Menschenhawks

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On this, the anniversary of the WTC and Pentagon attacks, I’d like to introduce you to my friend Brian.

I’ve known Brian for around 13 years now. He’s got a lovely wife and an adorable tyke and a baby on the way, and you can see pictures of them all at his website. He’s got a great head for business and an inexhaustible reservoir of good advice which he dispenses to his friends. If you look up the word mensch in a Yiddish-English dictionary, you’ll see his picture. (It means “truly decent guy”.)

Which is why I was struck by his essay about the WTC. You can read it for yourself, and I strongly recommend you do, as it lays out his background for what he has to say. This includes the following, which he thought as he visited Ground Zero for the first time:

Think what you will about the war against terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, or a war in Iraq. At that moment, staring at the burning rubble, it all seemed very clear. It didn’t need to be fair. It didn’t need discussion or debate. We were going to find “them” and destroy “them.” We were going to make sure this kind of thing would never, ever happen again. And we alone were going to determine when we were finished. Period. The rest of the world could help us or get the hell out of our way.

Brian implies, although he doesn’t actually say, that he’s moved on from this visceral reaction. But this crystallized for me the fear I’m feeling about the motivations of the administration, and of the people who are either supporting them or tacitly going along.

It takes a strong individual to face fear, anger, and the urge for revenge, and then move on and say that those were feelings of the moment. There’s no question that Americans are feeling much less secure than they did on September 10, 2001. Some people are downright petrified.

Part of it is fear of the unknown. The big medical news here is West Nile virus, which has killed several dozen people and has everyone nervously checking for mosquito bites. These are largely the same people who try to go to work when they have the flu, which kills around 10,000 Americans a year.

Likewise, the best way for you to not make it home tonight is to get in your car and drive somewhere, which prevented 41,821 people from ever getting home in 2000. Doing some quick math, that’s about one WTC attack per month. Around eight times as many die from cigarette smoking. Therefore, if we were blessed with Vulcan logic, our war on terrorism would be taking a back seat to other matters more likely to kill us.

But obviously, logic has nothing to do with this. If it did, people would always fly instead of drive. Risks are assessed based upon our feeling of control, and driving brings with it an illusory sense of control that you don’t get in the passenger cabin of a 747.

So now our leaders are fighting for their own sense of control, however illusory. We gained it first with our victory over the Taliban, if not Osama. We maintain it with airport security lines, threat assessment color coding, and ongoing statements from the administration that range from the vaguely reassuring to the vaguely terrifying, sometimes in the same sentence. Soon, unless there is a major sea change in the political tide, we’ll be going to war in Iraq to get our next hit off of that very addictive drug.

The reason we want to go kick some Iraqi ass is because all of us had our metaphorical moment at Ground Zero, and few of us have recovered. And if we go, we’ll win; if we doubted that for a second, perhaps we’d be less willing to go. The only question is whether Iraqi casualties will outnumber ours by 10 to 1 or 100 to 1.

The problem is that the true questions of security in the Age of Terrorism don’t get answered by the defeat of nations. No one can say whether defeating Iraq is better in the long run for our safety than not going there in the first place. Sure, Saddam’s a bad man who wants nukes, but we’ve known that since 1989. (Before which time, he was our ally against Iran.) The only thing that’s changed vis a vis our national security regarding Iraq in the past year is that there were rumors that he sorta had something to do with al-Qaeda. Those rumors have been repudiated, but here we are, getting ready to head back to the Persian Gulf and leave it a lot flatter than it is now.

If that someday makes it more likely that we’re targeted by terrorists, and decreases our security, the lines of cause and effect will be far too fuzzy to draw convincingly. If you don’t buy the idea that American actions have some effect on the emotions we arouse in others, no amount of this kind of evidence will ever convince you otherwise.

But if our goal is truly “to make sure this kind of thing would never, ever happen again”, rather than raw vengence or the need to just do something to make ourselves feel better at any cost, we need to start giving some serious thought to what we mean by security, and what we do to sustain it.

[This essay is part of The Red and the Blue discussion: 9/11 Anniversary, 2002.]

The Myth of Republican Competence

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Joshua Micah Marshall, in the Washington Monthly, writes Confidence Men, subtitled “Why the myth of Republican competence persists, despite all the evidence to the contrary”:

“While no one bats a thousand in politics, it’s actually difficult to think of one thing the vice president has been responsible for that has not ended in muddle or disaster. Yet his reputation for competence has survived. The same applies to the Bush administration generally.”

