Wednesday, September 28, 2011
YULIA’S VERDICT IMMINENT: UKRAINE’S FUTURE HANGS IN THE BALANCE …. By Dick Shriver
Dateline Kiev, September 28, 2011: The crowds outside the main courthouse yesterday were orderly, though it was divided into two groups, clearly distinguishable by the different flags they were carrying and the fact that they were kept apart by Kiev’s police. There appeared to be a few more flags of Ukraine’s “Party of Regions”, the party of Ukraine’s president, Victor Yanukovych, whose prosecutors are calling for a verdict of “guilty” for the 51-year old former prime minister; these demonstrators were likely party goons, coal, iron and steel workers ordered and transported there by their union bosses from the eastern Donbass region. The remainder of the flags were held by those more likely to be there voluntarily and out of sincere support, those of Yulia Tymoshenko’s All-Ukraine Union “Fatherland” Party.
Tymoshenko has been accused of signing (or authorizing the signing of) an agreement with Russia in 2009, when she was Ukraine’s prime minister whereby Russia would provide another year of gas to Ukraine at an agreed-upon price; the problem was the price. Some argued that it was too high and that she had overextended her authority by signing the agreement and endangering Ukraine’s economy. Ten years in prison for doing her job as prime minister and ensuring that homes and factories would have enough energy for the next year? (Tymoshenko left a trail of worse allegations, but the prosecutors chose to pursue this purely politically-motivated charge).
Maybe the price was a bit higher than it had to be, but since when has it been a crime to enter into a bad deal? Since 1962, to be precise. At that time, Ukraine, then a Soviet puppet, made it a crime to exceed one’s authority in government, something done every day by government executives, both good and bad, in every nation in the world.
Ukraine’s antiquated law is perfectly logical …. to everyone except members of the modern human race. Tymoshenko has been accused by her detractors, who are many, for trying to curry favor with Russia’s soon-to-be-president again, Vladimir Putin, advocate of a “controlled democracy” for Russia; by giving Russia a higher price for its gas, they say Putin would help her beat Yanukovych in the next election (she lost in the 2010 presidential election to Yanukovych, 48% to 43%, with Ukraine’s former president, Victor Yushchenko, receiving a dismal 5%).
Oddly, the outcome of this case affects Ukraine’s chances of developing closer ties to the west through the EU. If Tymoshenko goes to prison, the EU has put Yanukovych on notice that it will suspend discussions with Ukraine on closer economic association ties with the EU until the matter can be taken up again three years from now in accordance with the EU's bureaucratic rules. Yanukovych may be chummier with Russia than Yulia, but it will still hurt him politically if the EU pulls away (not to mention the fact that the EU deal would be good for Ukraine’s economy and its citizens …. matters that really don’t matter in the former Soviet sphere unless there is a political price).
Tymoshenko is also no westward, EU-leaning politico. I met with her in 1999 when she was 39 years old, a member of parliament and head of the State Tax Committee … a rising star in both looks and power. I was seeking her support for a law to protect a pending OPIC-supported (the US’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation) investment fund from the most egregious forms of corruption, a Ukrainian staple. With her hair down around her shoulders that did not hide the $100,000 tear-drop diamond that glittered from each ear, she blasted me with a Marxist refrain, “Ukraine does not need your western capital and its greedy business leaders eager to take advantage of our poor Ukrainian workers” (by the way, I could have gotten my law … for a specified payment).
One year later, after she had been named Deputy Prime Minister for Energy and Fuel, our company, based in western Ukraine, sponsored her as a speaker to the American Chamber of Commerce. With a McKinsey-like powerpoint presentation, she laid out the status and staggering capital needs of Ukraine’s decrepit, obsolete energy sector. At the end of her oration, she held out her hands to the foreigners present, palms up, beseeching them, “We need your help … tell us what to do”.
