http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/29/opinion/29herbert.html
The Wreckage in the China Shop By BOB HERBERT NY Times Op-Ed: June 29, 2006 After all the sound and fury of the past few years, how is the U.S. doing in its fight against terrorism? Not too well, according to a recent survey of more than 100 highly respected foreign policy and national security experts. The survey, dubbed the "Terrorism Index," was conducted by the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine. The respondents included Republicans and Democrats, moderates, liberals and conservatives. The survey's findings were striking. A strong, bipartisan consensus emerged on two crucial points: 84 percent of the respondents said the United States was not winning the war on terror, and 86 percent said the world was becoming more - not less - dangerous for Americans. The sound and fury since Sept. 11, 2001 - the chest-thumping and muscle-flexing, the freedom fries, the Patriot Act, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the breathtaking expansion of presidential power, Guantánamo, rendition, the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars - seems to have signified very little. An article on the survey, in the July/August edition of Foreign Policy, said of the respondents, "They see a national security apparatus in disrepair and a government that is failing to protect the public from the next attack." More than 8 in 10 of the respondents said they believed an attack in the U.S. on the scale of Sept. 11 was likely within the next five years. Many of the respondents played important national security roles in the government over the past few decades. They included Lawrence Eagleburger, who served as secretary of state under George H. W. Bush; Anthony Lake, a national security adviser to Bill Clinton; James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Richard Clarke, who served as counterterrorism czar in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and was in that post on Sept. 11th; and Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan. Noted academics and writers who specialized in foreign policy and national security matters also participated in the survey. "Respondents," according to a report that accompanied the survey, "sharply criticized U.S. efforts in a number of key areas of national security, including public diplomacy, intelligence and homeland security. Nearly all of the departments and agencies responsible for fighting the war on terror received poor marks. "The experts also said that recent reforms of the national security apparatus have done little to make Americans safer. Asked about recent efforts to reform America's intelligence community, for instance, more than half of the index's experts said that creating the office of the director of national intelligence has had no positive impact in the war against terror." The respondents seemed, essentially, to be saying that the U.S. needs to be smarter (less like a bull in a china shop) in its efforts to combat terrorism. "Foreign policy experts have never been in so much agreement about an administration's performance abroad," said Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a participant in the survey. "The reason is that it's clear to nearly all that Bush and his team have had a totally unrealistic view of what they can accomplish with military force and threats of force." The respondents stressed the importance of ending America's dependence on foreign oil, saying that could prove to be "the single most pressing priority in winning the war on terror." Eighty-two percent of the respondents said that ending the dependence on foreign oil should have a higher priority, and nearly two-thirds said the country's current energy policies were making matters worse, not better. "We borrow a billion dollars every working day to import oil, an increasing share of it coming from the Middle East," said Mr. Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director. The respondents also said it was crucially important for the U.S. to engage in a battle of ideas as part of a sustained effort to bring about a rejection of radical ideologies in the Islamic world. That kind of battle requires more of a reliance on diplomacy and other nonmilitary tools. If the respondents to this survey are correct, the U.S. needs to be moving in an entirely different direction. The war against terror cannot be won by bombing the enemy into submission. The bull in the china shop may be frightening at first, but after a while it's just enraging. We need a better, smarter way. *** http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0626-20.htm Sewing Seeds For Salvation by James Carroll The Boston Globe: June 26, 2006 Leaders of Scandinavia laid the cornerstone of a worried act of hope last week. In the far northern archipelago of Norway only 600 miles from the North Pole, construction began on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Protected by bunkers, guards, a ferocious climate, and the region's hostile animals, the vault will be a radically secure storage facility for up to 3 million of the crop seeds on which life depends. Refrigeration, and, if that fails, the permafrost will keep the seeds frozen indefinitely. In Svalbard, steps are being taken to anticipate a disaster of epic proportions, whether nuclear war, climate trauma, or some other wasting of Earth. The vault will provide the seeds with which humans might begin to recover. The AP news report from Svalbard compared the vault to ``a Noah's Ark for seeds in case of a global catastrophe." That reference to Genesis put me in mind of the book's earlier chapters, the story of Adam and Eve in Paradise. For the first time it occurred to me that the poignant tale of the beginning of the human race, centered on a tragic loss, might be describing something not of the past, but of the future. What if the Fall is before us? The prospect of a globe so devastated that plant life itself would have to be rekindled requires unprecedented contemplation. Well, not quite unprecedented. In 1960, General Thomas Power, head of the Strategic Air Command, rejected a colleague's qualm about the all-out character of nuclear war plans by dismissing any restraint: ``The whole idea is to kill the bastards . . . At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win." To which his colleague replied, ``Well, you'd better make sure that they're a man and a woman." (You'll find this in Fred Kaplan's ``Wizards of Armageddon.") Once, catastrophes of the kind that would deprive the world of its vegetation were unimaginable. In the far mists of time before history, there were ice ages, vast glacier melts, and meteor strikes that, as the human mind measures events, traumatized the planet. Geologists and astronomers report that such things can happen again, but the scale of time within which they occur, or of space when considering cosmic happenings, removes them from the perceived realm of possibility. All life is contingent, of course, with being itself held in existence at every instant, when it might equally turn to nothingness. Who knows when the sun will be snuffed out? But planners in Norway are thinking of something far less arcane. Something initiated more by the likes of General Power than by an eccentric return, say, of Halley's Comet. Indeed, the inconvenient truth, in Al Gore's phrase, is that quite perceptible climate change has already been initiated by humans, with New Orleans-like devastations a bare hint of what may be coming. To cast the imagination forward to a nightmare world in which seeds might be more precious than diamonds -- or to a planet whose soil might have been so radiated as to make seeds worthless -- is truly to know the present Earth as Eden. ``Earth in the balance" is another phrase of Gore's, and that balance has never seemed more delicately maintained. Seeds and crops, water and soil, air and wind, the gentle evening breeze, the sight of children entirely at home in their perfect little bodies, the brilliance of adjustments made by people whose bodies are far from perfect, even Norway's generous will to anticipate dangers of the future -- all of this defines a beatific garden compared with what might come. What suddenly seems striking about the Adam and Eve story is how it turns on a forbidden fruit that is defined as ``knowledge of good and evil." Whatever that image might have meant to persons in the past, it must mean something different now that crucial thresholds of knowledge, whether of the atom's ambiguities or of the atmosphere's fragility, have been crossed. Science, and the moral reasoning it requires, have made humans responsible for the future in ways we have never been before. Adam and Eve committed a sin that had catastrophic consequences for the rest of time. Until now, such a choice could be regarded as the stuff of myth. But no more. Those are precisely the stakes of the choices we are making every day. Will we not recognize our Paradise until it is lost? James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. (c) 2006 Globe Newspaper Company ____________________________________________ portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. To subscribe: http://www.portside.org/subscribe To search the portside archive: http://www.portside.org/archive --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
