[iwar] [fc:Is.America.At.War?]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-08-14 06:41:49


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Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 06:41:49 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Is.America.At.War?]
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Insight Magazine
September 2, 2002
Is America At War?
By J. Michael Waller 
A subterranean river of leaks has undermined the war on terrorism and
subverted contingency plans for replacing the brutal regime in Iraq,
according to U.S. intelligence sources. They warn that this is just the
beginning of ongoing efforts, some coordinated and some not, to subvert the
administration of George W. Bush. And, say insiders, it is being made worse
by White House political handlers who have been doing their best to distract
public attention from the president's tough and repeated warnings that the
country is at war. A deliberately cultivated atmosphere of normalcy has
diluted the president's message, stripping his consistent pronouncements of
their urgency. 
The White House political and public-liaison staffs have failed to mobilize
the president's grass-roots allies and constituent groups for the long,
grueling fight ahead, say concerned friends of Bush. Poor White House
relations with Congress meanwhile have allowed moderate Republicans and
liberal Democrats to question the president's Iraq agenda, say House
staffers, and failed to fortify conservatives who could act as surrogates
for Bush on Capitol Hill and across the country. Fewer and fewer people can
say with a straight face that the United States is at war. 
The intelligence services may be working overtime, the armed forces
stretched to their limits at levels of intensity sometimes not seen since
World War II, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) and new homeland-security
structures operating harder than ever to keep the public safe on the home
front. But, despite all that Bush and his Pentagon team under Donald
Rumsfeld can do, is the U.S. government really on a war footing? 
"We're not appropriately at war by any historical standard," says
foreign-policy historian John Tierney, a professor at the Institute of World
Politics. In Tierney's view, it's a mistake for national leaders to pretend
that all is normal despite the military operations against terrorists and
what the president warns will be a "war" lasting years or even generations.
"If you want to call today's situation normal, then you cannot be in a war.
'Normal' at home by definition means that you're not at war. War is a
profound interruption of daily life," Tierney says. 
Meanwhile, White House insiders tell Insight, political elements of the
administration increasingly are perceived as catering to a carping, whining
activist community that feels offended by what widely are regarded as
legitimate security measures. Other senior administration officials confide
that they are infuriated with the White House for ordering homeland-security
chief Tom Ridge, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, FBI Director Robert
Mueller and others to cater to the complaints of small but loud Muslim and
Arab activist groups, which they say have invested their energy carping
about how they have become "victims" of government abuse, racism and
bigotry. "Who's making us do this?" demands an angry senior presidential
national-security appointee. 
Tierney says the very word "war" has become a cartoon. "Americans have
cheapened the term," he says. "'War on drugs,' 'war of the sexes,' 'gang
wars,' 'war on poverty.' It's more than a semantic issue; it's a substantive
one. Words that are used without any precise meaning lose their impact and
power to compel. So polemicists say we're not at war since the president has
not mobilized the people or even called for national sacrifice." 
This isn't to say that the White House hasn't asked its natural
constituencies for help. "President Bush put out a call some months ago for
people and organizations nationwide to participate in the homeland-defense
effort," says Jerry Newberry, spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars
(VFW). "He's talked to various groups and people all around the country
asking them to contribute in various ways. The VFW did meet with a member of
the White House staff some months ago and, in fact, we volunteered our
services in whatever way we could. We, like many other organizations,
encouraged our posts to do various things in the community - make contact
with emergency providers, make ourselves available in emergency situations
and make our posts available in case of natural disasters, that type of
thing." 
But did the White House staff mobilize such groups to build support and
public awareness about the war on terrorism? No, Newberry says. "We had
already made the White House aware that we were in support of their efforts
and that we would do everything we could to offer our assistance in any way.
When the president came out and asked for the commitment of volunteer hours,
our people went to the White House, met with the director of the Freedom
Corps and put together a plan of action." 
Bush announced creation of the USA Freedom Corps in January to help
communities "prepare for and prevent crises and strengthen our homeland
security," according to a White House fact sheet. But nothing of substance
has been done to enlist the public in the broader war against terrorism,
which would include support for the politically difficult defense
transformation under way at the Pentagon. 
Nor has the White House staff invited nongovernmental defense groups to act
as surrogates, as was done in the Reagan years, to keep pro-defense leaders
and organizations informed, mobilized and motivated. It appears to have
ignored the successful Reagan formula, where presidential leadership was
supported by an issues-savvy White House staff committed to carrying out the
president's defense vision, by White House-directed coordination between and
among government agencies, by providing a steady flow of information to make
the president's case in a way the public readily could understand and by
credentialing and empowering the president's supporters in Washington and in
grass-roots America [see "Winning Page from Reagan Playbook," Aug. 20,
2001]. 
"During World War II, when people would hiss and piss about not being able
to do something, the answer always was, 'Don't you know there's a war on?'
Well, we don't know there's a war on," says Herbert Romerstein, a veteran
congressional investigator and historian of political communication. But
apparently key elements of the White House staff didn't get the message.