Washington Post, on George W. Bush

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Washington Post, 8/30/02, A5:

President Bush asked Congress yesterday to come up with $825 million in emergency funds to help the nation recover from one of its worst fire seasons.

The request came two weeks after Bush, citing the need for spending restraint, blocked $5.1 billion in emergency funds…. Among the money held up was $50 million in disaster assistance for fires and $150 million to help the nation’s fire departments.

President Seuss

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The thing that I fundamentally just don’t get about W’s popularity was brought home by his speech on Thursday on the recent fires out west. The quote below is a complete transcript of the snippet on NPR:

We need to thin. We need to make our forests healthy by using some common sense. We need to understand if you let kindling build up and there’s a lightning strike, you’re goin’ to get yourself a big fire, that’s what we got to understand. We gotta understand that it makes sense to clear brush, we gotta make sense… make sense to encourage people to ensure that the forest is not only healthy from disease, but healthy from fire. That’s what we gotta do here in America, we haven’t done that in the past. We just haven’t done it, and we’re now paying the price.

This is one of those few cases when I’ve got no disagreement with what GWB is saying; I’m not a forest policy expert, but I’ve been hearing this for years. US policy for generations has been to stop every fire, every time, as quickly as possible. Which lets all sorts of kindling build up, and so instead of dozens of manageable fires, you get annual Armageddons. For this reason, the Forest Service actually sets more fires than it puts out, in order to thin down the kindling. It was one of these “managed fires” that got out of control and threatened Los Alamos.

But the speech wasn’t lauding existing forest policy, it was an introduction of the new Bush plan to thin the forests by shredding hunks of regulations and handing timberland over to industry. “Clear out the underbrush,” the new policy goes, “and you can keep that timber as well as some other trees you feel like picking up.” (Differing reports are saying different things about what the policy hands over to the timber industry that isn’t underbrush.)

Which leads to the first thing I don’t get about W’s approval. This entire administration is marked by rampant political opportunism that would make Bill Clinton blush, and only leftwing nutcases like myself seem to notice. The tax cut, originally proposed as a return of the “people’s money” when times were good and revenues were high, first become “necessary due to the recession”, and then a matter of “economic security.” September 11th is the retroactive justification for dozens of pet projects on the Bush 2001 agenda.

And now the west is burning, people are scared, and Bush promises to do something, on the assumption that no one’s going to notice the dispatch of US property to private interests. Based on past experience, he’s probably right.

What makes this even more interesting is that for the first time, a coalition of western state governments and environmental groups have already hammered out a plan to thin underbrush without corporate giveaways. This is a region that is spectacularly suspicious of federal government intrusion. Bush and many of the western governors are Republicans, the “state’s rights” and “get the feds outta my business” party. It will be interesting to see how many of them conveniently ignore that aspect of their philosophy.

But the thing that really nails me is how happy people are with the Dr. Seussization of domestic and international politics. Our enemies are all evil. Terrorists hate freedom. We just gotta clear underbrush. To hell with how. Apparently, if you serve up complex issues in an oversimplified fashion, and deliver them in a folksy, downhome, aw-shucks fashion, you too can be a popular president.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “We should make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.” The only things missing from current political debate are bright illustrations in primary colors.

Quote of the week

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The Scene: Atlantic City, New Jersey. Noon. Jeff and his father leaving the apartment, Jeff still recovering from a massively sleep-deprived trip to Italy.

Jeff (squinting and shielding his eyes): Damn, it’s bright.

Jeff’s dad: Yes, that’s called “daylight.”

No shoes, no ID, no service

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John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation among other virtues, has filed a lawsuit against the US government challenging as unconstitutional the requirement to show ID before boarding a US domestic plane.

At issue is a series of secret security directives issued by the Federal Aviation Administration and/or the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), in consultation with the Department of Justice and the Office of Homeland Security.  The directives appear to require US airlines to demand identification before allowing customers to travel.  Because the directives are secret, no citizen actually knows what they require.

Such regulations are unconstitutional because they are unpublished; require government agents to search and seize citizens who are not suspected of crimes; burden the rights to travel, associate, and petition the government; and discriminate against those who choose anonymity.

I’m a die-hard civil libertarian, but even I found this a bit to hard to swallow. If you do as well, I urge you to read the FAQ, which spells out what was news to me: flying without ID isn’t against the law. No law from Congress, no Executive Order. What forbids it are various secret rules promulgated by—well, no one’s quite sure. And what the Supreme Court has stated in no uncertain terms is that Americans have the right to anonymity, and the right to travel.

I thought this was an interesting case. Don’t dismiss it before you’ve read the site.