February 15, 2006

A Pre-Emptive Attack Against America Going Soft

So it’s 2002, and Al Qaeda is going to try to re-live 9/11, this time West Coast-style, by taking out the tallest building in Los Angeles. But the United States and its allies – using a combination of intelligence activity, surveillance and effective interrogation – foil the plot.

So if you’re George W. Bush, you shout the story from the rooftops, because this is a huge victory over the terrorists – and you’ve still got mid-term Congressional elections and your own re-election campaign to get through.

But we never heard the details of this story. Not in 2002, when the president’s party usually loses seats in Congress. Not in 2004, even when John Kerry led in the polls in mid-summer, the economy wasn’t so good and the experts were predicting Bush would need a miracle to win.

All that time, Bush kept the story in his back pocket, even to the brink of his own political extinction on Nov. 2, 2004, when the early returns had it looking like Philly cheesesteaks with Swiss cheese would soon be on the menu at the White House. If Bush was going to go down, he would take the L.A. story to his political grave.

Why? Because the United States really has serious enemies who pose serious threats, and the more they know about our counterterrorism activities, the less effective the same activities will become – and some things are more important than politics.

Fast forward to 2006. Bush’s wiretapping of Al Qaeda suspects has been branded by Democrats and the mainstream media as “warrantless eavesdropping on Americans.” Aggressive interrogation techniques have been labeled “torture.” More than a few Democrats are accusing Bush of exaggerating terrorist threats in order to scare Americans into giving him unjustified executive powers, which they are sure he will use to persecute political enemies.

So after months of this storyline, Bush says, enough! You want to know what kind of threats we really face? And what we’re getting for our efforts to counter them? Well listen good!

Four years later. After keeping it in his pocket through two election cycles when it looked like he really could have used it, Bush finally brings the L.A. story forward.

Why now? The immediate storyline, of course, is that he did it for . . . politics! He’s in trouble in the polls, don’t you know, so he comes out with this L.A. story. Yeah, that’s it. He didn’t use it when his re-election was in doubt, but now that his post-re-election approval ratings are in the 40s, he is desperate and he plays his ace.

This theory is hard to stomach even if you believe that no one ever does anything for a reason other than politics and poll numbers. But if you believe there are actually serious reasons for doing serious things, you might consider that America is getting soft – at least to the extent you can tell from some of our loudest voices. Too many of us have lost sight of the horror of the Twin Towers collapse, obsessed as we are with the horror of the National Security Agency listening in while we discuss banana cream pie recipes with Aunt Thel.

For this, we can thank the New York Times and an as-yet unnamed leaker, who went public with one of the most important and carefully guarded methods our nation had for fighting terrorism. Why? Because for them, the enemy isn’t Al Qaeda. It’s George W. Bush. And the threat isn’t bombs, hijackings, anthrax or suicide attacks. It’s tax cuts, privatization and Alaskan oil wells.

This is a far cry from the public mood that prevailed after 9/11, because we have more than returned to politics as usual. We have gone way beyond it – with Democrats and many of their media allies painted so far into the bash-Bush-at-every-turn corner that they now find it impossible exercise even the slightest restraint for the sake of the nation. So the wiretaps of Al Qaeda get repackaged as wiretaps of . . . you! They also find themselves incapable of even modestly celebrating when a good thing happens for America. So the Democratic response to the news that we stopped Al Qaeda in Los Angeles is for the city’s whiny mayor to complain that he was “blind-sided” by the president’s speech (until he is reminded that the California Department of Homeland Security gave him a heads-up a day ahead of time), and for Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, to snort that Bush’s recounting of the story serves no good purpose.

Oh yes it does. It reminds us of what’s real, true and relevant. Not paranoid fantasies of Bush listening in on your poetry readings. But really bad people blowing you to smithereens.

Bush had to tell this story now because he sees his political opponents making headway toward their goal of convincing America that there is really no serious threat, except the one posed by Bush himself. The polls don’t indicate that the public has started buying this notion en masse – not yet anyway – but you will recall that it’s not Bush’s style to wait until a threat is imminent. The prospect of this nation going soft on the threats we face requires a pre-emptive attack.

This is Column # DC20. Request permission to publish here.