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When Napoleon Won at Waterloo

by Uri Avnery; Gush Shalom; September 04, 2006

NAPOLEON WON the battle of Waterloo. The German Wehrmacht won World War II. The United States won in Vietnam, and the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Zealots won against the Romans, and Ehud Olmert won the Second Lebanon War.

You didn't know that? Well, during the last few days the Israeli media has paraded a long series of experts, who did not leave any room for doubt: the war has brought us huge achievements, Hizbullah was routed, Olmert is the great victor.

The TV talk-show hosts and anchormen put their microphones at the service of professors, publicity experts, "security personnel" and "strategists" (a title not denoting generals, but advisers of politicians). All of them agreed on the outcome: an honest-to-goodness victory.

Yesterday I switched on the TV and saw a person radiating self-assurance and explaining how our victory in Lebanon opens the way for the inevitable war with Iran. The analysis, composed almost entirely of clichés, was worthy of a high-school pupil. I was shocked to learn that the man was a former chief of the Mossad. Anyway, we won this war and we are going to win the next one.

So there is no need at all for a commission of inquiry. What is there to inquire into? All we need is a few committees to clear up the minor slips that occurred here and there.

Resignations are absolutely out. Why, what happened? Victors do not resign! Did Napoleon resign after Waterloo? Did Presidents Johnson and Nixon resign after what happened in Vietnam? Did the Zealots resign after the destruction of the Temple?

JOKING ASIDE, the parade of Olmert's stooges on TV, on the radio and in the newspapers tells us something. Not about the achievements of Olmert as a statesman and strategist, but about the integrity of the media.

When the war broke out, the media people fell into line and and marched in step as a propaganda battalion. All the media, without exception, became organs of the war effort, fawning on Olmert, Peretz and Halutz, waxing enthusiastic at the sight of the devastation in Lebanon and singing the praises of the "steadfastness of the civilian population" in the north of Israel. The public was exposed to an incessant rain of victory reports, going on (literally) from early in the morning to late at night.

The government and army spokespersons, together with Olmert's spin team, decided what to publish and when, and, more importantly, what to suppress.

That found its expression in the "word laundry". Instead of accurate words came misleading expressions: when heavy battles were raging in Lebanon, the media spoke about "exchanges of fire". The cowardly Hassan Nasrallah was "hiding" in his bunker, while our brave Chief-of-Staff was directing operations from his underground command post (nicknamed "the hole").

The chicken-hearted "terrorists" of Hizbullah were hiding behind women and children and operating from within villages, quite unlike our Ministry of Defense and General Staff which are located in the heart of the most densely populated area in Israel. Our soldiers were not captured in a military action, but "abducted" like the victims of gangsters, while our army "arrests" the leaders of Hamas. Hizbullah, as is well known, is "financed" by Iran and Syria, quite unlike Israel, which "receives generous support" from our great friend and ally, the United States.

There was, of course, a difference of night and day between Hizbullah and us. How can one compare? After all, Hizbullah launched rockets at us with the express intent of killing civilians, and did indeed kill some thirty of them. While our military, "the most moral army in the world", took great care not to hurt civilians, and therefore only about 800 Lebanese civilians, half of them children, lost their lives in the bombardments which were all directed at purely military targets.

No general could compare with the military correspondents and commentators, who appeared daily on TV, striking impressive military poses, who reported on the fighting and demanded a deeper advance into Lebanon. Only very observant viewers noticed that they did not accompany the fighters at all and did not share the dangers and pains of battle, something that is essential for honest reporting in war. During the entire war I saw only two correspondent's reports that really reflected the spirit of the soldiers - one by Itay Angel and the other by Nahum Barnea.

The deaths of soldiers were generally announced only after midnight, when most people were asleep. During the day the media spoke only about soldiers being "hurt". The official pretext was that the army had first to inform the families. That's true - but only for announcing the names of the fallen soldiers. It does not apply at all to the number of the dead. (The public quickly caught on and realized that "hurt" meant "killed'.)

