ASHINGTON
First came the pre-emptive military policy. Now comes the pre-emptive
campaign strategy.
Before the president even knows his opponent, his first political ad is
blanketing Iowa today.
"It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this
country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known," Mr. Bush
says, in a State of the Union clip.
Well, that's a comforting message from our commander in chief. Do we
really need his cold, clammy hand on our spine at a time when we're
already rattled by fresh terror threats at home and abroad? When we're
chilled by the metastasizing Al Qaeda, the resurgent Taliban and Baathist
thugs armed with deadly booby traps; the countless, nameless terror groups
emerging in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and elsewhere; the vicious attacks
on Americans, Brits, aid workers and their supporters in Iraq, Afghanistan
and Turkey? The latest illustration of the low-tech ingenuity of Iraqi
foes impervious to our latest cascade of high-tech missiles: a hapless,
singed donkey that carted rockets to a Baghdad hotel.
Yet the Bush crowd is seizing the moment to scare us even more.
Flashing the words "terrorists" and "self-defense" in crimson, the
Republican National Committee spot urges Americans "to support the
president's policy of pre-emptive self-defense" — a policy Colin Powell
claimed was overblown by the press.
"Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions,
politely putting us on notice before they strike?" Mr. Bush says.
With this ad, Republicans have announced their intention: to scare us
stupid, hoping we won't remember that this was the same State of the Union
in which Mr. Bush made a misleading statement about the Iraq-Niger uranium
connection, or remark that the imperial idyll in Iraq has created more
terrorists.
Richard Clarke, the former U.S. counterterrorism chief, told Ted Koppel
that Mr. Bush's habit of putting X's through the pictures of arrested or
killed Qaeda managers was very reminiscent of a scene in the movie "The
Battle of Algiers," in which the French authorities did the same to the
Algerian terrorists: "Unfortunately, after all the known Algerian
terrorists were arrested or killed, the French lost. And that could be the
thing that's happening here, that even though we're getting all the known
Al Qaeda leaders, we're breeding new ones. Ones we don't know about and
will be harder to find."
This view of Al Qaeda was echoed by a European counterterrorism
official in The Times: "There are fewer leaders but more followers."
The president is trying to make the campaign about guts: he has the
guts to persevere in the war on terror.
But the real issue is trust: should we trust leaders who cynically
manipulated intelligence, diverted 9/11 anger and lost focus on Osama so
they could pursue an old cause near to neocon hearts: sacking Saddam?
The Bush war left our chief villains operating, revved up the terrorist
threat, ravaged our international alliances and sparked the resentment of
a world that ached for us after 9/11.
Now Mr. Bush says that poor Turkey, a critical ally in the Muslim
world, is the newest front in the war on terror. "Iraq is a front," he
said. "Turkey is a front. Anywhere the terrorists think they can strike is
a front." Here a front, there a front, everywhere a terror front.
In his Hobbesian gloom — "Fear and I were born twins," Hobbes said —
Dick Cheney thought an Iraq whupping would make surly young anti-American
Arab men scuttle away. Instead, it stoked their ire.
James Goodby and Kenneth Weisbrode wrote in The Financial Times last
week that the Bush crew has snuffed the optimism of F.D.R., Ronald Reagan
and Bush pčre: "Fear has been used as a basis for curtailing freedom of
_expression_ and for questioning legal rights long taken for granted. It has
crept into political discourse and been used to discredit patriotic public
servants. Ronald Reagan's favorite image, borrowed from an earlier
visionary, of America as `a shining city on a hill' has been unnecessarily
dimmed by another image: a nation motivated by fear and ready to lash out
at any country it defines as the source of a gathering threat."
Instead of a shining city, we have a dark bunker.
But the only thing we really have to fear is fearmongering itself.
