfeld
strategy has, so far, been to fight the "new war" with a strategy
inherited from the last two Kosovo and the Gulf war. In
the former we grasped a dubious instrument, the indigenous
but brutal Kosovo "Liberation" Army, and gave them the air
cover they needed to win. But it isn't working with the Northern
Alliance: the KLA swam in a sea of popular sympathy, but Afghans
remember the era of chaotic brutality brought on by these
"liberators" the last time the Alliance took control of the
country.
MORE IS LESS
With the Kosovo strategy failing, it appears
that the hawks have won the debate within the administration:
we're going to keep doing what has failed so far, only more
so. More weapons to the Northern Alliance, more and heavier
bombing raids carried out against a diminishing list of significant
military targets, more US troops on the ground. Not to mention
more announcements and "spin" than a presidential campaign
and just as blatantly political.
THE WAR THAT
MATTERS
We are fighting
two wars, and losing both. We are losing what is the real
war, for most Americans: the war on anthrax, the war on hijackers
and other madmen intent on killing us right here in America.
This is the war that really matters because it is the one
we have to win. What I want to know is what makes our
rulers think they can conquer and hold Afghanistan, and perhaps
other parts of the Middle East, if Congress has to abandon
the US Capitol and the Supreme Court is sent fleeing into
the night?
THE VOICE OF
REASON
John Mearsheimer,
writing in today's [November 4] New York Times, makes
the important point that bribes rather than bombs should
be our weapon of choice in Afghanistan. Since there is nothing
much to bomb, and the introduction of ground troops before
winter is highly problematic, we have no choice but to pursue
an approach that "would emphasize ground-level diplomacy,
with open wallets, among Pashtun leaders in central and southern
Afghanistan," backed up by the closest cooperation with Pakistan
and "selective military actions."
RUMSFELD'S
WAR
Mearsheimer,
a West Point graduate and co-director of the Program on International
Security Policy at the University of Chicago, is the veritable
voice of reason compared to the editorial screamers and TV
talking head warriors who dominate our national discourse.
He estimates that it would take half a million American soldiers
to properly pacify Afghanistan on the scale that Senator John
McCain and others are now advocating. A massive ground invasion
would have to mean a permanent occupation force, one that
would be fighting a seasoned guerrilla army with support from
all over the Islamic world. Aside from the sobering logistical
and political obstacles standing in the way of such a strategy,
what seems clear is that Rumsfeld and his fellow hawks are
intent on using a massive sledgehammer to eradicate a cloud
of poisonous mosquitoes.
BRIBES, NOT
BOMBS
Mearsheimer reminds us that "the principal target is Al
Qaeda," not the conquest of Afghanistan, and underscores the
reality of the "new war" where human intelligence is more
important than sheer firepower. As he puts it:
"The
most important ingredient in the war against Al Qaeda is good
intelligence, which will allow the United States to locate
the terrorists and strike at them with deadly force when the
time is right and to locate, protect and reward those who
come to the American side. The Bush administration should
devote abundant resources to improving America's intelligence
capabilities and to buying information on the terrorists from
other governments."
STOP
THE BOMBING
The
limits of air power have been reached: the bombing should
be immediately halted, before the US damages its cause in
the region irreparably and forever. The unintended consequence
of the bombing is to turn ordinary Afghans against the US,
and harden them in the cause of resistance to foreign aggression.
With every passing day the Afghan quagmire seems deeper, and
more ominous, and Mearsheimer highlights this eerily evocative
aspect of the developing US strategy by reminding us that
"Afghanistan is four times the size of South Vietnam, 60 times
the size of Kosovo" and, unlike the other two examples,
has never stayed conquered for too long.
A QUAGMIRE
AWAITS
The Rice-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz
wing of this administration, having won the initial battle
against the "doves" centered around Secretary of Sate Colin
Powell, now face calls by ultra-hawks the Wolfowitz-McCain-Weekly
Standard faction to do something spectacular. Massive
infusions of ground troops, massive bombings raids, massive
force applied indiscriminately, crudely, and relentlessly.
The purpose is not purely military, but primarily political:
to shore up morale, and increase flagging support for the
war, not only in America but also in Great Britain, where
a once huge pro-war majority is rapidly shrinking. The Rumsfeld
crew is under pressure from the ultra-hawks, like McCain,
who are even more intensely political. Together they are taking
us into a massive military intervention that has all the makings
of a classic quagmire. The Afghan War, if it proceeds along
these lines, will go down in history as yet another unwinnable
war that we were lured into by our enemies and talked into
by our well-meaning "friends," both at home and abroad.
DOWN
A SLIPPERY SLOPE
So we have
two wars: one that all of us are fighting and desperately
hoping for victory, and another that some loyal Americans
see as a disaster in the making, albeit not one that it is
too late to stop. A defined and targeted campaign to take
out Al Qaeda and its Afghan supporters is both justified and
necessary: the conquest of Afghanistan under cover of a "war
on terrorism" is neither. Nor is it likely to succeed. As
we have warned from the beginning, what should have been more
of a police action directed at Bin Laden and his operatives
could easily turn into a general war against the Afghan people,
and that is precisely what has occurred. The extended bombing
campaign has Vietnamized this campaign, and we are sliding
down the slippery slope into a quagmire.
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