IT WAS CLEAR EVEN FROM THE POLLS that something changed during Anthrax Week. When Gallup asked Americans about the most important issues facing the nation, that perennial favorite response from prosperous times–“education!”–registered only 3 percent. AIDS, drugs, civility, and various other concerns of a polity with a lot of time on its hands registered zero. Eighty percent cited issues of security, terrorism, and war. What’s more, they voted with their feet, mobbing doctors’ offices for prescriptions for the anthrax antidote Cipro and, in the case of the House of Representatives, evacuating the Capitol under duress for the first time since the War of 1812. The good news is the American people are focused. The bad news is they are panicked. And the even worse news is they’re right to be. Panic is seldom a productive response, but even less productive has been the phony bucking-up of those politicians who have split hairs over whether or not to refer to the ongoing biological attack as “terrorism”–the better, one fears, to avoid altering our habits to fight it. Most obviously out of his depth was the Health and Human Services secretary, Tommy Thompson, whose resignation had been overdue days before. “I don’t know” is not in his vocabulary, and there is no politician in more desperate need of the phrase. This is a man who speculated that Florida photo editor Robert Stevens had contracted the anthrax that killed him while fishing in a trout stream. There was one policy on which Thompson was adamant throughout the week: The United States would not break the patent of the German pharmaceutical manufacturer Bayer AG on Cipro, the antibiotic most widely recommended for anthrax. Breaking the patent could bring American stockpiles up to desirable levels within three months; under the Thompson plan, Bayer can work triple shifts to accomplish that goal in just under two years. Now, breaking the patent may be necessary, and it may not be. But the decision ought to be made on the basis of wartime medical necessity, not the confidence of German investors. One silly idea that should meet its demise after last week is that every changing of daily routines constitutes a “victory for the terrorists.” The president had useful business to do in China and Russia, and we assume he was right to head abroad just as the anthrax panic was spreading. But the rationale his staff gave to the New York Times was preposterous: “The president, the aides said, sided with those who insisted that he must go through with the trip if he expected the country to take seriously his repeated urging to get on with life as usual.” All well and good, as long as we understand that life as usual means wartime life as usual. We’re not talking about metaphors any longer: The ultimate “victory for the terrorists” will come if we forget that we are fighting a war. IF THE POLITICIANS WEREN’T WORRIED, it was partly because they were taking care of themselves in ways they were urging their public not to bother with. A reasonable question is: If we’re supposed to be going about our business, why is the vice president in hiding? House minority leader Richard Gephardt explained the evacuation of the Capitol by saying, “We have got hundreds of young people up here, and we don’t want them put in harm’s way.” What young people? His 28-year-old staffers? These are the employees of our elected representatives. Last week, in a Hillary Clinton-esque bit of opinion-manipulation, they became “The Children.” (What about our children? Joe Sixpack can be forgiven for asking.) After anthrax was discovered in one of his Manhattan offices, New York governor George Pataki refused to be tested because, he said, “I don’t think it’s necessary.” Actually, testing is useful not just diagnostically but epidemiologically, for charting the spread of the disease. It’s not necessary to Pataki because he’s taking some of that understocked Cipro that Americans fear will be all gone by the time they get anthrax. That’s why Tom DeLay was the opposite of reassuring when he said, “The American people need to know that these terrorists are going after specific people. . . . People that are symbols. Somebody in Sugarland, Texas, shouldn’t worry about anthrax.” Understand? You’re not important enough for al Qaeda to attack. Americans could be forgiven for concluding from DeLay’s rant that they’re not important enough for the American government to protect, either. (Presumably, the fault rests with the 5,000 dead in the World Trade Center for choosing to work in a building that was so “symbolic.” And presumably those crop-dusters Mohamed Atta sought to rent in Florida were being jiggered to drop anthrax only on famous people.) THE CHIEF FALSEHOOD that our leaders were trying to fob off on the American people is that this war doesn’t really have a home front. Much of the leadership spent the week desperate to convince Americans there is no significant cell of Islamic terrorists in this country bent on taking American lives–even as it becomes increasingly obvious to the American public that there is. Among the four al Qaeda terrorists sentenced to life in New York last week for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania was the Lebanese-born Wadih El-Hage. El-Hage is an American citizen. So is Mohamed Abdi, the Somali-born cabdriver in Virginia whose phone number was found in the car of one of the Dulles airport hijackers. At a time when even some American citizens are bent on the country’s destruction–inside the tent, pissing in–Middle Americans are probably beginning to ask why illegal immigrants about whom they know nothing are still checking the luggage at their local airport. Should we be grateful that politicians are not exploiting this suspicion with appeals to