23 November 2003

Maureen Down pissed me off first thing this morning. She accused the President of "putting a clammy hand on the spines" of the American electorate. That is an unsettling image for a Sunday morning when I am filled with the sweet glow of gridiron victory. My spine is quite straight this morning. Michigan beat Ohio State convincingly, no question about it, and they did it by putting a little extra into everything they did.

The curse of having attended one of the great football schools is the wild ecstasy of victory over an arch-rival, televised across the planet, with more than a hundred thousand in attendance. But that sort of emotion comes with a corresponding sense of doom that comes along with a defeat, one that can go on for days or weeks. Those who do not know it will never experience it. Sometimes I wish I had gone to a fine little school where the football season could come and go without remark or comment. But this is the baggage I will carry until my stomach can no longer knot in anticipation and I cannot leap from the couch in a frenzy of joy or despair over a diving catch.

The hero yesterday was Chris Perry, who did everything. He ran for three times what the best defense in the Nation normally gives up, and caught 54 yards more in passes. He played hurt, too. In the first quarter he went down with what looked like a hamstring pull and the crowd began to chant his name, the biggest crowd ever assembled to watch a college football game.

After it was all over, Chris remarked quite matter-of-factly that the Buckeyes were twisting and bending him in the pileups, giving him "a little extra" to see if they could knock him out of the game. It is not unexpected in this greatest of rivalries in college sports.

They couldn't knock him out. He came back again and again, in pain. The front of his Maize and Blue helmet was smeared with the crimson of Ohio State. He collided with such force on a middle linebacker that I could feel the imapct eight hundred miles away. It was a stunning win. My son called from the parking lot outside the Big House after the crowd began to flow back up toward campus to continue the celebration into the night. "This is the biggest day of my life!" he shouted into the phone.

I smiled. It was 34 years ago to that minute that the Wolverines gave me one of the best days of my life, when we beat the best OSU team that Woody Hayes ever coached and started three decades of seasons in which we contended for the championship almost every year.

It is the sort of commitment continuing across the years that breeds its own success.

Maureen doesn't have the perspective. I don't know whether she followed the games yesterday. She was dyspeptic because she sniffed that the President was "playing politics." Goodness, I thought, a politician playing politics! There is a news flash. She complained that Mr. Bush was running an ad in Iowa that contained a clip from the State of the Union address in which he said "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."

Maureen seems concerned that in the face of a concerted terror campaign against the new Iraqi police and the Turks and our special friends the British that we don't need any more bad news at home. Like the word this morning that two of our kids had their throats slit this morning doesn't do enough spine grabbling. The kids were left on the ground next to their HumVee. It is a page out of the al Qaida playbook for the Somalia angle, show the troops dead on the ground. But there was no howling mob. Just two poor kids dead in their uniforms.

Jeeze, Maureen. Get a life. We are at war.

She went on to quote Dick Clarke, not the ageless disc jockey but the former White House director of counter-terror. He was ageless in his way, too, sliding over from the Clinton White House to the Bush with nary a quiver, leaving counter-terror writ large to become the counter-cyber terror director before they finally got him to leave. He had made enemies at Microsoft, since at the end of his time on the National Security Council he was trying to get Bill Gates to fix the world's most frustrating and vulnerable computer operating system. Opposing Bill Gates is not a strong career move, I gather.

Maureen based her column this morning on the same sort of hard hitting in-depth research I do, only she gets paid for it. She was watching Ted Kopple on TV the other night and she reported that Ted had interviewed Clarke on the current state of play in Iraq. Maureen is always salivating for an opportunity to savage the Administration, and goodness knows they have served up enough soft balls for her to hit. But this matter is too serious for glib opinion to masquerade as truth. The President is not right all the time, but he was quite correct in his clip. The Bad Guys have been working on some nasty plans for a long time, and they will not hesitate to use them when the time comes around. They still have all their time-outs and although they have lost some of their starters, the bench is deep.

Dick Clarke said that "Mr. Bush's habit of putting X's through the pictures of arrested or killed al Qaeda managers was very reminiscent of a scene in the movie "The Battle of Algiers." The French Legion Etrangere Commander does the same thing, which is what we did with our playing-card deck of Iraqi bad-guys.

Talk about your one degrees of separation! I have been looking for a DVD of that movie all week. The Pentagon watched it like a game film. Moreover, in the Spring my Boss couldn't be bothered to go over to the National Defense University to participate in the graduation exercise of the Health Care Seminar, a group of prospective Department of Defense leaders. I talked to them about bio-terror, and just how bad things could be. I talked about the Rhode Island nightclub fire, and how a single awful accident with pyrotechnics and a blocked exit caused a mass casualty event that swamped the specialty burn-beds of the whole Northeast.

It required the activation of national Disaster Mortuary Assistance Teams. "Just think what the consequences of a deliberate act of bio-terror?" I opined with a rhetorical flourish. "Whither the specialty bed-tracking and stockpile of respirators? What of the mass casualty training and drug stockpile cross-referencing?" There are some real problems, we agreed, and we need to get to work on them. We cannot forget what is coming, not for an instant.

I ran into Ted Kopple on the front steps. He had participated in the Media and Military seminar and had just come back from Iraq, where he had done what might be the most powerful reporting of his career as an "embed" journalist. An old man in a young person's game, he was, harking back to his reporting from Vietnam. I told him that and he nodded his patrician head with that crazy hair as he went to his sedan.

Maureen doesn't get it. She has been too long in the easy world of taking pot-shots at the Bushes. What the Battle for Algiers tells us is that the French lost to the FLN, secular nationalists. Dick Clarke is a smart guy but he missed something about the Algerian War. The French did kill most of the FLN leadership, the ones they knew about. And I even agree it "could be the thing that's happening here, that even though we're getting all the known Al Qaeda leaders, we're breeding new ones."

So this thing isn't going to over soon. It will require understanding what we are confronting, and instituting policies that will support Islam's ability to look at the world without seeing Crusaders on all sides. We need to understand our antagonists and we need to penetrate their ranks and quietly extinguish them without losing our national soul. I didn't claim this was easy. It just isn't a sound-bite.

Remember, it was the Algerian Nationalists, in turn, who took on the Islamic fundamentalists. And they beat them down. We have some good friends in the Muslim world, and they are going to need help. We are going to have to use our heads and maybe use a little extra. And remember that this is going to take years, and a commitment to ultimate victory. There is no alternative to this one, no pulling back to the homeland. If we do, they will only follow us here. And they will come anyway if we do not stop them. I agree with Dick on that part.

But as for Maureen, I really think she should actually go see the movie before her next column about it in The Times.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra