LONDON, 6 January 2004 — Attention all passengers thinking of taking another BA223 to Washington. Mr. Michael Howard is your main man. “I believe that red tape, bureaucracy, regulations, inspectorates, commissions... came to help and protect us — but now we need protection from them,” he says, as one core belief among many. Just so. Now protect us from the Department of Homeland Security.
This US monster, prime pronouncer of orange alerts and airport delays, is a bureaucracy like any other. It makes voracious claims for money like any other (up $14 billion, to over $30 billion, on security spending since Sept. 11). It wallows in jargon like any other.
Welcome, for instance, to the new “interagency grants and training website on the DHS website at www.dhs.gov/grants. This website provides information on homeland security and public safety grant opportunities offered by the DHS and other federal departments and agencies and a link to the Compendium of Federal Terrorism Training for State and Local Audiences, an interagency site for training opportunities available to state and local emergency personnel”.
Pour many more billions into the CIA. Pour extra billions into the FBI. Pour in shedloads of cash everywhere, and what have you got? A beast with a life and dynamic of its own. But also, significantly, a beast beyond question or criticism. For this is a secret “war”, isn’t it? Nobody, of course, is onside for terrorism. Everyone wants its scourge destroyed. The acrid stench from the twin towers lingers. But there’s a difference between cheerleading and question-asking, a difference between blank acceptance and mind engagement.
Howard Dean, the Democrats’ prospective 2004 champion, is reckoned to have made a public gaffe when he wondered whether the US homeland was safer now than it was just after Sept. 11. Yet he and Michael Howard, discussing first principles, would be bound to embrace each other.
Howard believes that the “people should be big and the state should be small”. Dean, from the small state of Vermont, is tough on bureaucratic sprawl. But meanwhile, the US deficit balloons — while the homeland bureaucracy that Tom Ridge, an underwhelming old politician, controls, does its full grow-like-topsy turn. And incoming flights over the holiday, from Paris, Heathrow, Mexico City and the rest, go into a holding pattern without explanation or human consideration.
Got a tip? Apparently. Got a specific steer or an arrest warrant? Apparently not. There are intercepts that spread alarm, but orange is still the color of very general intelligence — following the lead set by CIA Director George Tenet, who explicitly believes that if you think something may be up, but don’t know what it is, then you press every alert button in sight so that Al-Qaeda thinks you know more than you do and backs away. The result — happy Christmas, happy New Year! — is a constant warning bell ringing, a continuous cringe of public apprehension turned to weariness by repetition. But is it any longer good politics?
The difficulty, for any reasonable politician, lies in getting the balance right. People — ordinary people, ordinary voters — see a threat. They couldn’t do otherwise after Sept. 11, or Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul and the rest. One day, London or St Louis may be the next target. We pay our taxes; we expect protection. Yet we also have ordinary lives to live. We expect a sense of proportionality.
Here, then, is one sure theme for 2004. Howard Dean has raised it already. Michael Howard — if he truly believes that people “should be masters of their own lives”, not “nannied or overgoverned” — might well follow suit. Simply: What is the threat out there, and what are the means to confront it? What should we “the masters” be told, and what should be done in our name?
Time for a grown-up debate. Britain has had a bit of one already and will have a bit more shortly, post-Hutton, as the WMD testimony of our joint intelligence chiefs comes under renewed scrutiny. Did they all vamp it up to suit their bureaucratic, back-covering selves? But the basic argument has barely begun in America. So Saddam was a fount of terrorist threats, so he’s locked away: Hurray! Hang on a moment, though. Why — quite apart from Baghdad mayhem — is Dulles closed on a whim and an executive order? Why do orange lights keep flashing? Why is that sky marshal toting his gun? Why was there such a scant sense of homeland security in the holiday headlines? Where has all the money gone? At which point political wisdom, ancient and modern, comes into play.
There’s a real problem with terrorism, to be sure. Never put that out of your mind. Always give it due weight. But don’t forget what becomes of those “who came to protect and help us”. If you’re running a Department of Homeland Security and you always need more funds (because, brother, it’s a big, big department), then you have a problem. Success is preventing any more attacks — success also means nothing happening, which means you’ve got a lower profile that makes more budget-busting increases difficult to come by.
Thus there’s every reason to go about your business with manifest display. One thing, uncynically, goes with another. The more flights cancelled, the more you’re obviously doing your job. And your commander-in-chief, descending on Buckingham Palace with a security army the size of the Household Cavalry, is unlikely to disagree in election year: He, after all, created your department in the first place.
Who says that the right can’t create gargantuan bureaucracies too? Who says that Nanny Muddle and her friends always know best? Transparency sucks. And BA 2004, now standing in a remote part of the airport, has a whole lot of understanding left to do.