OF COURSE, among the almost one thousand people invited to the TV studios during the war to air their views, there were next to no voices criticizing the war itself. Two or three, who were invited for alibi purposes, were shown up as ridiculous weirdos. Two or three Arab citizens were also invited, but the talk-masters fell on them like hounds on their prey.

For weeks, the media suppressed the fact that hundreds of thousands of Israelis had abandoned the bombarded North, leaving only the poorest behind. That would have shaken the legend of the "steadfastness of the rear".

All the media (except the internet sites) completely suppressed the news about the demonstrations against the war that took place almost daily and that grew rapidly from dozens to hundreds, and from hundreds to thousands. (Channel 1 alone devoted several seconds to the small demonstration of Meretz and Peace Now that took place just before the end of the war. Both had supported the war enthusiastically almost to the finish.)

I don't say these things as a professor for communications or a disgruntled politician. I am a media-person from head to foot. Since the age of 17 I have been a working journalist, reporter, columnist and editor, and I know very well how media with integrity should behave. (The only prize I ever got in my own country was awarded by the Journalists' Association for my "life work in journalism".)

I do not think, by the way, that the behavior of our media was worse than that of their American colleagues at the start of the Iraq war, or the British media during the ridiculous Falklands/Malvinas war. But the scandals of others are no consolation for our own.

Against the background of this pervasive brainwashing, one has to salute the few - who can be counted on the fingers of both hands - who did not join the general chorus and did indeed voice criticism in the written media, as much as they were allowed to. The names are well-known, and I shall not list them here, for fear of overlooking somebody and committing an unforgivable sin. They can hold their head high. The trouble is that their comments appeared only in the op-ed pages, which have a limited impact, and were completely absent from the news pages and news programs, which shape public opinion on a daily basis.

When the media people now passionately debate the need for all kinds of inquiry commissions and examination committees, perhaps they should set a personal example and establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the actions of the media themselves at the time of supreme test.

I N GOETHE'S "Faust", the devil presents himself as the "force that always strives for the bad and always produces the good." I do not wish, God forbid, to compare the media to the devil, but the result is the same: by its enthusiastic support for the war, the media deepened the feeling of failure that came afterwards and which may in the end have a beneficial impact.

The media called Hizbullah a "terror organization", evoking the image of a small group of "terrorists" with negligible capabilities. When it became clear that this is an efficient and well-trained military force with brave and determined fighters, effective missiles and other weapons, that could hold out against our huge military machine for 33 days without breaking, the disappointment was even more bitter.

After the media had glorified our military commanders as supermen and treated every one of their boasts with adulation, almost as if they were divine revelations, the disappointment was even greater when severe failures in strategy, tactics, intelligence and logistics showed up in all levels of the senior command.

That contributed to the profound change in public opinion that set in at the end of the war. As elevated as the self-confidence had been, so deep was the sense of failure. The Gods had failed. The intoxication of war was replaced by the hangover of the morning after.

And who is that running in front of the mob clamoring for revenge, all the way to the Place de la Guillotine? The media, of course.

I don't know of a single talk-show host, anchorman. commentator, reporter or editor, who has confessed his guilt and begged for forgiveness for his part in the brainwashing. Everything that was said, written or photographed has been wiped off the slate. It just never happened.

Now, when the damage cannot be repaired anymore, the media are pushing to the head of those who demand the truth and clamor for punishment for all the scandalous decisions that were taken by the government and the general staff: prolonging the war unnecessarily after the first six days, abandoning the rear, neglecting the reserves, not sending the land army into Lebanon on day X and sending them into Lebanon on day Y, not accepting G8's call for a cease-fire, and so on.

But, just a moment --

During the last few days, the wheel may be turning again. What? We did not lose the war after all? Wait, wait, we did win? Nasrallah has apologized? (By strict orders from above, the full interview of Nasrallah was not broadcast at all, but the one passage in which he admitted to a mistake was broadcast over and over again.)

The sensitive nose of the media people has detected a change of the wind. Some of them have already altered course. If there is a new wave in public opinion, one should ride it, no?

WE CALL this the "Altalena Effect".

