[wordup] Democracy held hostage

[Adam Shand]

Via: politech at politechbot.com
From: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/29/democracy/index.html

Democracy held hostage

We are fighting for freedom -- including the right to vigorously debate.
But the war fever crowd wants us all to march in step.

By David Talbot

Sept. 29, 2001

Truth is not the only early casualty of war. So is rational thought. War
breeds hysteria and a rush to conformity. The herd, under attack,
instinctively groups together and seeks assurance that everyone is
trustworthy and loyal, everyone is primed for defense.

That's what we're experiencing in our country in the weeks after the Sept.
11 terror attacks -- assaults so seemingly out of the blue, dramatically
violent and diabolically orchestrated that they shook the nation's
confidence to its core. Within hours after the terror offensive, before
the shock had begun to fade, the country's political leaders and media
elite rushed to assure us that the country was united and resolute. This
was certainly true when it came to giving aid and comfort to the victims
of the attacks. These were days of unprecedented national heroism and
generosity. But as the weeks go by, it becomes increasingly clear that
when it comes to the more vexing questions of why we were attacked and how
we should respond, there is no national consensus yet -- nor even a clear
consensus within the Bush administration.

The country is undergoing a cram course in geopolitics, comparative
religion and military strategy that is long overdue -- as well as a deeper
soul-searching that is inevitable after this type of trauma. All of this
brings with it a certain amount of intellectual and political friction,
which is necessary and good for the country. As the better angels of the
Bush administration have admonished us, the last thing America should do
is let loose the usual round of ineffectual military fireworks -- a
spasmodic reaction that might temporarily salve the wound to the nation's
pride, but create even deeper troubles for us. What we need more than
anything right now is careful deliberation and spirited debate. We need,
in short, for our democracy to come fully alive.

Unfortunately, the calls for herd-like conformity are on the rise. In the
last week, self-appointed sheep dogs from across the political spectrum
have begun yapping at our heels, pushing us to all think alike and move in
the same direction. When "Politically Correct" host Bill Maher dared
suggest that the American habit of shooting cruise missiles at enemies
from safe distances was "cowardly," he was quickly alerted that he had
gone beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse -- even though that's his
job. (Remember, his show is called "Politically Incorrect.") Several local
TV stations promptly dropped his show, FedEx and other sponsors cancelled
their contracts, and even after Maher issued an apology, White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer felt compelled to pile on -- despite the fact that
his own boss had also snorted at the cruise missile strategy, which, in
the president's words, only menaced camels' behinds and empty tents.
Fleischer used the Maher controversy to issue this creepy Orwellian
pronouncement: "Americans need to watch what they say, watch what they do,
and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is." (Creepier
still, someone in the White House then took scissors to the official
transcript of Fleischer's remarks to make them less chilling.)

Susan Sontag was similarly singled out for censure in the editorial pages
of the Wall Street Journal and other thought-police strongholds. Her
crime? She ventured to say that the American people are not being served
by a political and media caste that seeks only to reassure us, instead of
enlightening us: "Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is
OK ... We have a robotic president who assures us that America still
stands tall ... But everything is not OK ... The voices licensed to follow
the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the
public. Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a 'cowardly' attack
on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an
attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a
consequence of specific American alliances and actions?"

One might not agree with Sontag's characterization of the terror attack,
but it certainly should be allowed for consideration amid all the
mandatory media flag-waving. Even those who are bent on a massive military
response would do well to know more about our enemy before we attack. One
can agree, as I do, with Christopher Hitchens' definition of our enemy as
"Islamic fascists" bent on imposing the same "bleak and sterile theocracy"
on our society as they have on theirs -- and still call for prudence as we
contemplate the enormous challenge of counterattacking a rising ideology,
not simply an army. This fanaticism is made even more daunting an enemy by
the fact that it has gained a foothold not just in rogue nations, but
throughout the Middle East, even in so-called friendly countries, and
perhaps most alarmingly in politically unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Certainly there are voices on the left -- Noam Chomsky's among the most
prominent -- for whom no U.S. military action would ever be justified,
even when the nation is directly attacked as it just was. But these
reflexively anti-American or doctrinaire pacifist voices are a small
minority within the vast population to the left of George W. Bush. And yet
to conservatives like David Horowitz and Andrew Sullivan they are
representative of a sprawling fifth column of "appeasers." This
broad-brush attack ,of course, serves these conservative pundits' agenda.
They claim they are motivated by a profounder sense of patriotism than
their opponents' when they demand that Bush critics fall in line behind
the president. But their true aim is political. They want to use the
current crisis to settle old political scores, rally support for our
less-than-commanding commander in chief, and stifle legitimate dissent.
This is not patriotic, it's antidemocratic. What's more, it's against the
national interest.

