IP: How to Lose a War: scathing NYT Op-Ed

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

October 27, 2001

How to Lose a War

By FRANK RICH


Welcome back to Sept. 10.

The "America Strikes Back" optimism that surged after Sept. 11 has now been 
stricken by the multitude of ways we're losing the war at home. The F.B.I. 
has proved more effective in waging turf battles against Rudy Giuliani than 
waging war on terrorism. Of the more than 900 suspects arrested, exactly 
zero have been criminally charged in the World Trade Center attack (though 
one has died of natural causes, we're told, in a New Jersey jail cell). The 
Bush team didn't fully recognize that a second attack on America had begun 
until more than a week after the first casualty. The most highly trumpeted 
breakthrough in the hunt for anthrax terrorists — Tom Ridge's announcement 
that "the site where the letters were mailed" had been found in New Jersey 
— proved a dead end. And now the president is posing with elementary-school 
children again.
Given that this is the administration that was touted as being run with 
C.E.O. clockwork, perhaps it should be added to the growing list of Things 
That Have Changed Forever since Sept. 11. But let's not be so hasty. Not 
everything changes that fast — least of all Washington. The White House's 
home-front failures are not sudden, unpredictable products of wartime 
confusion but direct products of an ethos that has been in place since Jan. 20.

This is an administration that will let its special interests — 
particularly its high-rolling campaign contributors and its noisiest 
theocrats of the right — have veto power over public safety, public health 
and economic prudence in war, it turns out, no less than in peacetime. When 
anthrax struck, the administration's first impulse was not to secure as 
much Cipro as speedily as possible to protect Americans, but to protect the 
right of pharmaceutical companies to profiteer. The White House's faith in 
tax cuts as a panacea for all national ills has led to such absurdities as 
this week's House "stimulus" package showering $254 million on Enron, the 
reeling Houston energy company (now under S.E.C. investigation) that has 
served as a Bush campaign cash machine.

> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/27/opinion/27RICH.html


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