Posted on 29-9-2002
Business
Con-fidence
By Frank Rich
You had to sympathize with Democrat Tom Daschle when he erupted
on the
floor of the Senate this week. After months of playing Clark
Kent to George
W. Bush's Superman, the guy looked unhinged. Mr. Daschle's real
frustration
is his inability to change the subject of the national conversation.
As the
election nears, the Democrats want to talk about the economy,
and every
time they try, Mr. Bush drowns it out with "Iraq," a word so
overpowering
it can make grown Americans forget that their pensions are in
the toilet.
What Mr. Daschle and the rest of his incoherent party have failed
to
articulate (along with so much else) is that this presidency
is all of one
consistent piece, whether it is managing our money or managing
a war. Now,
as pre-9/11, it reflects the C.E.O. ethos of the 1990's bubble
at least as
abundantly as the previous administration did the promiscuous
1960's. Two
weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Bush invited Jack Welch,
Ken Lay and a
bevy of C.E.O.'s down to Texas, and he has always run the White
House by
the cardinal rules in their playbook. A chief executive can
do no wrong.
The directors (for which read Republicans in Congress) and outside
directors (that would be the Democrats) are expected to give
him a blank
check and question nothing, including the accounting, while
the grateful
shareholders (the benighted voters) watch their portfolios bulge.
Now that we know that this model was a sham, with even Mr. Welch's
General
Electric under scrutiny for fiscal sleight of hand, you would
think the
Bush administration might revisit it. But instead it is following
a
discredited modus operandi more slavishly than ever, even as
it prepares to
fight a new war. "There is a fine line between arrogance and
self-confidence," said Mr. Welch in "Jack: Straight From the
Gut," his
Bushian-titled memoir. "Arrogance is a killer." Mr. Bush and
the C.E.O.'s
around him seem as oblivious to this maxim as the C.E.O. who
coined it.
The "fuzzy math" of this White House's tax cut and budget projections,
chronicled by my colleague Paul Krugman from the start, is compounded
daily
rather than corrected. When we poor shareholders worry too loudly
about our
growing economic pain, the administration's antidote to our
woes is not
more honesty in bookkeeping but Ken Lay-style cheerleading.
This month Mr.
Bush's S.E.C. chief, Harvey Pitt, went so far as to tell Americans
it is
"more than safe" to get back in the market — as the Dow plummeted
for its
sixth consecutive month. It's the same pitch Mr. Lay offered
his employees
in an e-mail — "I want to assure you that I have never felt
better about
the prospects for the company" — on the day Jeffrey Skilling
resigned as
chief executive in anticipation of Enron's collapse.
But this administration no longer cooks the books merely on
fiscal matters.
Disinformation has become ubiquitous, even in the government's
allegedly
empirical scientific data on public health. The annual federal
report on
air pollution trends published this month simply eliminated
its usual (and
no doubt troubling) section on global warming, much as accountants
at
Andersen might have cleaned up a balance sheet by hiding an
unprofitable
division. At the Department of Health and Human Services, The
Washington
Post reported last week, expert committees are being "retired"
before they
can present data that might contradict the president's views
on medical
matters — much as naysaying Wall Street analysts were sidelined
in favor of
boosters who could be counted on to flog dogs like WorldCom
or Pets.com
right until they imploded.
It's when such dishonesty extends to the war on terrorism, though,
that you
appreciate just how much a killer arrogance can be. Even with
little White
House cooperation in its inquiry, this month's Congressional
intelligence
hearings presented a chilling portrait of the administration's
efforts to
cover up its pre-9/11 lassitude about terrorist threats. Exhibit
A was
Condoleezza Rice's pronouncement from last May: "I don't think
anybody
could have predicted that these people would take an airplane
and slam it
into the World Trade Center . . . that they would try to use
an airplane as
a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." In fact, the committee
reported, U.S. intelligence had picked up a dozen plots of a
similar sort,
over a period from 1994 to pre-9/11 2001, with some of them
specifically
mentioning the World Trade Center and the White House as potential
targets.
In the weeks before the attack the C.I.A. learned that in Afghanistan
"everyone is talking about an impending attack."
The past cannot be undone, and the intelligence committee found
no smoking
gun to suggest that the administration could have prevented
the horror. But
as we ready our own attack on Saddam Hussein, that's not the
issue. What we
need to know now is if any of these catastrophic failings in
preparedness
have been corrected in the year-plus since. The Congressional
report says
that Al Qaeda learns from its mistakes, flexibly adjusting its
organization
and plans. Do we?
While the administration says yes, the factual backup is again
fuzzy.
Certainly it's hard to be reassured by anything said or done
by John
Ashcroft, who in May 2001 testified to the Senate that "our
No. 1 goal is
the prevention of terrorist acts." We now know that he was just
putting us
on. On Sept. 10, 2001, he refused a F.B.I. budget request to
add 149 field
agents, 200 analysts and 54 translators to its counterterrorism
effort. He
did so despite the fact, unearthed by Congressional investigators,
that the
F.B.I. then had only one analyst monitoring Al Qaeda.
The attorney general drives liberals crazy with his assaults
on civil
liberties, but we do have courts to sort that out (as they are
already
doing). What's truly frightening about Mr. Ashcroft is his incompetence.
Even as we learned this week that the Justice Department's prosecutors
are
so sloppy that they mistakenly turned over 48 classified F.B.I.
reports to
Zacarias Moussaoui, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker
that the
attorney general may have blown our chance to get useful Qaeda
information
out of Mr. Moussaoui by mismanaging his prosecution.
Nor is there any evidence that our intelligence operations have
been
repaired over the past year. Coordination between the F.B.I.
and the C.I.A.
remains so spotty that as of the 9/11 anniversary Congress still
had not
received an updated, cross-agency accounting of Iraq's nuclear,
chemical
and biological arms capabilities. The administration's conflicting
accounts
of Saddam Hussein's nuclear prowess and his alleged links to
Al Qaeda
change by the day. "The dots are there for all to connect,"
said Donald
Rumsfeld last week; this week Ms. Rice's spokeswoman said: "Have
we
connected those dots? No."
Is our information about other, possibly even graver terrorist
threats just
as slipshod? Like it or not, we have a new, pre-emptive defense
policy
built on the principle that we strike the bad guys before they
hit us. But
how can it be executed if our intelligence is too inconsistent
to determine
which bad guys are first on the horizon? As Hezbollah militants
mobilize in
Lebanon and non-fuzzy math suggests that more Qaeda operatives
are in Iran
than Iraq, we have chosen a first-strike target, however thuggish,
that may
be tangential to the stateless, itinerant Islamic terrorism
of the youthful
Mohamed Atta generation.
But there's no point in debating that now. We are already on
our way to
Baghdad. It's our C.E.O.'s choice as the most profitable target
for the
next fiscal year, and we are assured that it will go better
than some other
C.E.O. pet projects, like Dick Cheney's "win-win" Halliburton
-Dresser
merger. What's more, it is cost free: the chief White House
economic
adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, said it won't even dent that fine
economy the
president keeps telling us he is so optimistic about. Maybe
there will be
some price in blood, but the battle plans leaked daily from
the Pentagon
never seem to offer any casualty projections, reassuringly enough.
Mr. Daschle and his fellow outside directors, meanwhile, have
their own
politically profitable business plan, to be executed as soon
as they sign
off on the war resolution. They will be all too happy to let
Al Gore worry
about Iraq in San Francisco, or wherever he is, while they whip
up
election-eve fears about something truly scary, like Social
Security
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