This time her hair was done up in what has become her trademark braids of a Ukrainian peasant and was wearing a simple black dress with not a piece of jewelry. She had undergone a complete transformation, inwardly and outwardly, and had become one of Ukraine’s most powerful and controversial populist political icons.
Before holding an official position in government, she had been head of Ukraine’s monopoly gas importer, United Energy Systems, a position which she allegedly parlayed into an off-shore fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars … something that is easily done in Ukraine if you’re of a mind to do so, have your own army, and know the right people. Tymoshenko had been a close ally of Ukraine’s Victor Lazarenko who had held the position of prime minister for just one short year after which he rode off into the California sunset onto his multi-million dollar estate where he continues to live comfortably under US house arrest, successfully forestalling extradition order after extradition order to Greece, Switzerland, Ukraine or any other country with a warrant for his arrest. He had siphoned off a mere billion dollars in his year as prime minister, probably not even close to a record by Ukrainian or Russian standards.
That Tymoshenko’s arrest and trial are politically motivated is without doubt. Yanukovych could dismiss the case in a second, save face, and get on with his crony thugocracy that is systematically gobbling up every major industrial plant in the country.
The trouble is, she might come back….
… and beat him in the next election. Today’s leaders from the former Soviet Union do not yield power easily through their phony democratic processes. They play for keeps, but Tymoshenko knows where the bodies are buried (let’s call this a metaphor). Corruption in Ukraine is enough to make one’s hair curl (just look at Yulia’s) and is so endemic it is hard to run away from; the next head of state might wish to press charges against his/her predecessor, especially someone as rich, smart, popular, powerful …. and now bitter …. as Tymoshenko.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Alternate Histories by Thomas F. Berner
But there is a different way of looking at the story. That it is more realistic than the standard Keynesian myth is irrelevant for the millions of people – bureaucrats, lawyers and the rest of society’s snake oil salesmen – whose livelihood depends on this myth.
Even with the large deficits the Federal government was running, the net debt in the economy – individual, corporate, local, state and federal government – dropped steadily throughout the thirties, freeing up private and local government balance sheets to allow them to borrow more and reinvest. The importance of “deleveraging” is nothing new. Hoover’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, famously argued that the solution to the Great Depression was to “liquidate capital, liquidate industry, liquidate the farmers.”
The result, of course, was that Mellon himself was liquidated and policies were put in place to prop up failure. Deleveraging is still considered as a possible solution in every credit crisis, but while it is always proposed it is always ignored. One of the pre-TARP proposals was for the government to buy up bad debt and to liquidate it over time, allowing banks to create new debt without having to deal with the baggage of old debt. The argument for rejecting that idea was that there was no way to price bad debt, but that is downright silly. You just buy at a high enough price not to bankrupt the banks and a low enough price to keep Uncle Sam from losing his shirt. Then you provide a mechanism for the bank to share in recoveries above that amount. The real reason the idea was rejected is that it would have forced those in the executive suites to show just how bad the stewardship of their institutions had been. Heads would have rolled. TARP, like the President’s stimulus bill, was designed to save jobs, not create any.
The recession of 1937 had more to do with the social legislation of the New Deal – high taxes, social security (which was being taxed but not yet paid out), the Wagner Act which empowered labor unions – stifling the private economy. FDR accused capital of “going on strike” but he had induced the strike. Capital doesn’t go on strike unless it is facing an uncertain future. Today we have the same thing: Obamacare and the raft of regulations being churned out of Washington are big scary unquantified liabilities looming over the economy. Why pour your money into a hole in the ground when you have no idea how deep the hole is?
When World War II broke out, there was a sudden demand for goods of all types. But here was the kicker: people were earning money, but rationing prevented them for spending any of it. The post-war boom resulted from four years of pent-up demand, factories with enough resources to move into products which were in demand and the undeniable fact that the industrial capacity of the rest of the world was bombed flat, creating a foreign demand for American goods (and equally important, a lack of competition domestically).