For those who don't know, or who have already forgotten: Altalena was a small ship that arrived off the coast of Israel in the middle of the 1948 war, carrying a group of Irgun men and quantities of weapons, it was not clear for whom. David Ben-Gurion was afraid of a putsch and ordered the shelling of the ship, off the coast of Tel-Aviv. Some of the men were killed, Menachem Begin, who had gone aboard, was pushed into the water and saved. The ship sank, the Irgun was dispersed and its members joined the new Israeli army.

29 years later Begin came to power. All the careerists joined him in haste. And then it appeared, retroactively, that practically everybody had been on board the Altalena. The little ship expanded into a huge aircraft carrier - until the Likud lost power and Altalena shrunk back to the size of a fishing boat.

The Second Lebanon War was a mighty Altalena. All the media crowded onto its deck. But the day after the war was over, we learned that this was an optical illusion: absolutely nobody had been there, except Captain Olmert, First Officer Peretz and Helmsman Halutz. However, that can change any minute now, if the trusting public can be convinced that we won the war after all.

As has been said before: in Israel nothing changes, except the past.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=10882

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ZNet | U.S.

The Great Equalizer
Lessons From Iraq and Lebanon

by Gabriel Kolko; September 05, 2006

The United States had a monopoly of nuclear weaponry only a few years before other nations challenged it, but from 1949 until roughly the 1990s deterrence theory worked - nations knew that if they used the awesome bomb they were likely to be devastated in the riposte. Despite such examples of brinkmanship as the Cuban missile crisis and numerous threats of nuclear annihilation against non-nuclear powers, by and large the few nations that possessed the bomb concluded that nuclear war was not worth its horrendous risks. Today, by contrast, weapons of mass destruction or precision and power are within the capacity of dozens of nations either to produce or purchase. With the multiplicity of weapons now available, deterrence theory is increasingly irrelevant and the equations of military power that existed in the period after World War Two no longer hold.

This process began in Korea after 1950, where the war ended in a stand off despite the nominal vast superiority of America's military power, and the Pentagon discovered that great space combined with guerrilla warfare was more than a match for it in Vietnam, where the U.S. was defeated. Both wars caused the American military and establishment strategists to reflect on the limits of high tech warfare, and for a time it seemed as if appropriate lessons would be learned and costly errors not repeated.

The conclusion drawn from these major wars should have been that there were decisive limits to American military and political power, and that the U. S. should drastically tailor its foreign policy and cease intervening anywhere it chose to. In short, it was necessary to accept the fact that it could not guide the world as it wished to. But such a conclusion, justified by experience, was far too radical for either party to fully embrace, and defense contractors never ceased promising the ultimate new weapon. America's leaders and military establishment in the wake of 9/11 argued that technology would rescue it from more political failures. But such illusions - fed by the technological fetishism which is the hallmark of their civilization - led to the Iraq debacle.

There has now been a qualitative leap in technology that makes all inherited conventional wisdom, and war as an instrument of political policy, utterly irrelevant, not just to the U.S. but to any other nation that embarks upon it.

Technology is now moving much faster than the diplomatic and political resources or will to control its inevitable consequences - not to mention traditional strategic theories. Hezbollah has far better and more lethal rockets than it had a few years ago, and American experts believe that the Iranians compelled them to keep in reserve the far more powerful and longer range cruise missiles they already possess. Iran itself possesses large quantities of these missiles and American experts believe they may very well be capable of destroying aircraft carrier battle groups. All attempts to devise defenses against these rockets, even the most primitive, have been expensive failures, and anti-missile technology everywhere has remained, after decades of effort and billions of dollars, unreliable.1