As Bush administration officials keep reminding us, everything is
different about this war. It's clear that our leaders have not yet figured
out how to deal with this enormously complex threat. They're not even
certain it is a war. What we need now, more than ever, is the widest and
most energetic debate as the country makes sense of what has happened and
how to respond. We don't need blind conformity. We need fearless
self-scrutiny. What should the U.S. role be in the Middle East? How should
we strike back against our foes without spreading the fires of Islamic
fanaticism? Why do the impoverished populations of the region find radical
fundamentalism more enthralling than the benefits of Western culture?

But the sheep dogs are quick to snarl that this kind of talk is left-wing
equivocation. Bellicosity now rules, from the New Republic, which
denounces the "fatalism" of America's cautious "elites," to the Weekly
Standard, which accuses the New York Times of "moral idiocy" for running
occasional pieces critical of Bush in our time of crisis. Some of the
loudest saber-rattling has been coming from the National Review, which on
this week's cover roars the full-throated battle cry, "Let's Roll!" and
predictably attacks the "blame America first" fifth columnists in our
midst.

As usual, it's often the armchair generals -- like radio brigadier Rush
Limbaugh, who managed to avoid military service during the Vietnam war --
who cry the loudest for blood. These soft-fleshed but eager warriors were
undoubtedly dismayed by this week's reality check from the Defense
Department's reigning hawk, Paul Wolfowitz: "I think it can't be stressed
enough that everybody who is waiting for military action needs to rethink
this thing."

So far, the Bush administration has displayed admirable patience despite
the pressure for immediate vengeance. After his swaggering cowboy talk of
"smoking them out" and "hunting them down," Bush has tempered his
language, reportedly on the sage advice of his more experienced father.
Under the leadership of Secretary of State Colin Powell, the
administration is now working hard to assemble an international coalition,
including key Arab states, to isolate and defeat the terrorist movement.
This difficult task is made even tougher because of the arrogant
unilateralism of the Bush administration's first seven months, a
go-it-alone strategy that alienated even our European allies, got the U.S.
thrown off the U.N. Human Rights Commission, and put us on the Middle East
sidelines as the growing sparks from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lit
up the entire region.

Before Sept. 11, Powell himself seemed sidelined, pushed aside by
administration hard-liners. Fortunately, in the past two weeks, the White
House seems to have recognized that it urgently needs Powell's experience
and diplomatic craft. This global acuity certainly can't come from the
president himself, one of the least traveled and most internationally
uninformed chief executives in American history (a man, let us recall, who
during last year's campaign couldn't name the leader of Pakistan, Gen.
Pervez Musharraf -- a figure who now looms large in Bush's first global
crisis).

While Powell is a reassuring force to the international community, he is a
primary target of the bellicose American right. While clamoring for the
left to keep its silence and rally behind the president, these
conservatives have no qualms about hectoring Bush, demanding that he
jettison Powell and declare war on virtually the entire Islamic world. In
a recent open letter signed by over 40 leading conservatives, including
William Bennett, Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Kristol, the group
pressures Bush to not stop with bin Laden and his network, but to extend
the war into Iraq, as well as Iran and Syria if they don't withdraw
support from the radical Hezbollah group.

It's not only conservative pundits calling for democracy to be put on hold
for the duration. More distressingly, the silence-is-patriotic mentality
has also gained momentum in the Democratic Party, the press and even
liberal activist circles. On Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders suddenly
sound accommodating about Bush's missile defense plan -- an astronomically
expensive and militarily dubious dream that, in light of what we've
learned about terrorists' likely choice of weapons, cries out for more
congressional scrutiny than ever. Many Democratic challengers in next
year's elections are also throwing in the towel, declining to run after
somehow concluding that democracy is unpatriotic in days like these. And
Jimmy Carter, who last summer could find nothing to commend about the Bush
administration, now calls upon his fellow citizens to support the
president with "complete unity."