The effect of these three elements wore off by the early 1970’s leaving Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush to try to muddle through within the paradigm created by FDR. As America lost its supremacy and then its industry, it fell into a position where the old paradigm no longer works. This week, Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard called the Obama Administration “reactionary,” but the President is pushing the policies of the academic, political and media establishments. Reactionary they may be, but they think of themselves as progressive.
These reactionaries are encouraged to think of themselves as progressive since there is not yet a coherent body of ideas coalescing around the opposition. The Tea Party knows that something is very wrong, but they are a mass movement of middle class and working class Americans, the same people who in 1860 and 1930 knew something was terribly wrong with the framework of society, but had no intelligible body of ideas to deal with it. Tax cuts are not a complete public policy.
This is nothing new. When a paradigm has become obsolete, there is no full blown platform of ideas to replace it. Abe Lincoln was lucky to have the platform of the Whig Party which had been held up by the Democrats for twenty years, but even he flailed around with many issues. He was, after all, against emancipation before he was for it. FDR was a famous experimenter, borrowing concepts from Herbert Hoover, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Francis Everett Townsend, Huey Long and any other crank, tyrant or crackpot who had a vaguely attractive idea to flog.
So where are the new ideas going to come from? Despite the lack of a coherent policy, FDR kept the Government Printing Office busy grinding out new laws and regulations. Abe Lincoln had a legislative program which in its ambition and effect was even greater and more important than that of the New Deal.
But both of those Presidents had advantages we don’t have today. Abraham Lincoln and FDR both had advisors who were practical men of affairs. America had not yet strapped itself into the strait jacket of an academic elite coming from academic ivory towers and a business elite which has more in common with postal workers than entrepreneurs. The media was not yet a morass of unthinking scriveners who all say the same thing, but was a vibrant market of competing opinions.
If we are to climb out of the current dead end we find ourselves in, we have to rethink a great many things. New ideas won’t come from the left. All humans have a tendency to confuse self-interest with public interest, but the elites – those who have reached the top of the ladder of the current economic system – have the power to influence the future, which makes their confusion more dangerous than that of the average person. Since the left constitutes the bulk of the current elite, radical ideas will not be coming from them. This is made worse because the current elite, unlike the agricultural interests which dominated before 1860 and the industrial interests which dominated before 1930, have no vested interest in anything but keeping themselves on top. The cotton grower had to protect the environment in order to keep his fields productive, the industrialist had to build a useful product in order to find a market for his goods. The academic, the media and the day trader don’t have anything riding on the long term.
The left controls most of academia and the media and as both of those august institutions strive to prop up the current economic regime, they inevitably betray the neutrality and quest for the truth which is the reason they exist. These istitutions either have to be reformed or replaced.
It’s time to explore whether there are alternate ways to frame society which will keep the best of what we have, but leave behind those elements which benefit some of us to the detriment of everyone else.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
ONE DOWN ….. By Dick Shriver
“We don’t come from anywhere”, said our Basque friend and host, Jose, in the five star (my rating) Urepel Restaurant in the old part of Spain’s Basque enclave, San Sebastian. Jose and his colleague, Niaki (my spelling since my computer has no Basque letters … his name is derived from Ignatius), then gave us a lesson in Basque history, explaining that there are many theories about where the Basques came from, but no proof that the Basques came from anywhere but where they live today. There are 2 million of them in the northwest corner of Spain at the westernmost junction of France and Spain; there are several million Basque diaspora, mainly in Latin America, but especially in Chile where Basques at one point constituted nearly half the population.
There are traces in the surroundings of Basque country that date back 150,000 years. Cave drawings have been found that were created 12,000 years ago. Their language has no obvious connection with any other ... certainly not Spanish (my ear sensed a touch of Finnish, or Georgian, or one of those other unintelligible languages .... and their machine-gun rapidity of speech suggests they evolved with extra-large brains and neural canals). Ethnic homogeneity has doubtless played a role in Basque insularity and independence; while dictator Franco favored the Nazis over the allies, Basques helped downed allied aviators escape over the Pyrenees.
