Frank Rich

[Ray Evans Harrell]

August 17, 2002 The Waco Road to Baghdad By FRANK RICH eorge W. Bush tossed the nation's press a softball and they hit it out of the park. There was not a single good review, not even from his minions at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for the White House's feel-good-about-your-401(k) jamboree at Waco. It was a "forum," the critics suggested, in the sense that the Politburo was a "legislature." Only Mr. Bush, who is on record as having loved "Cats," pronounced the event a "great show." But it's Mr. Bush who was right. What his critics miss is that by this administration's standards of governance, Waco was a triumph. It was expressly designed to be content-free (rather like "Cats," in fact). The goal was never to produce policy but solely to serve up a video bite of Mr. Bush looking engaged by the woes of what his chief of staff, Andrew Card, referred to on CNN as "so-called real Americans." If the White House wanted anyone to listen, it would not have staged eight separate panels simultaneously on a Tuesday morning in the dog days of August, assuring that complete coverage would be available only on C-Span. For those few viewers who dipped in, the spectacle was not unamusing. On one panel, Mr. Bush could be found in mutual fawning with his campaign contributor "Chuck" Schwab — Charles to us — no doubt oblivious to the fact that Chuck had just placed a nose behind Enron's Ken Lay and Global Crossing's Gary Winnick on Fortune's "Greedy Bunch" list of those executives who cashed out the most stock before their companies' shares tanked by 75 percent or more. Yet even this touching tableau, on a day when Schwab was laying off nearly 400 employees, did not stop CNN, MSNBC and Fox News from switching to such alternative programming as a picturesque natural gas explosion in a suburban California house. What makes the morning-after outrage of the nation's commentariat seem a bit over the top is that the preordained hollowness of the Waco show is not news. This is how this administration always governs. Mr. Bush has two inviolate, one-size-fits-all policies (if obsessions can be called policies): the tax cut (for domestic affairs) and "regime change" in Iraq (foreign affairs). Everything else is a great show designed to provide the illusion of administration activity when it has no plan. The show takes the form not only of the Orwellian slogans emblazoned on the backdrops ("Small Investors/Retirement Security" loomed above the president and Chuck in Waco) but also of bogus announcements of muscular action. At the forum's final curtain, the president declared that he would teach Congress a tough lesson about fiscal responsibility by holding back $5.1 billion it had appropriated for such low-priority items as equipment for firefighters and health monitoring at ground zero. But what about the $190 billion in wasteful farm subsidies he has already thrown to the winds? Besides, he would have to cut spending by $5 billion five days a week for more than a year to compensate for the red ink of his $1.35 trillion tax cut. Though the president's harshest critics think he's stupid, I've always maintained that the real problem is that he thinks we are stupid. He never doubts that his show will distract us from bad news. Waco was supposed to make us forget the latest round of economic headlines: stagnant wages, slowed growth, new all-time records in personal bankruptcies and consumer borrowing. All this is on top of a falloff in the Dow that The Economist measures as identical in percentage to that of Herbert Hoover's first 18 months, which included the crash of '29. Well, the economy is only money. It's when the same governance technique is applied to life-and-death matters like war and domestic security that the farce curdles. Here, too, there are new headlines the administration wants us to forget. At the F.B.I., a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed, the prehistoric computer system remains in disarray even as the agency's top executives are either pushed out or flee for private employment (as the counterterrorism chief abruptly did on Thursday). The Wall Street Journal discovered that when the federal government issued a terrorist warning to shopping centers four months ago, the Mall of America learned about it only by watching CNN. Not only are our airlines collapsing but, according to Thursday's USA Today, so is the undercover air marshal program that was supposed to be strengthened after Sept. 11. One marshal called it "a laughingstock." And what does the administration propose as a solution? Last week John Ashcroft went on TV to announce what he calls the "first ever White House conference on missing and exploited children." It takes an exploiter to know one. F.B.I. figures show a decline in the kidnapping of children — except on cable TV. But if you can't crack the anthrax case, why not create some distracting hysteria by glomming onto a local law enforcement issue that is the biggest showbiz phenomenon since shark attacks? The administration loves the bait-and-switch. It hyped the cases of "the American Taliban," John Walker Lindh, and the "dirty bomber," Jose Padilla, to cover for its failure to snare the actual Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and the actual bomber, Osama bin Laden, much as it has hyped the perp walks of second-rung executives from WorldCom to make us forget about Halliburton, Harken and Ken Lay. Next stop: Iraq. Just as a tax cut is billed as the miracle antidote to every possible economic ill — "We've got the best tax policy in the world!" Mr. Bush said at Waco — so we're asked to believe that taking out Saddam Hussein will bring democracy to Iraq and the rest of the Arab world, miraculously repair the chaos wrought by our disengagement from the Middle East and win the war on terrorism all at once. The silver bullet that gets Saddam, it appears, will cure all international ills with the possible exception of the arrogance of the French. While Saddam is an authentic genocidal monster, there are more plausible links between Al Qaeda and our dear friend Saudi Arabia than between Al Qaeda and Saddam; it could be argued that toppling him would strengthen Al Qaeda. But what the administration is mainly hoping is that a march on Baghdad will make us forget about Al Qaeda, wherever it may be lying in wait. It's not good P.R. for our war on terrorism that Islamic terrorists have been linked to eight attacks abroad since Daniel Pearl's murder in January, including the assassination of the Afghan vice president in Kabul and the slaughter of an American diplomat, among others, at a church in Islamabad.    The White House keeps saying that no decision has been made about Iraq, but of course a decision has been made. Richard Perle, an administration Iraq hawk, gave away the game in yesterday's Times: "The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said" would lead to "a collapse of confidence." Translation: If Mr. Bush doesn't get rid of Saddam after all this saber rattling, he will look like the biggest wimp since — well, his father. Democrats, as timid in challenging Mr. Bush on Iraq as they were in letting his tax cut through Congress, keep calling for a "debate." What world are they living in? Mr. Bush is no sooner going to abandon his pursuit of Saddam than his crusade to eliminate the estate tax. These are his only core beliefs. The questions left to be debated now are who's going to pay for the war, who's going to be killed in it, who's going to police what could be a decade-long cleanup. (So far the answer to all three seems to be first and foremost: the go-it-alone Americans.) The loudest voices asking these questions are almost exclusively Republican: Brent Scowcroft, Chuck Hagel, Henry Kissinger, even Dick Armey. "If you think you're going to drop the 82nd Airborne on Baghdad and finish the job," said Senator Hagel, a Vietnam war hero, two weeks ago, "I think you've been watching too many John Wayne movies." What's been most remarkable about the Iraq project so far is how an administration as effectively secretive as this one could spring so many leaks of invasion scenarios to the press. It strains credulity to assert that this is all an ingenious conspiracy to fake out Saddam. The leaks fake us out instead, inuring us to the new war to come. The only mystery is when D-Day will be. Given the administration's history, I'd guess that it will put on the big show as soon as its political self-preservation is at stake. Certainly the White House's priorities are clear enough. It has guarded the records of Dick Cheney's energy task force and the S.E.C. investigation of Harken far more zealously than war plans that might endanger the lives of the so-called real Americans who will have to fight Saddam.

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