xenophobia? No. Because politicians are, for their own ends, indulging a considerably more dangerous delusion. Last week, there was wide airing of a bizarre, wishful-thinking canard that the attacks might have been carried out by some crank “hate group” from the Heartland. Unnamed “investigators” told Brian Ross of ABC that the letters that accompanied the anthrax sent to Tom Daschle and Tom Brokaw showed a “command of idiomatic English” that pointed to an American nativist crank. (Applying literary criticism to the attacks allowed Ross and others to ignore the attackers’ technological sophistication.) Christopher Dodd agreed. “My gut instinct tells me that these attacks . . . were more a domestic variety,” he said. Yeah. Maybe Newt Gingrich did it. This smiley-face minimizing of germ warfare ties our hands, to little psychological end. There will have to be a side to this war on terrorism that involves deporting suspicious illegals and interdicting them at our borders. And yet every effort to take extraordinary wartime measures has come up against some antiquated, pre-September 11 political interest group. The New York Times has reported that, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, Senator Dianne Feinstein suggested a six-month moratorium on student visas, which several of the hijackers used to enter the country. In the last decade, 16,000 students from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, and Syria arrived with such visas. Her measure has thus far been blocked by education lobbies–specifically, graduate schools that treasure foreign students because they pay full tuition. Another holdover from peacetime is the non-compliance of Saudi Arabia and Egypt with the Advance Passenger Information System (APIS). There are roughly a hundred international airlines that fly into the United States. Ninety-four of them participate in APIS, which involves wiring a manifest to U.S. authorities, once a flight is in the air, so that passengers’ names can be checked against various U.S. government watch lists. Saudi Arabia still refuses to participate, and one of its diplomats explains why. “At this time, hundreds of Saudi citizens are being detained and questioned with regard to the hijackings,” he says. “A lot of them are innocent people. That number would probably quad
ruple.” So Saudi planes continue to offload their uncheckable passengers day after day, with no complaint from the United States. Wouldn’t want to offend our ally, after all. The lesson of last week should be that the terrorists have the ability, the will, and the chemicals to wage biological war on the United States. The fears of Americans are rational, and they grow more rational the more their politicians pooh-pooh them. But the thing about a terrorist war is that irrational fears are not to be dismissed, either. Our enemies are not planning to wage this war on our timetable. The logistics and aims of the September 11 bombings–and not merely their wanton evil–were unimaginable. So will be the terrorist attacks to come. Much of the go-on-about-your-business talk of the last week has rested implicitly on the assumption that those spreading anthrax will continue to confine their attacks to the U.S. mail. But why would they? Think stadiums and trains and nurseries. Don’t think about al Qaeda managing to smuggle a nuclear weapon into a major city. Think about it smuggling such weapons into twenty different cities, and then threatening to detonate them simultaneously. Or, worse, not threatening. Other threats are hardly more comforting for being predictable: To ask whether there will be a smallpox or Ebola outbreak in the United States is to ask only whether the terrorists have access to smallpox or Ebola. The Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam editorialized in Friday’s New York Times that pitching in could allow Americans to forge “a better society in a time of war.” It goes without saying that such a society ought to be “better” not only in its civic involvement but also in its ability actually to get the war won. In this light, the most disturbing thing about Anthrax Week is that it showed politicians of both parties to have prior ideological commitments that array them against this effort. Christopher Dodd has gotten way too much mileage out of Kumbaya platitudes about racial tolerance to be able even to process the knowledge that a sophisticated terrorist network is operating in the United States to kill Americans because they’re Americans. Tommy Thompson is too old to unlearn what he takes to be the invariable truth that the interests of the American people will always be in harmony with those of the shareholders of Bayer AG. Both are exercising the kind of survival instinct that comes most naturally to them–a political survival instinct. They are wishing their way back into the United States they ruled on September 10, 2001, a country that does not exist any longer, a country where the most successful politicians were those who most persuasively tapped into the American creed, which back then could be summed up as: “Let’s hold hands and buy stuff.” Last week called into question whether a war can be won with leadership that was elected in a different country. Dodd, Thompson, DeLay, and others are engaging in their own panicky desperation, every bit as risible as that of the Americans they aspire to calm. Americans, meanwhile, are looking for something to do. They understand far better than their politicians that, while a democracy at peace can be manipulated, a democracy at war must be mobilized. They also understand better than their politicians that we’re at war in the first place. Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. October 29, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 7
