Joe Conason: No Vast Missile Shield Could Have Prevented This

With smoke still billowing like a funeral pyre from the ruins of the World Trade Center, cries could be heard for vengeance against an unseen and unknown enemy who left no return address. Hunting down and punishing the "folks" who did these things will test the nation's patience, although it is far more important to be careful than to be quick. The thousands of innocent dead deserve justice, which tempers rage with reason. Should reliable information emerge proving the culpability of Osama bin-Laden and his protectors in the Taliban, the United States is fully capable of dealing with them.

In the days to come, we will hear much speculation about who is to blame for this atrocity, and fingers are likely to be pointed not only abroad but at home. The airwaves may soon be filled with torrents of nonsense rhetoric from politicians attributing fault to their partisan adversaries, speaking as if they knew how such an attack could have been prevented. They didn't, and they don't.

For the moment-and probably for some weeks to come-the appropriate attitude for citizens is to support the efforts of government officials at all levels to cope with the bloody consequences. If past American responses to acts of terrorism and war are any guide, the President can expect an upsurge of patriotic support; let us hope he uses that enhanced authority wisely.

Wisdom, in the wake of a momentous disaster, means the questioning of prior assumptions, prejudices and policies. Clearly, we will have to find ways to enhance the security of our society that don't destroy the liberty we seek to defend. But there are other issues to be considered. For George W. Bush and his administration, the ideas and initiatives that must now be reconsidered can be described as unilateralism. The notion of the United States as an impregnable fortress, with little need for treaties and allies, has become outdated again in a single day.

The most conspicuous symbol of unilateralism is the missile shield, or national missile defense, whose irrelevance to the present international realities has suddenly been revealed amid blood and fire. The so-called shield is, as one critic has said, "a weapon that won't work against a threat that doesn't exist." What happened on Sept. 11 demonstrated irrefutably that any enemy determined to inflict mass destruction upon America can do so without ballistic missiles. To insist on that proposal-at a projected cost of $100 billion-would be to waste time, money and scientific talent, when all those resources would be better spent on effective domestic and international security measures.

The apparent capacity of terrorists to penetrate our airports and airspace forces us to think about the unthinkable. If an enemy can bring down the World Trade Center and destroy a substantial part of the Pentagon, why would we assume that they could not someday drop a nuclear device on the doorstep of the White House? Attack by such low-tech means, instead of a high-tech rocket, would elude the missile shield. The only plausible defense against terrorist use of atomic weapons is to secure nuclear materials around the globe from those who might misuse them.

Yet so far, the Bush administration has shown little interest in the programs created for that purpose, notably in the former Soviet Union. Federal officials ignored recommendations by a bipartisan panel to sharply increase funding of those efforts, and even considered cutting them. For a tiny fraction of the price of the useless missile shield, the unguarded weapons and fissionable elements in Russia could be removed from danger.

Unfortunately, international cooperation has not been the outstanding characteristic of foreign policy in this administration or among its supporters in Congress, to say the least. Their contrarian viewpoint has been expressed in contempt for American obligations under the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, as well as for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that was so carefully designed to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Treaties and alliances, they appear to believe, are for weaklings and dreamers, when in fact such agreements are essential to our own future security. Preventing proliferation ought to be the paramount objective of American policy, and anything that destabilizes or deflects that aim must be avoided.

If we are really determined to safeguard our cities and citizenry, maintenance of our overseas alliances is the strongest shield. A jetliner could just as easily be hijacked from a foreign airport, and then flown into an American target, as from Logan or Dulles. Rather than aggravating our differences with allies in Europe and elsewhere, the administration should consider ways to strengthen those ties. Many of those nations have considerably more experience with terror on their soil than we do; their assistance in combating what may become a continuing assault is vital.

Improved relations with our traditional allies may also help us to convince them that a more aggressive approach to terrorist organizations is both realistic and necessary. The likelihood of success against the forces responsible for this extraordinarily well-executed crime will be considerably greater if civilized nations are coordinated with equal precision. The ability of the United States to lead depends entirely upon the confidence with which other nations regard us.

These suggestions scarcely reflect the present philosophy of the Bush administration-with the possible exception of Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose influence has been waning since the day he was appointed. But Mr. Bush wouldn't be the first Republican President to change course when confronted with previously misunderstood realities. His father's administration at first coddled Saddam Hussein, and then led an allied expedition against Iraqi aggression. Ronald Reagan vowed to build an even more ambitious version of the missile defense, to the horror of our allies, and then abandoned that mirage to negotiate historic agreements with the Soviet Union.

In this tragic moment, Mr. Bush too can seize an opportunity to correct his administration's course. All Americans should wish him the wisdom to do so.

Excerpted from Hillary Clinton and the Racial Left--

Hillary Clinton and the Third Way-- Ever since abandoning the utopian illusions of the progressive cause, I have been struck by how little the world outside the left seems to actually understand it. How little those who have not inhabited the progressive mind are able to grasp the ruthless cynicism behind its idealistic mask or the fervent malice that drives its hypocritical passion for "social justice."

No matter how great the crimes progressives commit, no matter how terrible the future they labor to create, no matter how devastating the catastrophes they leave behind, the world outside the faith seems ever ready to forgive them their "mistakes" and to grant them the grace of "good intentions."

It would be difficult to recall, for example, the number of times I have been introduced on conservative platforms as "a former civil rights worker and peace activist in the 1960s." I have been described this way despite having written a detailed autobiography that exposes these self-glorifying images of the left as so many political lies.

Like many New Left leaders whom the young Mrs. Clinton once followed (and who are her comrades today), I regarded myself in the 1960s as a socialist and a revolutionary. No matter what slogans we chanted, or ideals we proclaimed our agendas always extended beyond (and well beyond) the immediate issues of "civil rights" and "peace."

New Left progressives-including Hillary Clinton and her comrade, Acting Deputy Attorney General Bill Lann Lee-were involved in supporting, or protecting or making excuses for violent anti-American radicals abroad like the Vietcong and anti-American criminals at home like the Black Panthers.* We did this then-just as progressives still do now-in the name of "social justice" and a dialectical world-view that made this deception appear ethical and the fantasy seem possible.

As a student of the left, Jamie Glazov, has observed in an article about the middle-class defenders of recently captured Seventies terrorist Kathy Soliah: "if you can successfully camouflage your own pathology and hatred with a concern for the 'poor' and the 'downtrodden,' then there will always be a 'progressive' milieu to support and defend you."* Huey Newton, George Jackson, Bernadine Dohrn, Sylvia Baraldini, Rubin Carter, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rigoberta Menchu and innumerable others have all discovered this principle in the course of their criminal careers.

There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were civil rights and peace activists-and that is certainly the way I would have described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to a non-left audience. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my former comrades in the left refer to themselves and their pasts in similar contexts today.

But they are lying. (And when they defend racial preferences now-a principle they denounced as "racist" then-even they must know it).

The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity-often without even realizing that they are. Because they also lie to themselves. It is the political lie that gives their cause its life.

Why, for example, if you were one of them, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role in humanity's vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that you were certain would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth that they could not "understand" and that would hold them back?

If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.

If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?

What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.

But you never had the honesty-then or now-to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.

Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren't really committed to civil rights as Americans understand rights? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the individual-both of which you despise.

It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left's anti-American, but "progressive" agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem.[End Excerpt]------ Author: David Horowitz

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