After the president's State of the Union address, in which he emphasized the
fight against terrorism as his top priority, the White House Office of
Public Liaison issued talking points that placed entitlement programs on the
top of the list and pointedly de-emphasized the president's war aims. White
House public-liaison activity with defense groups continues to be
alternately described as "limp," "weak," "nonexistent" and "useless,"
according to senior nongovernmental defense operatives who asked not to be
cited so as to maintain what tenuous relationships they have. 
But the White House political office eagerly has courted Muslim
organizations - throwing Bush's "with-us-or-with-the-terrorists" dictum to
the wind and ignoring the fact that some of these groups have been favorable
to terrorism in what is being euphemized as a well-intentioned but misguided
outreach program, say concerned White House insiders. Critics among the
president's friends tell Insight the administration has been burned time and
again by embracing American Muslim activists who turn out to be supporters
of Hamas or Hezbollah, some of whom can't even bring themselves to denounce
al-Qaeda by name. The critics say they fear some liberal enemy of the
president, such as the Washington Post, will put it all together just before
the election. 
These same critics note the exclusion of mainstream Muslims who openly
preach nonviolence and who have offered repeatedly to help antiterrorism
agents root subversive operatives from mosques across the United States. One
of those Muslim leaders, Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, who heads the
Supreme Islamic Council of America, loyally warned both the Clinton
administration and the current White House that they were getting mixed up
with some real rascals. "I'm sad because when I spoke up in 1999, they
didn't listen," Kabbani told the Detroit News last October. "And to the
extent that the extremists are everywhere - in the administration, on
Capitol Hill - they didn't do their homework." 
Has there been a change? Despite security concerns expressed widely among
the president's top intelligence specialists, the political specialists have
had their way. Before leaving for Uzbekistan recently, Kabbani told Insight,
"The White House needs to do its homework." 
Bush backers say the White House needs to do better with Congress, too. "Has
anyone noticed there is not a single conservative member of Congress taking
a leadership role in the fight over Iraq policy?" asks a frustrated senior
Republican Senate staffer. Liberal "[Sens.] Lugar [of Indiana], Biden [of
Delaware], Levin [of Michigan], Hagel [of Nebraska] and Lieberman [of
Connecticut] have stolen the show, with Lieberman being the only hawk. Why?
Why are conservatives MIA, the conservative critics ask, when our guys at
DOD [Department of Defense] are fighting State and the apparat tooth and
nail? Why aren't our friends in the administration begging for help?" In a
reference to the Senate GOP leadership, the staffer adds, "Why aren't we
offering it to them?" 
Officials opposed to an assertive antiterrorism policy are leaking secrets
to the liberal "prestige press" that editorially opposes the president, say
high-level Pentagon brass. A flag-rank officer grunts, "Can it be they
neither realize nor care that by leaking supersensitive intelligence reports
and highly classified war plans they are tipping off present and potential
enemies of the United States like al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein? These
b******s know what they are doing and they do it anyway!" A civilian DOD
expert warns: "Entire intelligence programs have been compromised, missions
doomed to failure and the lives of American service personnel placed
needlessly at risk, both in the present worldwide campaign against
terrorists and an anticipated final showdown with Saddam Hussein." 
Romerstein says, "The nature of national-security leaks has changed. During
the Clinton days, such leaks usually were from otherwise patriotic Americans
who were worried about cover-ups of real threats and malfeasance. But the
leaks of today are designed to undermine American policy, to harm our fight
against Iraq and against terrorism. They are more like during the Sandinista
campaigns [of the 1980s] when people on the left wanted to stop Reagan from
fighting the communists in Central America. They were calculated to damage
our war against the enemy; they contained untruths. 
You could tell many of them came from the [congressional] committees.
There's always enough spin to undermine the United States." 
Tierney says, "'Loose lips sink ships' was an old wartime slogan to guard
against careless casual conversation among factory workers, dockhands and
family members of servicemen - not against government officials leaking
classified material." 
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has been warning publicly about leaks since the
war began last October. He is a tough man, but until very recently he made
no move to seek out, fire or press charges against those inside government
leaking information. Now, after the New York Times and other papers
published details of an apparent war plan against Iraq, Rumsfeld means to
deal ruthlessly with the leakers, even if it means throwing some government
officials in jail. 
Rumsfeld says quietly that the country can do better, and nobody has been
more energetic than he in articulating the state of war. Seething that the
military wasn't killing the terrorist enemy fast enough, he called in late
July for more-aggressive operations against terrorist units in third
countries. Word is that he has to badger the Pentagon bureaucracy, both
civilian and uniformed, to keep them focused on the fact that America is
fighting a real war. "It's no secret to you all, to all of us, the secretary
wants everyone to understand the sense of urgency about what we're doing
here, and the threats out there are very, very real," said Pentagon
spokeswoman Torie Clarke in a recent meeting with reporters. "So he is
always communicating to everyone and to the senior military and civilian
leadership the sense of urgency with which they should address all these
matters." 
But a considerable number of Pentagon professionals still don't understand
the wartime situation, according to both civilian and uniformed personnel
there. The Armed Forces Press Service says, "Rumsfeld is constantly
reminding military and civilian personnel about the urgency of taking the
battle to the terrorists." The fact that he has to do that nearly a year
after Sept. 11 suggests the depth of the problem he and the president face
as they head toward a showdown with Saddam Hussein. 
J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight magazine.

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