Our friends further described how the Basque separatist and terrorist group, the ETA, had all but disappeared through a combination of amnesties, international police actions, and laws passed by the Spanish government, aimed specifically at the ETA, prohibiting violence to achieve political ends.
ETA, infamous for its terrorist tactics from the late 1950s up to the present, had originally been cited as the organization responsible for the Madrid train bombing in 2004; subsequent investigations, however, led to the indictment and conviction of a single Moroccan nationalist with no known ties to either ETA or al Qaeda). Earlier this year, ETA signed a permanent peace treaty with Spain ending its 60 years of assassinations, kidnappings and bombings which resulted in the deaths of nearly 1,000 people.
ETA was not, of course, an international terrorist organization. It was established to achieve political autonomy from Spain. Religion was not even a factor (as in Ireland, say) as the Basques are also largely Catholic. It was simply a small group of people who were determined to break away from Spain. For a time, they did attract some measure of sympathy from other Basques and various socialist/communist groups around the world. What they wanted, in short, was to be left alone (though their terrorist tactics were reprehensible).
Such was not to be. The Spanish Government held the line and played a good game of carrot and stick, combined with spies and patience, to wear the dissidents down. The ranks of ETA dwindled over the past ten years. Terrorist acts and deaths caused by the ETA all but vanished. They began to fight amongst themselves. Their funds dried up, in large part the result of international police cooperation and confiscation. Finally, by early 2011, there was only a handful of ETA leaders left to surrender and receive amnesty, to be released from prison with full rights returned, and to sign a permanent peace treaty.
As we sit here in the Hotel Mont Igueldo, on a 500 foot promontory looking almost straight down into the Atlantic and with an unprecedented view of the entire city and harbor of San Sebastian, we see a small country within a country that is very self-satisfied today, with unemployment half that of the rest of Spain and a prosperous regional economy. It is questionable whether ETA served any useful purpose, and certainly caused harm: as a minimum, it gave the region a bad name for decades. ETA may also, however, have given Spain its king, Juan Carlos, and the amazing story of how he converted a dictatorship into a democracy ... a story that heads of state in, say, Morocco, Egypt and Jordan might well wish to re-read.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Oz by Thomas F. Berner
More than that, its troops receive full political support from its political leaders. When I was in Afghanistan, the German Army was prohibited by German law from operating, even patrolling, more than five kilometers from a full field hospital, making it impossible for its troops to range far enough to be effective in the province it was assigned to protect. Even more limiting, the French army was prohibited from leaving the City of Kabul. This has nothing to do with the troops. The young German soldiers I met were very frustrated with their “rules of disengagement” and I worked with a brilliant young and very frustrated French Captain, the liaison to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in Kabul, who was prohibited from visiting the very tribes he was supposed to be familiar with.
The Australian Army suffered none of those limitations. Armies, like the government for which they work, reflect their culture, the culture of their institution and the culture of the country they serve. The culture itself comes from the people themselves and a healthy culture will recognize the necessity of its young men to risk their lives for the common good.
A few days ago, I had dinner with two World War II veterans, both of whom had served in the South Pacific. There was an American who had served on the USS Honolulu and had a number of stories about life in the U.S. Navy, most of them involving the large team of supplies and support every U.S. serviceman received. There was also an Australian, named John, who had served in the Australian Army. Although brimming with the confidence which is a trademark of his stereotypical countrymen, he wasn’t the sort to brag about himself, but his war was a rugged one.
The Australian army would give him a bag of food and a rifle, put him on a boat and drop him off alone hundreds of miles behind Japanese lines, where he was expected to work his way inland and harass enemy camps. Must have been rough work, I said. Not really, he replied, I had a jungle to hide in; the trick was to have an escape route. That is one of the admirable things about the Australians. Nothing is too difficult.
It is simply a matter of thinking through the problems and devising solutions for them. John became a sniper at the age of 16. Imagine how many 16 year olds today would accept being dropped off alone, vastly outnumbered by a tough and efficient foe, with a sack of food, a bandolier of ammunition and a dense, disease ridden jungle to protect you.
This toughness is a reflection of the culture and the traditional wanderlust of the Australian. I’ve been to a number of places – Syria, Burma, Ethiopia, for instance – where I’ll never see another Westerner except for a group of Australians, quaffing the local brew in some wayward saloon.
This toughness seems to be in the water. When a young Australian graduates from high school or college, it is traditional for them to go on a “walkabout” for a year or two. This is not an organized stay in Europe, with Daddy a phone call away ready to wire money. It seems to be an opportunity for them to test their mettle and their self sufficiency.
A few years ago, my wife and I were taking a ferry from the Island of Rhodes into Turkey. We got to talking to two young Australian women on their walkabout, neither more than 22 years old. One of them was tall, blonde and very beautiful and her mate was short, dark and a little on the stocky side. They had just hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert. Now apparently, when you hitchhike across the Sahara, your ride will occasionally dump you off at the next oasis and you wait there alone until another ride shows up.
So these young women were all alone at an oasis awaiting their next ride, when in came about ten heavily armed Arab traders leading a long line of camels heavily burdened with goods. The Australian girls were invited to tea and while they were struggling over the language barrier, the Arab chief took aside the short, dark Aussie and indicated that the Arabs would like to buy her girlfriend.
Now the average 22 year old woman in other parts of the world – the average 22 year old civilian no matter what their gender, in fact – would consider herself to have three options: scream, run or fight. This young woman just coolly looked at the chief and asked “how much?” The chief gave a number and the young woman took a minute or two to think before rejecting the offer.
The chief went back to his fellow traders and shortly came back with a higher price. The Australian took just a little longer to think about it before saying “no.” All the while, the blonde was totally oblivious to the fact that her freedom was up for sale. This went on into the evening, until the final offer was for all of the camels, all of the goods on the camels and a sum of money. This time the young Australian took a good half hour examining the teeth and hooves of the camels and inspecting the goods.
Finally, she turned to the chief and apologetically rejected the offer not because it wasn’t generous enough but because the two young women had been mates for so long. The chief, accepting defeat, prepared them dinner and by first light, the camel train went off in one direction and the Aussie girls caught a ride to the coast.
There is something wonderful about a pair of youngsters, barely out of their teens, with the presence of mind and the toughness of character to defuse a situation like that. They managed to get what they wanted, while giving the natives the satisfaction of thinking that they were setting the rules of the transaction. It is even more admirable that they were women. Women create and preserve the culture and the tough mindedness in those young women augurs well for the future of Australian culture.
There is another curious element to this. Most Australians don’t dwell on their heritage. It matters little to them whether their ancestors were Irish or English or Italian or Greek. What matters is that they are Australians. That, too, is part of the strength of the culture.
Australia may very well become the last civilized country on earth.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Legal Follies Part II by Thomas F. Berner
Commentators on the right wonder why Toobin has delivered this tribute. Certainly, Thomas hasn’t moved left, which is the usual reason someone on the left suddenly recognizes the intellectual heft of a conservative they have previously derided as substandard. Nor has Toobin moved right; indeed the purpose of the article is to attack Thomas for leading the way on the presumably pending rejection of Obamacare by the Court.
Some conservatives, such as Mark Steyn, are arguing that Toobin is creating a scapegoat for the Court’s anticipated decision and that Thomas, who will no doubt be leading the debate, can then be subject to another “high tech lynching.” I prefer a more hopeful view: that liberals are starting to realize that you can’t fight ideas with nothing but “raw judicial power.” For years now, they have nominated justices who are not necessarily intelligent, but safe votes for the liberal position on issues. Indeed, not since Justices Felix Frankfurter and Byron White showed themselves to be believers in judicial restraint has the left suffered from a rightward drift in an appointee the way the right has suffered from appointments such as Justice Souter.
