22 March 2004

Wheelchairs

Sheihk Ahmed Yassin was blown up yesterday leaving a mosque in Gaza. He was a paraplegic, and the only weapon he had was his fiery rhetoric. The image of his shattered wheelchair, covered in blood, is rocketing around the world, and people are very angry indeed. A helpless old man, shredded by the detonation of rockets.

He is said to have been the spiritual of Hamas, which is the Arabic word for "zeal" and an acronym for Palestinian independence. The Shiehk was an incredible pain in the ass to the Israelis, and they have tried to kill him before. They are desperate to find something, anything, that will help them assuage their anger and grief at the continued attacks. The fact that the bombing at Ashdod last week originated in Gaza drove the targeting, I'm sure.

There isn't much left of any military significance left to attack there.

Wheelchairs are a powerful image. Remember Leon Klinghoffer? He was the irascible American who castigated the hijackers of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. The crippled old man cursed at the terrorists bitterly. He was a real distraction to men under pressure. They were about serious business, a military strike on the port of Ashdod. It seems quaint, these days. Men going after a real military target for military aims.

They had not wanted to take control of the ship at all. They had hoped to ride it into the Israeli port of Ashdod and make their attack then. The ship was irrelevant to the mission, but they were discovered and they had to do what they had to do. The old man in his wheechair was in the way, and they shot him and dumped him overboard.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I still know some of the players in the response, but they almost all have their thirty years of service and are retiring.

Like Richard Clarke. I never heard him called that. We knew him as Dick, but the television people probably thought America would think they were featuring American Bandstand's host on tired old 60 Minutes last night. I made a point of watching, though I generally avoid it these days. I am painfully aware of how old the cast is starting to look. I have a sort of morbid fascination on what Andy Rooney is going to rail about, and it frightens me that I seem to agree with him most of the time.

It may be that I wind up looking like him, too.

Dick Clarke was on the tube because he has written a book ripping the lid off the sordid story of the bungled struggle against Islamic militancy. At least that is the central thesis of his book. He thinks this President has "done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

Dick is pretty upset, based on the interview. Even though the text was reviewed for classified content by the White House, he got his fulmination across pretty well.

"I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9-11."

Not a bad shot across the bow for a thirty-year bureaucrat who served four presidents. He thinks President Bush should have ordered strikes on an organization called "al Qaida" and its training camps in Afghanistan immediately after taking office.

Let's be fair. The new administration was hamstrung. They were forced to follow former President Bill Clinton's policy on al Qaeda until it had developed its own terrorism strategy. That had to wait until the new "B" keys arrived for the keyboards on the White House computers. Departing Clinton staffers had taken them when they left. I think it was the "B" key.

Or maybe the stories of how the offices in the West Wing were trashed were dis-information. I don't recall anyone correcting the record on the front page. Maybe it was buried back on page 16.

Dick calls his tome "Against All Enemies," and I suppose I should buy it in solidarity to struggling authors everywhere. I think the phrase comes from the oath we Federal officials swear to defend the Constitution from threats "Both foreign and domestic."

The latter two words were not in the original, but inserted to accommodate the Confederate threat. They did not get around to taking them out again, and then Tim McVey made the phrase relevant again. I wish I had the time to write a book to set the record straight, once and for all. I would get to the bottom of this lickety-split.

Clarke ladles blame on everyone, but he reserves a special vitriol for the second incarnation of the Bush Presidency. I think I know why, or at least part of it.

Dick had his thirty years and could retire. Not doing so means the lost opportunity of the retirement check and the chance to say what you want whenever you want to say it.

When the Clintons left with all the furniture, the new Bush team reassigned Dick from his position as chief of counter-terror and made him the chief of the Cyber Security effort. You will recall that we used to be concerned about that area, Y2K just having swept over us without significant damage. Now we just have our identities stolen.

Dick wanted to do something about things like that, and cyber-terrorism, too. But I suspect he viewed the reassignment as a demotion, though he tried to make the best of it. He outlined a bold program that would completely change the Government's role in the cyber world, codify responsibility and but the strong-arm on Microsoft, whose security on the Windows operating system remains abysmal.

Bill Gates had just weathered the storm of the Government assault on him in the courts, and he got religion. He established a big presence in Washington, finally recognizing that Seattle was not yet the capital of the universe, even if the coffee was better there.

Microsoft reacted on all fronts and led a consortium of other industry people who had no interest in the Government stipulating their source code, or sharing propriety information with others.

You can take on terrorists, but don't take on Bill Gates. Clarke's enormous cookbook of things to do and fix in cyber-space was whacked down to pamphlet-size, and contained only platitudes. He left he government with a bad taste in his mouth. He says he was surprised that there was talk of bombing Iraq right after the towers came down, that there were no targets to bomb in Afghanistan.

Well, his observation on that is correct. I remember the discussions. There was no infrastructure left in Afghanistan after twenty years of war, and at least Saddam had powerplants and telecommunications.

It would have been embarrassing if we bombed Hamburg, Madrid and Miami where the terrorists came from, even if the targets were attractive.

So I am not surprised that Dick seems a little bitter. But it was on his watch that this all really began, and President Bush, for all his smirking, was only following the policies of the previous- Clarke's- administration as we sleep-walked into September 11th.

And I am not altogether without sympathy for the Israelis. They are hitting out at the only thing the Palestinians have, which is people. The Ashdod bombings last week that the Achille Lauro hijackers meant to conduct were just delayed a couple decades. The dozen Israelis were efficiently killed by teenaged belt-bombers from Gaza.

But I remember how America reacted to the empty wheelchair of Leon Klinghoffer.

Don't you?