Even more ominous, the U. S. Army has just released a report that light water reactors - which 25 nations, from Armenia to Slovenia as well as Spain, already have and are covered by no existing arms control treaties - can be used to obtain near weapons-grade plutonium easily and cheaply.2 Within a few years, many more countries than the present ten or so - the Army study thinks Saudi Arabia and even Egypt most likely - will have nuclear bombs and far more destructive and accurate rockets and missiles. Weapons-poor fighters will have far more sophisticated guerilla tactics as well as far more lethal equipment, which deprives the heavily equipped and armed nations of the advantages of their overwhelming firepower, as demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq. The battle between a few thousand Hezbullah fighters and a massive, ultra-modern Israeli army backed and financed by the U.S. proves this. Among many things, the war in Lebanon is a window of the future. The outcome suggests that either the Israelis cease their policy of destruction and intimidation, and accept the political prerequisites of peace with the Arab world, or they too will eventually be devastated by cheaper and more accurate missiles and nuclear weapons in the hands of at least two Arab nations and Iran.

What is now occurring in the Middle East reveals lessons just as relevant in the future to festering problems in East Asia, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. Access to nuclear weapons, cheap missiles of greater portability and accuracy, and the inherent limits of all antimissile systems, will set the context for whatever crises arise in North Korea, Iran, Taiwan…or Venezuela. Trends which increase the limits of technology in warfare are not only applicable to relations between nations but also to groups within them - ranging from small conspiratorial entities up the scale of size to large guerilla movements. The events in the Middle East have proven that warfare has changed dramatically everywhere, and American hegemony can now be successfully challenged throughout the globe.

Iranian Missile Exercise

American power has been dependent to a large extent on its highly mobile navy. But ships are increasingly vulnerable to missiles, and while they are a long way from finished they are more-and-more circumscribed tactically and, ultimately, strategically. There is a greater balance-of-power militarily, the reemergence of a kind of deterrence that means all future wars will be increasingly protracted, expensive - and very costly politically to politicians who blunder into wars with illusions they will be short and decisive. Olmert and Peretz are very likely to lose power in Israel, and destroying Lebanon will not save their political futures. This too is a message not likely to be lost on politicians.

To this extent, what is emerging is a new era of more equal rivals.
Enforceable universal disarmament of every kind of weapon would be far preferable. But short of this presently unattainable goal, this emergence of a new equivalency is a vital factor leading less to peace in the real meaning of that term than perhaps to greater prudence. Such restraint could be an important factor leading to less war.

We live with 21st century technology and also with primitive political attitudes, nationalisms of assorted sorts, and cults of heroism and irrationality existing across the political spectrum and the power spectrum. The world will destroy itself unless it realistically confronts the new technological equations. Israel must now accept this reality, and if it does not develop the political skills required to make serious compromises, this new equation warrants that it will be liquidated even as it rains destruction on its enemies.

Israeli missiles target Beirut

This is the message of the conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon - to use only the examples in today's papers. Walls are no longer protection for the Israelis - one shoots over them. Their much-vaunted Merkava tanks have proven highly vulnerable to new weapons that are becoming more and more common and are soon likely to be in Palestinian hands as well. At least 20 of the tanks were seriously damaged or destroyed.

The U.S. war in Iraq is a political disaster against the guerrillas - a half trillion dollars spent there and in Afghanistan have left America on the verge of defeat in both places. The "shock and awe" military strategy has utterly failed save to produce contracts for weapons makers - indeed, it has also contributed heavily to de facto U.S. economic bankruptcy.

The Bush Administration has deeply alienated more of America's nominal allies than any government in modern times. The Iraq war and subsequent conflict in Lebanon have left its Middle East policy in shambles and made Iranian strategic predominance even more likely, all of which was predicted before the Iraq invasion. Its coalitions, as Thomas Ricks shows in his wordy but utterly convincing and critical book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, are finished. Its sublime confidence and reliance on the power of its awesome weaponry is a crucial cause of its failure, although we cannot minimize its preemptory hubris and nationalist myopia. The United States, whose costliest political and military adventures since 1950 have ended in failure, now must face the fact that the technology for confronting its power is rapidly becoming widespread and cheap. It is within the reach of not merely states but of relatively small groups of people. Destructive power is now virtually "democratized."

If the challenges of producing a realistic concept of the world that confronts the mounting dangers and limits of military technology seriously are not resolved soon, recognizing that a decisive equality of military power is today in the process of being re-imposed, there is nothing more than wars and mankind's eventual destruction to look forward to.

