Si Vis Pacem, Para Woodwardum
If you lead a normal life outside Washington, and happened to tune into the Bush-Blair joint press conference during your lunch hour on April 16, that first question to President Bush may have seemed a bit mysterious: “Mr. President, did you ask Secretary Rumsfeld to draw up war plans against Iraq in November 2001, just as the military action was getting under way in Afghanistan? Why couldn’t Iraq wait?”
The question made sense only if you knew that the promotional machinery was being wheeled into place to sell the new book by Washington Post investigative eminence Bob Woodward. And the first bit of “news” from Woodward’s Plan of Attack was that planning for the Iraq war began shortly after 9/11. If this doesn’t strike you as news, if you assume that it’s routine due diligence by the Pentagon to plan for wars against America’s enemies, then that just shows how woefully out of touch you are with the state-of-the-art anti-Bush theories that Washington is wallowing in this election year.
That same afternoon following the press conference, the Post on its website gave the first authoritative peek into the book’s contents, what you might call the executive summary. Under the headline “Bush Planned for War as Diplomacy Continued,” the Post‘s William Hamilton reported:
Several things are noteworthy here. For starters, the idea raised in the press conference that there was overreach in the president’s wanting to plan a future war as the one in Afghanistan got under way is preposterous. Iraq “couldn’t wait” because (a) the then-fresh lesson of 9/11 was that the U.S. government had lacked sufficient urgency in going after its enemies; (b) war plans don’t get written like a reporter’s story, in a caffeine-fueled all-nighter; and (c) something known as the two-war doctrine had been official U.S. policy for a decade. It envisioned a circumstance such as prevailed after 9/11, in which the U.S. military might need to walk and chew gum at the same time. President Bush, in other words, was asking his subordinates at the Pentagon to do something that was part of their job descriptions.
The common thread in both the press conference questioning and the Post piece is the insinuation that something unusual and unseemly was going on in the run-up to the Iraq war. Look at that word even in the Post‘s summary of Woodward. Think about the implication here. Then ask yourself whether there is adult supervision in the Post newsroom. Can it possibly be the received wisdom at the Post that it is underhanded to prepare for war while pursuing a diplomatic solution? Does it not occur to them that the two impulses are usually complementary and not contradictory? Does everyone’s education now leapfrog over the classical wisdom, si vis pacem, para bellum–prepare for war if you want peace?
President Bush is famous for being impatient with reporters. Sometimes they really deserve it.
9/11 Hypocrisy Watch
Did you notice last week that the New York Times suspended its institutional hostility to ethnic profiling just long enough to whack President Bush? Here’s the sweet spot in the Times‘s April 12 editorial:
We will stipulate that the editorial page of the New York Times is perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the subject of “utter, uncomplicated self-righteousness.” But let us suppose that President Bush had left his vacation in Texas long enough to order that U.S. airlines prevent young Arab men from boarding their planes–for in everyday English that is what is meant by the bureaucratic term of art threat profile. Somehow we suspect that the editors of the New York Times would themselves have taken the next helicopter back from their own vacations in the Hamptons to scream for the president’s scalp.
To be fair, no reasonable American can blame the New York Times if its knee-jerk civil libertarianism prior to 9/11 helped create an atmosphere in which it would have been unthinkable for airlines to kick off passengers fitting some prudential “threat profile” developed by the FBI.
No, what’s disgraceful about the Times‘s criticism of Bush last week is that after 9/11, the paper has been resistant to screening of air passengers. Here, for instance, is the Times‘s editorial reaction on March 11, 2003, to what it called “The New Airport Profiling.”
As we said, we’re willing to grant that the New York Times is an authority on self-righteousness. However, on the subject of what “reasonable Americans” think about the president, we can’t see that the Times speaks with any credibility at all.
A Postscript on the Clarke Book
Reporter Mike Carter of the Seattle Times followed up last week on another shaky claim in Richard Clarke’s book. “Was it ‘shaking trees’ or shaking knees that led to the arrest of convicted millennium terrorist Ahmed Ressam?” Carter asked.
“No,” was the terse reply of Michael Chapman, one of the customs agents who arrested Ressam, when asked if he was aware of a security alert.
“We were on no more alert than we’re always on. That is a matter of public record,” said Chapman, now a Clallam County commissioner.
[Chapman said] agents thought Ressam was smuggling drugs when they opened the trunk of his rental car and found bags of white powder buried in the spare-tire well. Only after finding several plastic black boxes, containing watches wired to circuit boards, did anyone suspect a bomb.
[Customs Agent Diana] Dean has said repeatedly she singled Ressam out for a closer look because he was nervous, fumbling and sweating. Ressam has since told agents he was sick, and federal sources have confirmed Ressam had apparently gotten malaria while at terrorist-training camps in Afghanistan.
