June 02, 2003

Who's Your Daddy?

The politics of terror alerts: heads Bush wins, tails Bush wins...

You may not have noticed, but another Orange Alert has come and gone. The latest one faded quietly away this weekend when the latest wave of al-Qaeda attacks failed to materialize. The interesting thing is that it was left in place for only a couple of weeks--an awfully short time, one would imagine, in the planning-and-execution cycles of terrorist organizations. How can the lighthouse keepers know that the threat has abated in such a short time?

You have to admit it looks like a risky move on its face--after all, what if there is an attack somewhere this week? For the Bush administration to take even this relatively minor gamble in lowering the threat level suggests that it sees a value in the terror alert system that it doesn't want to squander by leaving the sirens turned up all the time.

Why? Everyone knows that: public safety. We don't want the populace to grow so inured that they walk down the street absentmindedly picking up bombs. 

Except that this makes no sense at all. Even at Orange Alert we're all told to go on with our normal routines--so there is really no added measure of public safety in getting the public to take terror alerts seriously. (To the extent it's useful to change the alert status of police and government agencies periodically, that could as easily be done without public hoopla.) But there are numerous political uses. And if the system was conceived as one kind of political instrument--a post-9/11 means of assuring the public that the Bushmen were on top of a situation that they were patently not on top of--it's clear that Rove and the rest have long since seen through to its other political uses. At the moment its main virtue is the ability to dictate the news cycle--and thus bury other, less opportune stories at will--and to change the tenor of the day's political dialogue, also at will. It will be one important source of political capital for the Bushmen in the summer and fall of 2004 if they don't wreck its credibility altogether between now and then. (This is far from a sure bet. The state of Arizona is saying it may ignore the next orange alert.) 

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What do you suppose the chances are that the next terrorist attack of consequence, in the US or against US interests abroad, will occur during an Orange Alert? Less than 50/50, I bet--probably quite a lot less than that, if the truth be known. It all depends on US intelligence's luck in pulling needles from haystacks. (The US now possesses unprecedented means of acquiring information everywhere, all the time; that's true--but there is no sign that they have the means to cull it, to interpolate and interpret it all. In practical fact, that may never be possible.) 

But note that the Bush administration can win either way. If an attack occurs on raised alert, Bush wins points for competence and vigilance. If one occurs on the standard yellow alert, it only assures that we will be on near-permanent heightened alert between that time and the election, which would serve to put the entire dialogue of the presidential race on a wartime footing and shunt aside any domestic questions (like the economy, say...).

And this is where Bush wants the dialogue to be. He's been working on his campaign commercials since the USS Abraham Lincoln; come what may, the 2004 presidential race is going to be a referendum on the Bush wars. I'll close with these lines from a May 10 New York Times column on Bush's campaign strategy, by Francis X. Clines (can't link it; it's paid-archive now):

[Rove] made the Bush strategy clear: It's the terror, not the economy, stupid, even if the nation is suffering rolling deficits and relentless unemployment, and despite Mr. Bush's serial tax cuts for the captains of industry. Democrats may want to talk health care and other economic issues, but they will have to grapple their way through a patriotic blitz of a campaign, if Mr. Rove has his red-white-and-blue way. Democrats can rightly fear an "October surprise" coming color-coded by Tom Ridge next time around.

Posted by Steve Perry at June 02, 2003 06:23 AM

COPS in Iraq: The NYPD and Dyncorp

Apologies for not posting this sooner, but vis a vis the continued civil chaos in Iraq and in Baghdad especially, former NYPD Chief Bernard Kerik has been employed as a consultant. And here is a NY Indymedia post on one aspect of the post-war policing: the Bush administration's hiring of the checkered Dyncorp.

Posted by Steve Perry at June 02, 2003 05:10 AM

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