Notes

1. Mark Williams, "The Missiles of August: The Lebanon War and the democratization of missile technology," Technology Review (MIT), August 16, 2006.

2. Henry Sokolski, ed., Taming the Next Set of Strategic Weapons Threats, U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute, June 2006, pp. 33ff., 86.

Gabriel Kolko is the author, among other works, of Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another Century of War?, and Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is The Age of War.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=10885

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ZNet | U.S.

American and Muslim: six million people in search of an identity

by Robert Fisk; The Independent; September 04, 2006

A guy with brown eyes and dark skin and a thick American accent walks up to talk to me. I guess he's an Iranian, possibly a Pakistani. Where're you from, I ask? "Austin, Texas," he replies. Fisk foiled again. But where do you originally come from I ask him? "I was born in Newark, New Jersey." Fisk clears his throat. Where does his family originally come from? I'm beginning to feel like the man from Homeland Security, racially profiling my new friend. "Lahore," he replies laconically and I try to make amends. The only beautiful city in Pakistan, I say, and he smiles witheringly at me.

And I go on making the same mistake at the conference hall where the biggest annual convention of American Muslims - perhaps 32,000 of them - is meeting for a weekend of speeches and discussions that run all the way from drug addiction to Condi Rice's "new" and bloody Middle East, from banking without interest to the Bush administration's use of torture and yes, of course, the after-effects on Muslims of the international crimes against humanity of September 11, 2001.

You from Jordan I ask? "Denver, Colorado," the young woman replies. Born in San Diego. Family, yes, from Jordan. From Lebanon, I ask another? "Buffalo, New York." Actually, the family was from Syria.

It takes a while to realise that I'm playing the game of so many American non-Muslims in the aftermath of the plane hijackings. I'm sniffing for the world's enemies only hours after President George W Bush went into paranoid mode while addressing the American Legion in Salt Lake City. He had just claimed that America is fighting "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century" and then jumped on the crumbling old arguments of pre-Second World War appeasement to bang the Hitler drum as well.

Oddly, it's the Muslim converts rather than the Muslim-born Americans who are toughest on Bush. "He wants eternal war," a young man with a brown beard but very bright blue eyes - yes, he was from Vermont - hissed at me. "He talks shit and we have to listen to this and promise to be non-violent or someone will point the finger at us." All agree that the most pernicious element to the latest Bush rant is his gift to Israel of placing Ehud Olmert in the ranks of his "war on terror", quite specifically linking Israel's slaughter of Lebanese civilians in July and August to his own manic project by stating that combatants from Iraq and Lebanon "form the outlines of a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology".

I search for the anger amid these thousands of Muslims, businessmen from Seattle and students from Harvard and housewives from Miami. It's there, I know, but as an Armenian friend of mine remarks in the afternoon, they seem happy. And it's true. There are more smiles than expressions of contempt, more babies in backpacks and prams than posters of pain. In fact there aren't any posters at all. But I suspect I know the truth. On their own, as thin minorities in the towns and cities of the United States, America's Muslims - perhaps six million of them - can feel under siege, distrusted and even hated.

At the convention centre, however, they are in a self-confident majority, Sunnis for the most part - America's Shias, who may be in the majority over all, don't have the same organising abilities at present - who blithely ignore the officers of the Illinois state police and the Chicago cops' bomb squad. I watch them, guns swinging at their hips, go from stand to stand, occasionally inspecting the boxes of books piled against the walls. Just who, I wonder, do they think is going to bomb Muslims in Chicago?

Salam al-Marati - he is one of the few Muslims I meet who actually was born in the Arab world, in the Baghdad suburb of Qadamiyeh - is director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a Los Angeles advocacy group which repeatedly urges American Muslims to work with the authorities against violence but who sees other dangers and other targets for Muslim political anger: the pro-Israeli lobbyists who ostentatiously insist that the vast majority of American Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding but that a "network of Islamic terror" exists across the nation.

