Cost of doing business
Having staked out the position that the dialogue on public affairs
is and needs to be on-going. I want to offer some examples of the cost
of not doing so. We are lead by people who cannot or will not admit to
ever being wrong. If we hold our tongues, they will eventually lead us
to catastrophe even as much as they protest they are leading us away
from it.
Margaret Warner interviewed Paul Wolfowitz for the Newshour last Wednesday, Online NewsHour: Wolfowitz Discusses Tsunami Relief Iraq Elections -- January 19, 2005.
I hadn't seen Wolfowitz sit for an interview for a while so I watched
with some interest. The first part concerning the junket with Andrew
Natsios and Gov. Jeb Bush to Indonesia was sincere and sensitive;
although, the concurrent network coverage of that trip dealt little
with the part of his mission (as deputy Secretary of Defense) which
concerned lifting the current humans rights sanctions which prevent
arms sales to Indonesia. It was the next part, his vapid denial-laden
description of the Iraq war which stuck with me. Margaret Warner asked how
Mr. Wolfowitz responds to feelings by some that the administration
mislead the public about the rationale for the war. He leads with the Wmd: everyone thought they had them gambit. -- I don't believe so. No, the intelligence was very strong
on all these points. And frankly, I think if I may say so, I think some
of the critics now are a bit too definitive about what we've
learned. They say there are no stockpiles found. Well, at least so far
that's true. Let me finish, okay? So far, that's true, but does that
mean no WMD?... So I don't believe this discussion is helped by
accusations of misleading. There was a very strong intelligence
assessment which had to be taken seriously. If this -- turn it around,
Margaret. If we had been wrong the other way and if the threat had
really been imminent and we had been hit with an anthrax attack here
that was tied to Iraq and the president had done nothing about it, what
would people then say?
This by the way shows the importance of trying to swing the
CIA. DIA's custom intelligence shops run by the civilian leadership
(specifically here asst. deputy secretary Douglas Feith, it is
interesting that he now is going off to spend time with his family : Top Pentagon Aide Who...)
would have had little sway over the international intelligence
community. It was necessary to get the CIA to buy into it a little, or
at least bullied into not actively resisting it. Few aside from the
Washington Post and Judith Miller of the New York Times ever really
believed it. Mr. Wolfowitz still seems to believe in his definitive
non-fact and signals with his words here, there is no contrary evidence
that can ever change his mind. I liked the impatient dismissive "...wait
let me finish", to Ms Warner who was basically serving up
softball questions to him. Also his presence-of-mind to add "tied to Iraq" between anthrax attack, and President done nothing
Now between statements they are willing to make, and those
they are less willing to make, we glimpse the widening war on terror
soon to come. The Presidents own inaugural speech, and Seymour
Hersh's article in last weeks New Yorker. A story initially denied but
confirmed by the week-end, on DoD's paramilitay intelligence operations
(see Bush's Father Warns Against Extrapolating From Speech, Ready for a fight, The Coming Wars, and New York Times > Intelligence: Pentagon Sends Its Spies to Join Fight on Terror).
The post 9/11 blur, which is the administrations national
security strategy - its entire foreign policy, can be summed up in the
fearful phrase; 'Imagine what might happen...if we didn't/don't.' Call
it the Cost of Not Doing it (making war on all our enemies), or CoNDi, for short.
There is rhetorical and logical looseness to this argument.
One that either can't or doesn't wish to discern among these threats.
Conflating all disagreement with U S interests with annihilatic intent,
and leaves them to prove the negative that it doesn't. Again from Mr. Wolfowitz:
And the burden was on them to come clean, to
declare everything they had and to not obstruct inspectors and they
defied that resolution. At that point, the president faced a critical
decision of how you weigh the risk.
Let me throw out a couple of analogies here, metaphors for
war. In the first scenario two neighbors vie to put a garish neon
display on their roof first, a laughing bare-bellied Santa Claus
manufactured by Hotei Christmas decorations ltd. A community
compact allows for such displays, putting up the more involved displays is
referred to by area residents as 'going nucular'. By generally followed agreement these are limited to one per street. The first
man buys such an object and installs it with gusto. It is a
considerable middle-class coup, and he baths in the accolades and
acknowledgment of the street. His neighbor is consumed with envy. Of
the power, and of the glory. He can afford one he reasons, and he can
put it together (comes as a kit). So he buys one and starts to put it
up. At this, the first man runs up, slaps a ladder against his
neighbors house scrambles up and starts to yank the Santa down. Yelling
that his neighbor can't have it, because he has one already.
In the second scenario: A man becomes convinced that his
neighbor has bought a semi-automatic assault rifle at the local flea
market, and is going to use it to shoot up the school bus when it comes
by on a certain day. Therefore; he purchases a gun similar to that
which he believes his neighbor has himself. On the day, just
before the bus arrives, he kicks in his neighbors door murders his
neighbor and half his family, whom he believes to be accomplices, in a
shocking and awful hail of bullets and blood.
These are charactertures, to be sure, but whatever argument we
are using lies between them. Between reasonable men caught up in an
emotional and unreasonable mood, and paranoid pathology. Many nations
have achieved workable levels of weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear
weapons are a djinn that came out of the bottle at Alamagordo, sixty
years ago. They are never going back in. One reality of weapons
politics is that those who can build a bomb and whom we can not stop
are described differently than those we believe we can stop. It is an
unfortunate artifact of our policy is that it becomes absurd and
arbitrary as nations draw near completing a program of acquisition.
Particularly when measured against the indifference accorded the
disintegrating management of the arsenals of the former Soviet states,
which is likely Al Qaeda's first choice for obtaining such weapons. All
the good intentions in the world can not mask the arrogance and cold
hostility of using armies to install democracy in order to feel secure
in this world.
11:52:18 PM  ;;
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