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club has taken down its "W Watch" department from
its Web site, for fear of not seeming sufficiently respectful toward the
president. "Now is the time for rallying together as a nation; the public
will judge very harshly any groups whom they view as violating this need
for unity," announced the Sierra Club spokesman, sounding as if he had
been programmed by Ari Fleischer. Of course, Big Oil's friends in the Bush
administration and GOP felt no similar need to make peace with the Sierra
Club during these days of national unity, taking the opportunity to renew
their assault on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The major press organizations have also taken pains to seem properly
deferential toward the Bush administration. There were no loud cries about
press freedom when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that
much of the U.S. war on terrorism would be conducted in secret. One
military official went even further, blithely informing the Washington
Post, "We're going to lie about things." While not even the most
aggressive reporters would demand classified information that could put
soldiers' lives at risk, the Pentagon clearly wants to go further than
that in controlling news about the war. "No more televised Vietnams"
remains the Defense Department's mantra; Bush II wants to keep the news as
scripted as it was during Bush I's Persian Gulf War.

An elite press consortium made up of the New York Times, Washington Post,
Wall Street Journal and CNN also apparently handed the Bush administration
another big favor this week when it indefinitely delayed making public the
results of its Florida election recount. The long-awaited analysis of
200,000 disputed ballots from the presidential election was supposed to be
published on Monday, but the Times quietly informed its readers in a
Sunday essay by political reporter Richard Berke that the "move might have
stoked the partisan tensions" and "now seems utterly irrelevant." A
journalist involved in the project later told Inside.com, "There's a sense
that now is not the time to be writing about something that might make it
look like someone else should have been elected president."

The Times' decision to withhold information that is clearly the public's
right to know is a startling one, and in its desire to avoid reopening
potential wounds, more therapeutic than journalistic. In 1971, a much more
divisive time in the nation's history, the Times was motivated more by
First Amendment considerations than by appeals to a narrow patriotism when
it pressed to publish the Pentagon Papers. In lifting the restraining
order that the Nixon administration had brought against the Times, U.S.
District Judge Murray Gurfein, a Nixon appointee, agreed that the
paramount value for the press -- even in a time of heightened national
security concerns -- must be the public's right to know. "The security of
the Nation is not at the ramparts alone," declared Gurfein in his
surprisingly passionate decision. "Security also lies in the value of our
free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous
press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even
greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to
know." It would be wise of the Times and the rest of the press to keep
these words in mind during these fearful times as the government feels
emboldened to clamp down on the flow of information.

Some smaller newspapers were much more blatant in their hurry to abandon
the First Amendment. Earlier this week, the Daily Courier in Grants Pass,
Ore., fired a columnist who criticized Bush for "skedaddling" on Sept. 11
and "hiding in a Nebraska hole." The paper's editor, Dennis Roler,
announced that only "responsible and appropriate" criticism of the
president would now be allowed. Perhaps he hasn't read the Walter Lippman
quote emblazoned on the top of his own Web site: "The theory of a free
press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be
presented perfectly and instantly in any one account."

Les Daughtry Jr., publisher of the Texas City Sun, showed an equally
uncertain grasp of the principle of free speech when he promptly fired
city editor Tom Gutting for writing a similar opinion piece about Bush.
Daughtry then felt compelled to engage in a humiliating bout of
Maoist-style abnegation, apologizing not only to his readers but to "all
our country's leaders and especially President George W. Bush" for
temporarily allowing his city editor to exercise his First Amendment
rights. Feeling he had not gone quite far enough in his exaltation of the
president, Daughtry penned a second letter to his readers. declaring that
Bush has "the full support of virtually every citizen in the United
States, except, of course, Tom."

America suffered grievous, unprovoked injuries on Sept. 11 that no nation
should passively endure. A vast majority of the American people ardently
supports President Bush's vow to bring the organizers of this terror "to
justice, or justice to them." But maintaining this consensus as Bush leads
the country into battle will not be easy. To do this the administration
must convey a clarity of purpose and an honesty which have thus far been
in short supply. When White House vizier Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer feed
an egregious lie to the public about why the president did not immediately
return to the White House on Sept. 11 -- insisting that Air Force One and
the White House were under threat -- and then try to spin their way out of
it when the story unravels, that does not inspire confidence. When Colin
Powell promises that the administration's evidence against Osama bin Laden
will be shortly revealed to the world and the next day this evidence is
suddenly declared classified information, it only adds to the skepticism
about the government's anti-terror operation, even among our allies.