Daniel Pipes is a bête noire, as is Steven Emerson, a freelance journalist who grinds out article after article about the "American jihad" for such august papers as The Wall Street Journal, which, by the way, more and more reads like The Jerusalem Post. Emerson and his work are taken apart by al-Marati and his colleagues in a widely circulated booklet entitled Counterproductive Terrorism: How Anti-Islamic Rhetoric is Impeding America's Homeland Security.

"Those representing pro-Israeli groups continue to intimidate and marginalise those who are critical of Israeli policies by claiming this is pro-terrorism," al-Marati says with a mixture of anger and weariness. "This is to the detriment of America, to the detriment of countering terrorism."

Maher Hathout, originally from the Cairo suburb of Qasr el-Aini and an MPAC advisor, is, if anything, even more angry. "We are that group of Americans who are not intimidated," he says. "You go to the campuses, and the Muslim students are the most outspoken. They are asking - we are asking - how we can get the average American who knows the truth about the Middle East to have the guts to speak it. Our job is to say: 'Shame on you. You criticise your President. But when you speak of Israel,you whisper.' What has happened to the home of the brave?"

MPAC - which is operating in Chicago under the auspices of the distinctly pro-Saudi Islamic Society of North America - has produced a handbook called the Grassroots Campaign to Fight Terrorism, which quotes from the Koran ("Whoever killed a human being... it shall be as if he had killed all mankind") and advises its supporters that "it is our duty as American Muslims to protect our country and to contribute to its betterment".

"But what is the American-Muslim identity?" al-Marati asks. "Our religious values and our American values are not incompatible. There is no dissonance between the founding principles of America and Muslim values. Unless we have this identity, we will be trapped. We will end up creating Muslim ghettoes in America."

Sometimes, though, these men and women remind me of nothing so much as the more ardent members of the Israeli - or Armenian - lobby: fluent, just a little bit over-eloquent, passionate - and I wonder if one day they may get a little loose with the facts.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=10884

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ZNet | U.S.

9/11: Katrina Started at Ground Zero

by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz; September 05, 2006

Nothing else worked that day. The President was flying haplessly around the country looking distinctly unpresidential; the Vice President was in a bunkered panic. The military couldn't scramble armed jets and anything else that could go wrong did. But one thing worked, and it worked splendidly - the New York City, as well as federal, public-health system.

While the World Trade Center was burning fiercely and about to become a vast cloud of toxic smoke and ash, public health officials were already mobilizing. Within hours, hospitals had readied themselves to receive the injured; hundreds of ambulances were lined up along the West Side Highway awaiting word to race to the scene; the city's public health department had opened its headquarters to receive hundreds of people stricken by smoke inhalation, heart attacks, or just pure terror; the Department of Health had already begun providing gas masks and other protective equipment to doctors, evacuation personnel, and first responders of all sorts. From bandages and surgical tools to antibiotics and radiation-detection equipment, the federal Centers for Disease Control readied immense plane-loads of emergency supplies, ferrying them up to New York's LaGuardia Airport aboard some of the few planes allowed to fly in the days after September 11th.

Despite the general panic and the staggering levels of destruction, even seemingly inconsequential or long-range potential health problems were attended to: Restaurants were broken into to empty thousands of pounds of rotting food from electricity-less refrigerators, counters tops, and refrigeration rooms; vermin infestations were averted; puddles were treated to stop mosquitoes from breeding so that West Nile virus would not affect the thousands of police, fire, and other search-and-rescue personnel working at Ground Zero.

In the face of a great and unexpected catastrophe, this is the way it was supposed to be - and (for those who care to be nostalgic) after 5 years of the Bush administration's Global War on Terror, not the way it's ever likely to be again. One of the great ironies of 9/11 will pass unnoticed in the various memorials and remembrances now descending upon us: In the wake of the attacks, as the Bush administration claimed it was gearing up to protect us against any further such moments by pouring money into the Pentagon and the new Department of Homeland Security, its officials were also reorienting, privatizing, militarizing, and beginning to functionally dismantle the very public health system that made the catastrophe of 9/11 so much less disastrous than it might have been.