But Thomas shows the power of ideas and I find that to be an extraordinary cause for hope, not for conservatism necessarily, but certainly for the fate of liberalism, the law and the country. The phrase “raw judicial power,” which I quote above, comes from Justice White in his dissent on in Roe vs. Wade, which overturned abortion laws and was supposed to settle the issue once and for all. But of course it didn’t.
It didn’t settle the issue because a fiat from nine old men is not a substitute for the democratic process. An intelligent, well reasoned rationale is the only reason a judicial decision deserves credibility when it overrules the right of people to choose the rules by which they are governed. In a healthy democracy, if a political decision is made in an undemocratic fashion, the people will not accept it. What makes a judicial decision, which of necessity is decided in an undemocratic fashion, acceptable is when there is an intelligent rationale for the decision. But Roe vs. Wade has no such rationale, which is especially necessary for a decision which results in changes as sweeping as Roe vs. Wade’s were.
The reasoning of Roe’s author, Justice Harry Blackmun, has the sort of superficial appeal of which lawyers are fond but which has little connection to real life. He noted that in the first trimester, the fetus is not “viable” outside of the mother’s womb. It is, therefore, he felt, no more entitled to Constitutional protection than, say, a parasite. Similarly, in the last trimester, the fetus is capable of surviving outside of the mother and therefore is protected. The status of the fetus in the middle trimester is a bit fuzzy, Justice Blackmun thought, so in this period, abortion is subject to reasonable regulations.
The problem with Justice Blackmun’s concept is that it is frozen in time as of the year in which it was written. Most litigators – and litigators are the ones who generally find their way to the bench – live in the past. They argue about the who, what, when, where and why of an event that has already occurred. They live the lives of historians, sifting through old papers, questioning fading memories, studying old data in order to find justice for their client. They are not in the business of predicting the future and, in my experience, are quite bad at it. They are far less capable of foresight and thinking two steps ahead than a taxi driver negotiating rush hour traffic.
Justice Blackmun’s opinion relied on the state of scientific knowledge as of 1973. Great strides have been taken since then, so now a fetus is “viable” mere weeks after conception and, given the forward momentum of medical science, it is conceivable that viability will soon be almost simultaneous with conception. That would turn the reasoning of Roe vs. Wade on its head and make the opinion a Constitutional prohibition of abortion, because if the rights of a fetus depends on its viability outside of the womb, every triumph of medical science expands the rights of the fetus and narrows the woman’s right to an abortion. Roe vs. Wade is one man’s flawed attempt to define when human life begins and the guidance he offered is increasingly flawed.
In their heart of hearts, pro-choice lawyers recognize the flaws in the opinion and, indeed, the rationale of the Roe opinion has been almost totally ignored since it was issued. But there is no guiding principle to replace Blackmun’s flawed reasoning either. The result is the creation of a vast, and perhaps permanent, intellectual vacuum in the law.
We also have the side effect of masses of people who have taken their opinions to the street because the political forum has been foreclosed to them by the Court. If opinion polls are anything to go by, opponents of abortion are slowly moving opinion against abortion rights. Anyone with an inkling of human nature would have expected that. You don’t “settle” a political issue by sweeping objections under the rug and imposing your view by diktat. You settle the issues by honest debate, by finding compromises and letting everyone be a little unhappy.
If abortion laws had been left to fifty state legislatures, as it should have been, each state’s laws would have reflected the social mores of the people living there. It would probably still be largely outlawed in the Bible Belt and considerably more available in the northeastern and Pacific areas of the United States. More importantly, though, everyone would have reached a local compromise that they could live with. It would not be pretty, it would not be rational, but it would have been democracy. If you can’t provide a logical explanation for a ruling, based on universally accepted concepts (even if the application of those concepts is subject to disagreement), it is incumbent on the judicial system to surrender the issue to the messier democratic process, which has the virtue of giving a much larger forum for competing points of view to be heard.
