Something Smells in DC

Profiting from the politics of fear


WASHINGTON
A fear among kids growing up in England was that if they did not respond to a challenge, their friends would turn on them, shouting an old street phrase: "Cowardly, cowardly custard -- couldn't cut the mustard."

This past month, the "mustard" that remains uncut was generated by fears of terrorism, hurricanes, illegal immigrants, fire, bird flu, plane hijackings and many other probable or improbable disasters -- including obesity.

So, how do we avoid the "yellow stripe" award?

We adapt. We blend audacity into apathy and attempt to regulate the aberrant either with nonchalance or bravado. We travel by road, rail and the subway; we buy plane tickets, go back to New York City and ignore the well-thought-out system of terror alerts and climate change.

Mostly our daily lives continue as before. We continue to queue, shoeless and without jackets, to pass airport bomb detectors; we will grumble when we miss a subway train because of search procedures. And when Aunt Martha's knitting needles are confiscated, the White House will be deluged with angry letters.

Is all this necessary and are the alerts for real? Naturally, suspicion is roused when a well-timed change in the alert enables some politician to evade his responsibilities. Is the alert linked to a few Muslims in Buffalo living out fantasy lives, or to satisfying a lobbyist's greed from selling nearly useless airport bomb-detection equipment? Were there bureaucratic mistakes to be covered up, or has the Top 10 fiction list, with rogue agents running amok, finally become true?

You don't have to be a coward to recognize fear -- the yellow stripe is awarded only to those who run from fear. Today, in 2006, a large yellow stripe should be awarded to those who profit from fear.

Let's look at the facts.

There are 33,890 companies with federal homeland security contracts. Seven years ago -- after some decades of terrorism kicked off with the Olympics in 1972 -- there were only nine. Since 2001, $130 billion worth of contracts have been handed out by the same thundering, blundering pen pushers who mismanaged the hurricanes Katrina and Rita to these merchants of fear.

An industry that makes so much money has to have an army of lobbyists, with only one incentive: to increase the real fear of the threat to America and to our hearths, and augment fears for our mortality and eternity. Our recovering economy is based on fear of the unimaginable becoming the inevitable.

The field is crowded today. There are now some 550 lobbying firms registered for homeland security, compared with two in 2001. One of the new leading consultants is former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who while in office said his department had unearthed more than 1,000 terrorist cells in the United States and warned in May 2004 that 90 percent of the arrangements for a major attack on our country had been made by al-Qaida. Today, he leads the Ashcroft Group.

So, it was no surprise that this very senior civil servant should be a leader of the Gadarene-like rush of more than a hundred top officials, from government departments -- such as the FBI, the CIA, customs, immigration and so on -- to the private sector.

Homeland security has rapidly become a major engine for private industry, extending from espionage in the Middle East to border protection, airport security and communications. Are we safer with Tom Ridge, the former boss of Homeland Security, now advising the government of Albania and Ashcroft becoming the Washington lobbyist for AT&T?

As the commemorations of 9/11 were taking place this month, air traffic was again disrupted and flights diverted because a computer had been abandoned -- and found -- while the plane was in flight. In New York City, rail travel was disrupted due to a security alert at Penn Station.

In fighting against amorphous threats such as are those of Islamic terrorists, brute force is not enough -- already the war against terrorism has lasted longer than World War I (1914-1918). Moderates from both the West and Islam have been radicalized, neutrality is impossible and the more terrorist heads are lopped off -- as with the fabled Hydra -- even more heads grow.

Is it a lose-lose situation? No way!

So many of us survived the Cold War that few of the of baby boomers even remember when it commenced. That so many of us survived foreign foes, the evil empire, our own bureaucrats and the theories of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) with so little loss of sleep should be reassuring.

In the words of one patriotic American that applies to both bin Laden and fear -- "This too shall pass."

Dateline D.C. is written by a Washington-based British journalist and political observer.

Original article posted here.