It took no time at all for the administration to start systematically undercutting the efforts of experienced health administrators in New York and at the national Centers for Disease Control. By pressing them to return the city to "normal" and feeding them doctored information about dust levels - ignoring scientific uncertainties about the dangers that lingered in the air - the administration lied to support a national policy of denial.

Bush-style Safety

Putting in place a dysfunctional bureaucracy would soon undermine the public's trust in the whole health system in downtown Manhattan. In the process, it also effectively crippled systems already in existence to protect workers, local residents, and children attending school in the area. As a result, what promised to be an extraordinary example of a government bureaucracy actually working turned into a disaster and later became the de facto model for the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

Here's how it worked: First, Karl Rove and George Bush saw an opportunity - mounting the pile of World Trade Center rubble - for a public-relations coup in devastated Manhattan that could instantly reverse the President's distinctly unpresidential day on 9/11 and his administration's previously weak polling numbers. Second, Washington pushed New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani and local officials to get with the program and re-open Wall Street (which the 9/11 attacks had shut down) faster than was advisable. Third, city officials were told by administration emissaries that, despite the pall hanging over Ground Zero, all was well with the air and water in lower Manhattan and normal life should resume.

Finally, although nearly the entire city could, for months to come, smell the rancid co-mingling of burning plastics, asbestos, lead, chromium, mercury, vinyl chloride, benzene, and scores of other toxic materials as well as decaying human flesh, Bush's appointees in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continually bombarded city officials with reports claiming that the air was certifiably "safe" to breathe. As EPA Administrator Christy Whitman put it, "There's no need for the general public to be concerned." To this day we do not know the extent of contamination or level of exposure to which residents, workers, and students in the area were (and are still being) subjected.

Everyone got on the band wagon: the President mounted the pile of rubble without respiratory protection, signaling to firemen, policemen, and volunteers that he-men shouldn't worry about the towers having become a toxic waste-pile the likes of which the developed world hadn't seen since Chernobyl. Under the goading of EPA officials, even the venerable New York City Department of Health (despite internal dissention) began proclaiming lower Manhattan safe for the return of residents. (At that time, Lower Manhattan's congressional representative Jerrold Nadler was arguing that it was still dangerously toxic.) The Board of Education, feeling the heat from the Giuliani administration - in turn, reacting to pressure from Washington - ordered schools just a few blocks from Ground Zero reopened and thousands of students were sent back to the neighborhood.

New Yorkers, complaining of stinging and watery eyes, knew this was not, in any conventional sense, a "safe" area. Karl Rove and the President, however, were focused on solidifying the Republican Party's hold on the nation. In that context, the possible effects on the lives and lungs of a few hundred thousand New Yorkers was a minor matter.

The policy worked like a charm - at least initially. The clearing of the pile was accomplished with miraculous speed. City authorities had estimated it would take two to three years, but thousands of city employees, undocumented workers, and volunteers labored feverishly and often without protection, in part inspired by the patriotic fervor that gripped Americans. The 1.8 million tons of debris was gone in a mere eight and a half months. And, miraculously, the President's poll numbers, down in the toxic dumps just weeks before the 9/11 attacks, rose dramatically.

Residents of the area, at first wary that their apartments had been polluted, began to accept official reassurances and soon streamed back to the co-ops of Battery Park City and the lofts north and south of the Trade Center site. Despite their fears, parents, clinging to the consoling pronouncements that poured from the EPA, the city administration, and even the Department of Health, sent their children back into what some were calling a "war-zone."

The Bush administration's triumph in bringing "normalcy" back to the area around Ground Zero would, however, turn out to be a victory of style over substance - of a sort that would become far more familiar to Americans in the years ahead. Just as the challenging questions and assessments of intelligence analysts and State Department experts would be ignored or drowned out by administration pronouncements on supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as well as Saddam Hussein's alleged links to al-Qaeda, so, in those first weeks, the EPA's official pronouncements of safety trumped the skepticism of scientists at Mt. Sinai and other area medical schools, reporters like Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News and even local residents and politicians all of whom knew something was wrong. "The mayor's office is under pressure" to reopen lower Manhattan, reported one official who worried that the city's own Department of Environmental Protection felt the air was not suitable to breathe.

