On Aug. 20, 1998 President Clinton ordered the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant near Khartoum. His object? To kill Osama bin Laden. The Republican reaction? To accuse him of wagging the dog in order to distract people from what they considered to be the far more important Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Now, it's obvious that the Republicans weren't intentionally trying to shield bin Laden from becoming yet one more example of addition by subtraction. And, by stigmatizing Clinton for trying to kill a dangerous enemy, they didn't deliberately abet the greatest mass murder in American history. But the fact is that, as a practical matter, that's exactly what they did. The sad thing about this is that, when it comes to abetting our worst enemies, the disloyal bastards were just getting warmed up and remain passionately at it to this day.
I think it's important, at this juncture, to be clear about what I mean by Republican disloyalty and what I mean by describing them as fifth columnists. In a recent post I explained that Republicans are not very good Americans because they have betrayed and are betraying basic American values--for example, the president's claim that he has the right to ignore laws he doesn't like or his claim that he has the right to keep people in jail even after they've been declared innocent in court. You know; the kind of stuff bad rulers in one of those other countries are supposed to do. If you're disloyal to American values you are, by definition, disloyal to America. Republicans are disloyal to America.
Now as far as Republicans being fifth columnist, again, I don't think they're doing it deliberately. But, as the example that opened this post is intended to help show, that's pretty much what they've unwittingly accomplished.
So, let's talk about how a political party that was serious about fighting terrorism would act vs. a party that wanted to weaken our country and ensure that the terrorists would kill lots of Americans and grow strong--that is operate as de facto collaborationists.
Well if you wanted to stop terrorists, the first thing you'd want to do is identify the most important terrorists leaders and try to kill them. We've already started in on covering that one. Secondly, after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, you'd make fighting terrorism a top priority and direct as many resources as reasonably necessary towards detecting and preventing terrorism. You'd want the best, most thorough and unbiased intelligence you could get about who and what the most pressing threats were so you could act on them as effectively as possible. You'd improve port security by significantly increasing the percentage of incoming cargo containers that get inspected, since that's the easiest way to sneak in a nuke (it would also be nice if we kept American's ports under American control). You'd want to vastly increase the security of our chemical and nuclear plants since they have the potential to be horrifically destructive weapons that can be used against us. You'd do everything you reasonably could to show the Muslim world that the terrorists are wrong to call you imperialist. At the very least you wouldn't want to add fuel to that particular fire. You'd also want to develop alternative energy to keep the country's economy strong while weaning us of Arab oil thus undermining terrorism's motives and financial resources.
Now let us consider what a fifth columnist operating on behalf of our terrorist enemies would do.
The first thing you'd want to do is downgrade the importance of terrorism to the point where the government is hardly paying attention. You'd want to direct what resources are being devoted to fighting terrorism towards non-existent threats and to do that you'd harass competent intelligence professionals to demoralize them or even goad them into leaving. You'd ignore warnings that we were about to be attacked. Once attacked, you would avoid taking serious steps to stop it until it was over. Even then you wouldn't significantly improve port security or the security of our chemical and nuclear plants. Needing to do something, however, you'd make it a point to attack exactly the wrong people, preferably in an oil-rich Arab country to buttress terrorists' claims that you are an imperialist country that hates Islam and wants to oppress its people for their oil.
Not only would that help terrorist, but, even better, it would deplete the American military so that it we would have a much harder time defending ourselves during the next real emergency.
Now, offhand, how would you say things have been going? Well, Richard Clarke, the top terrorism pooh-bah in the Clinton White House was kept by the Bushies but demoted. He and George Tenent repeatedly and desperately attempted to meet with Vice President Cheney about the impending threat by famously declaring that Tenet's "hair was on fire." The meeting was put off until after the 9/11 attacks. Then there was the series of presidential daily briefings with titles like "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing," "Bin Laden threats are real" and, most famously of all, "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" that urgently needed to be ignored. On September 10th, attorney general John Ashcroft submitted a budget to congress recommending that anti-terrorism funding be cut.
On the day of September 11th, when Bush was informed that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center and we were definitely under attack, he could have flown into action which arguably would have been a good idea since there were still two planes in the air waiting to come down someplace awful. But that might have thwarted the one that hit the Pentagon. Instead, Bush sat in his chair listening to some kids read "My Pet Goat." Then he got together with his staff to write a speech assuring everyone that he was in control as United flight 93 was being wrestled into a Pennsylvania corn field.
To be honest, the early days of giving the Taliban the bum's rush in the Afghan campaign was handled brilliantly. I mean assisting Afghan warlord in the overthrow of their former oppressors and/or allies was a very nice move.
Unfortunately, things quickly reverted to what for Republicans, has proved normal.
Bin Laden is more than just the guy who masterminded the 9/11 attacks. He is a charismatic symbol of hope for millions of disaffect young Muslims who hate our guts, many of whom would be only two happy to kill us. Furthermore, it was known that a lot of these war lords and their men were decidedly shifty characters. It, therefore, was imperative from both a symbolic and practical standpoint that we personally whack the unholy bastard in the mountains of Tora Bora. That's if you sincerely wanted to fatally strike our nation's single most important enemy. A fifth columnist however, would want to make it look like we were trying to get the guy but actually let him go and then lose interest. Bush let him go and then lost interest.
Still, everybody was watching. What to do? Find a totally irrelevant country to attack, of course. In this case the best target for a fifth columnist would be an oil-rich Muslim country, the better to confirm suspicions of imperialism. And, of course, you're going to want to lie to and insult all of our traditional allies so they'll hate us and be of as little help as possible. Also, if you want to be tops at the fifth columnist game, you're going to need just enough military to achieve initial victory but keep the numbers small enough so that the occupation becomes a wasting quagmire that slowly evaporates our nation's military strength. Mission accomplished!
That's the international situation. Now comes the issue of how to mess things up at home.
The thing that really makes America a strong country is our economic might. Without our economic might our military might would be just a dream. Better create historic deficits so that we risk an economic meltdown. And since a truck bomb in a huge tank of hydro-chloride gas near one of our major cities would kill about a hundred thousand people, you'd better resist any attempt to mandate higher security standards at our nation's chemical factories. And don't worry about those nuclear power plants either; they'll take care of themselves just fine.
The only possible way to cap all this would be to sell our port security out to a country where officials have been known to consort with Osama bin Laden himself while failing to examine significantly more incoming containers thereby making it as easy as possible for terrorits to sneak in a nuke. Drink?
Now, of course, the Republicans are not really colluding with our Islamic Jihadist enemies. That's unfortunate. If they were, we'd undoubtedly be far more secure than we are today.