The Supreme Court is no longer perceived by many Americans to be an institution of intellectual discourse. It is thought to be a sort of superlegislature, where the result is what counts and not the reasoning the Court used to reach the decision. The ends are not supposed to justify the means in a democratic society. This separation of power from process and principle has not only replaced the Court’s moral and intellectual authority with mere political power, but it has also led to an unhealthy paranoia on the left, which projects its own behavior onto that of its opponents.
Ironically, Justice Blackmun had been subject to charges by leftwing critics of being an intellectual lightweight, but the very case which proved them correct also made him a liberal icon. Intelligence ceased to be a requirement to the left. That they now recognize the intelligence of a conservative jurist who has been unfairly maligned by them for twenty years is therefore a cause for celebration by everyone.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
WHEN IN DOUBT, GO WITH THE MILITARY …. By Dick Shriver
In 1985 I chaired the ”First World Conference On Counter Terrorism” which took place in Washington, DC. In attendance were more than a hundred counter-terrorist experts from a dozen countries including Germany, Canada, Italy, England and Israel. Virtually every US agency engaged in counter-terrorist activities at the time was represented including the FBI, CIA, the Secret Service, US Customs and the maverick of law enforcement, ATF, or Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (the concept of a department of homeland security was not even a gleam in anyone’s eye at the time). I asked the late Al Haig, a friend from my days in the Pentagon, if he would make the keynote address: he agreed.
The Europeans and Israelis set the tone for this conference. By 1985, they had experienced the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre by Palestinians, the Bader-Meinhoff Gang in Germany, the hijacking of an El Al flight that resulted in the Entebbe raid, and the Red Brigade of Italy …. Their message to us was: “Get ready, America … you’re next”. At that time, the worst act of terrorism inflicted on the US had been the suicidal destruction of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon, killing 243 marines; this incident was deemed a criminal act rather than an act of terrorism, though a relatively unknown (at the time) organization that called itself “Hezbullah” was involved. In fact, all of the attendees at this first conference on counter-terrorism were from the international law enforcement community.
Our conference and Haig’s subsequent publication of an Op-Ed piece on the topic in the Washington Post after the conference had zero impact on US policy. In fact, as a group we had little sense that terrorism would become the threat it is today to the American way of life, nor do I recall that anyone even proposed any serious policy recommendations beyond some meek efforts to increase US awareness of the matter.
If someone had proposed a consolidation of the multitude of agencies that now comprise the Department of Homeland Security, no one would have taken it seriously. If anyone had speculated an attack, say, by suicidal Islamic radicals hijacking commercial airliners, no one would have bothered to take notes. If anyone had speculated that we might one day launch two pre-emptive strikes, one against Afghanistan and the other against Iraq, our group would have complimented the speaker on a great imagination. There was no message from this first public discourse on international counter-terrorism to carry to our head of state at the time, President Ronald Reagan (though if we had been so motivated, Al Haig could have carried such a message).
The fact is, it took vastly more to get the attention of the world’s leaders. After the blowing up of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, other than an official investigation and an attempt to assassinate Muammar Qaddafi by an air strike, we did nothing. After the attack on the US Cole, we did little. After the attack on the US marine Barracks in Lebanon, we got out. After the first attack on the World Trade Center using a truck loaded with explosives, a urea nitrate-hydrogen gas enhanced device that was intended to topple the North Tower into the South Tower, our response was a criminal investigation (6 were killed and over a thousand injured right at the very site of the 9/11 attack).
What does it take to get the attention of a national leader for such threats? I suspect that so long as the threat is considered to be a criminal act, no major policy change is likely to be considered. If the threat is considered to be a military threat, we have a better chance of giving the matter the attention it deserves. The professionals in our CIA and defense department are much more attuned than the law enforcement community to think in terms of an enemy eager to do us in on a wholesale basis. Until we have a better mechanism of categorizing potential major threats to the homeland, I fear we will continue to be vulnerable to attack. President George Bush’s definition of our response as a “war on terror” was, and still is, correct.