Before long, parents of children in the neighborhood were engaged in screaming matches with local officials who had the hapless task of carrying out policies they didn't necessarily support. As it happened, they were all correct in their fears. Class action lawsuits from over 7,000 residents and workers subsequently led to the discovery of documents showing how intense pressure from Mayor Giuliani had indeed led the Department of Health to certify areas in lower Manhattan safe so that they could be reopened for residents and businesses.

Style over Substance

What began with the dismantling of an effective public-health response at Ground Zero later spread to the entire national and local public-health systems. From September 12th, 2001 on, public-health professionals called ever more vigorously for resources to revamp a sagging health infrastructure of hospitals, emergency services, disease-reporting systems, and preventive health care - in essence, the country's first line of defense against all sorts of health catastrophes, whether caused by terrorism or not.

As state after state faced fiscal crises, what public health departments got was "yo-yo funding," up one year, down the next. What they did not get from the Bush administration were adequate resources to face a more dangerous world - to make sure we knew when a strange disease pattern was emerging or where increased reports of peculiar symptoms might indicate a terrorist plot. The public-health community never got sufficient equipment to detect higher than expected levels of radiation emanating from a container at some port, nor sufficient lab facilities and trained epidemiologists to track local outbreaks of disease. Instead, it got funding for a high-profile, showcase, mass smallpox-inoculation campaign for a disease that may not even exist on the planet, and ineffective, color-coded public-warning systems that made everyone cynical about any alert that might come from public officials.

In general, administration officials worked doggedly in the public health arena to create great media images that drew attention away from real, if sometimes humdrum, reforms that might have cost money. In the meantime, such public-health basics as laboratories, well-baby clinic care, and inoculation campaigns were quietly drained of money badly needed for a war-gone-wrong in Iraq. Administration cronies with no particular skills or experience in emergency management were put in charge of FEMA and on scientific panels at the Centers for Disease Control. As in other areas, administration officials evidently hoped that nothing revealing would happen on their watch and that they could slide away into history before anyone realized the public's health was in danger.

Then Hurricane Katrina blew into town, allowing the world to see just how unprepared they were. From a public health point of view, Katrina was the dark underside of the 9/11 experience. From lack of emergency-power supplies for hospitals to an inability to collect dead bodies (in some cases for months), administration-managed public health services proved hopeless and helpless in New Orleans - which increasingly meant anywhere in the U.S. If that was what Katrina could do, what would happen if terrorists actually released a dirty bomb in the middle of Atlanta, Los Angeles, or Houston? Would the public-health community even have the crucial equipment available to detect the nature of such an attack, much less respond quickly? Would anyone be lining up the ambulances, passing out the medications, checking those restaurants and puddles this time around, no less organizing an orderly evacuation of residents?

In the wake of September 11th, the public health community saw its sanest initiatives stifled and its priorities distorted. While money is now less available for the inoculation of babies from the real threats of rubella, mumps, and measles, as hoped-for funds to prevent as many as 350,000 children from getting lead poisoning are no longer on anyone's agenda, as federal funds to support health education have been rescinded, and as (unbelievably enough) money needed to protect U.S. ports from dirty bombs or bioterrorism have all-but-vanished, Katrina victims still wander the nation wondering whether they will be able to see a physician.

For the next 9/11, when it comes to public health, don't think New York, Ground Zero, 2001; think New Orleans, August 29, 2005. Think: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job..." Then sit back amid the disaster and wait for the private charities to appear, wait for FEMA to send in the mobile homes.


David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz are the authors of the just published Are We Ready? Public Health Since 9/11, (University of California Press/Milbank Fund). Rosner is Professor of History and Public Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Markowitz is Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center. On September 11th, Markowitz anxiously awaited word from his wife, who worked only a few blocks from the World Trade Center, while Rosner frantically biked toward the collapsing buildings, looking for his daughter whose school was only blocks away.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing.]

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