Franklin Roosevelt proved a master at building support for last century's
epic struggle against fascism. Before Pearl Harbor, he faced strong
isolationist and anti-draft sentiment; afterwards, he had to grapple with
a press and public prone to marked mood swings, rising and falling with
the country's fortunes on the battlefield, and a home front that was often
torn by racial and labor conflicts. Yet he reached out to the Republican
Party to build bipartisanship, cultivated the press, and most importantly
eloquently conveyed to the American people why we were fighting and the
enormous significance of the outcome. He mobilized the country for its
historic conflict without resorting to the totalitarian measures of our
enemies -- with the glaring exception of the internment of Japanese
Americans, a tragic misstep that some of our current paranoid fringe are
now clamoring to inflict on Arab-Americans. "Though the United States was
miserably unprepared for war in the spring of 1940," observed Doris Kearns
Goodwin in "No Ordinary Time," her study of FDR's wartime White House,
"Roosevelt never doubted that the American people would eventually win the
war, that the uncoerced energies of a free people could overcome the most
efficient totalitarian regime."

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, in contrast, utterly failed to build a
winning consensus for the Vietnam war. This was partly due to the two
presidents' paranoid and autocratic style. But, more significantly,
Johnson and Nixon were in charge of a war that was vastly more difficult
to justify than World War II. While a case could certainly be made that
defeating a communist takeover of the country was a noble cause, it was
much harder to convince Americans that the North Vietnamese were a threat
to their way of life. And the U.S. military, despite its strenuous efforts
to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, never succeeded in
uncoupling the communist dictatorship of Hanoi from the legitimate
nationalist aspirations of the country's majority.

America's latest war has already opened many of the old Vietnam wounds,
with conservative critics charging that the current voices of
"appeasement" are the same ones that stabbed the U.S. in the back in
Southeast Asia. But this is not the right lesson to take from Vietnam. It
was not the antiwar movement that blocked an American victory over Hanoi;
the war itself was unwinnable without escalating it to a level that would
have risked nuclear war with China and the Soviet Union. It was unwinnable
because most Vietnamese, who we were ostensibly fighting for, did not want
us to win it. The lesson, then, to be learned from Vietnam as we confront
our latest totalitarian foe is that the American soldiers must never again
be sent to countries where their mission is impossible and the majority of
people regard them as the enemy.

Peter Feaver in the conservative Weekly Standard persuasively argues that
the best analogy to "America's New War," in CNN's horrid marketing phrase,
is the Cold War. Like the global war against communism, the war against
terrorism must be fought on an ideological as well as military level, and
much of it will be carried out through diplomacy, espionage and "shadow
conflicts."

Considering that our enemy is a fanatical strain of Islam that has taken
deep root in a burgeoning, youthful generation throughout much of the
Muslim world, the struggle is also likely to be protracted, lasting much
longer than one presidential term. "If fundamentalism seems particularly
rife in the Muslim world this is because of the population explosion,"
observes religious scholar Karen Armstrong. "To give just one telling
example, there were only 9 million Iranians before World War II; today
there are 57 million and their average age is 17. Radical Islam, with its
extreme and black and white solutions, is a young person's faith."

Our "war" on terrorism, then, only fits the definition in a metaphorical
sense. It will be vastly harder to conduct such a struggle, because the
enemy is a belief system, not a nation state. And our first goal must be
to understand why Western culture -- with all its consumer toys, action
movies and seemingly unlimited freedoms -- is not as compelling to these
millions of young people as a religious mission whose greatest expression
of faith is martyrdom.

In light of the complexity and likely duration of this conflict, it is
essential for the Bush administration to build a deeply entrenched public
consensus -- and this can't be done by lying, hiding information,
short-circuiting civil liberties or any of the other old "national
security" techniques of suspending democracy. Consensus, instead, must
come over time from thorough and open debates, as Feaver recognizes: "Many
of these debates will be specious, but not all will be. Indeed, the Second
Cold War may be harder to fight than the last one, leaving ample room for
responsible disagreements among reasonable people. We will have to nurture
those debates, learn from them, and forge the best possible policy in an
extraordinarily difficult political climate."

In the end, it won't be military superiority that determines the outcome
of this war. As our implacable fundamentalist foes have told the world,
this is a war of values. We cannot win by sacrificing ours. If democracy
and freedom are to win over the forces of terror and theocracy, they first
must flourish at home.

David Talbot is Salon's founder and editor in chief.