April 11, 2004 NY TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Our New No-Can-Do Nation
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Young Americans are bravely fighting and dying in Iraq, trying to fulfill the audacious vision of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to remold Iraq in the image of America.

But while we try to turn them into us, who have we become?

The president presents himself as an avatar of American values, plain-spoken cowboy and tough flyboy.

But Condi Rice's testimony on Thursday raises the depressing possibility that we've lost the essence of our frontier spirit: the ingenious individualist who gets around the system and faces down the drones.

From Abigail Adams to Tom Sawyer to Bugs Bunny to Jimmy Stewart's Jefferson Smith to Indiana Jones, the best American character is plucky, nimble, clever, inventive.

So it's disturbing to see our government reacting to crises with a jaded shrug and lumbering gait, especially since we are up against such a creative, chameleonlike enemy.

Consider the pathetic performance of NASA, which inverted its motto to "Failure is an option" by shrugging off warnings about the safety of the seven Columbia astronauts who burned up coming back to earth, and not trying to send up a rescue shuttle.

This no-can-do spirit marked George Tenet's lame excuses to senators in February who wanted to know why the C.I.A. never picked up the trail of Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot who crashed Flight 175 into the south tower on 9/11, even though the Germans gave the agency his name and phone number. "They didn't give us a first and a last name until after 9/11," Mr. Tenet said.

And what would Eliot Ness say about an F.B.I. that is less computer savvy than American preschoolers and Islamic terrorists? The F.B.I. is only halfway through modernizing its computers, which could not, before 9/11, do two searches at once, such as "Al Qaeda" and "flight schools." Can't we draft Bill Gates for duty?

This ominous passivity was threaded through the testimony of Ms. Rice, a brainy and accomplished woman who should represent the best of America. She blamed "systemic" and "structural" impediments that prevented the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. from sharing. She complained that other people hadn't recommended what she should do; even the terrorists were faulted for not giving specifics.

The screeching chatter in the spring and summer of 2001 — "There will be attacks in the near future" — did not yank Mr. Bush and his team from their Iraq fixation. "But they don't tell us when," Ms. Rice protested. "They don't tell us where, they don't tell us who, and they don't tell us how." Paging Nancy Drew.

Inconclusive intelligence did not bother the Bush team when it wanted to be "actionable" on Iraq, or engage in "tit for tat" with Saddam.

The Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing — remarkably headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" — mentioned Al Qaeda's wanting to hijack planes and the 70 F.B.I. field investigations into suspected Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the U.S.

The briefing had three-month-old information that Al Qaeda was trying to sneak into the country for an explosives attack. No wonder the C.I.A. chief and counterterrorism czar were running around with their hair on fire.

What should have made Condi hysterical, she deemed "historical."

W. kept fishing and denouncing Saddam, while Condi sat for a glam Vogue photo shoot and interview.

On Iraq, they ran roughshod over the system. On Al Qaeda, Condi blamed the system, saying she couldn't act on Richard Clarke's plan until there was a strategy, a policy, "tasking," meetings, etc.

The F.B.I. officials who ignored Coleen Rowley as she tried to break through the obtuse leadership of Louis Freeh's F.B.I. to get evidence on Zacarias Moussaoui, and Kenneth Williams, the Phoenix agent who outlined the Al Qaeda plot to train Arab terrorists in our flight schools, have not been held accountable. Why aren't the heroic Ms. Rowley and Mr. Williams running something?

Dick Clarke has struck a chord because his passionate efforts reflected those great American virtues of ingenuity and brashness. Even if he was a bit of a cowboy, loading up his .357 sidearm to return to the West Wing the night after 9/11, at least he was not dozing through High Noon.




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