Strung Up on Haman's Gallows...How the Dems Can Reclaim National Security

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Stringing Them Up On Haman’s Gallows
A modest plan to reclaim the national security issue


Of all the parables of the Old Testament, perhaps none is more poetic— or more relevant to modern times— than the Book of Esther’s gruesome tale of Haman’s gallows. The story, which is set out in Chapters three through seven, describes how a colony of Jews had come to live in Persia where a pompous Agagite named Haman was acting as a Prime Minister under the Persian King. The arrogant Haman demanded that all Persian subjects, Jews especially, prostrate themselves before him. A Jewish man named Mordecai refused to bow to Haman, and as a result, Haman ordered the construction of a formitable set of gallows upon which to hang Mordecai and any other rebellious Jews in the colony. But Mordecai had a cousin, Esther, with whom the King was quite smitten. Mordecai encouraged Esther to marry the King and, eventually, to put a bug in the King’s ear about Haman’s nefarious plan. With Esther’s help, Mordecai was able to turn what was to be his own execution into the execution of Haman instead. Haman himself was literally hung on the very gallows that he had painstakenly built for the execution of Mordecai.

Damn! Did those Old Testament scribes know irony, or what?

Fast forward to 2006. A contemporary Haman--Karl Rove-- has let it be known that we are all expected to prostrate ourselves before him-- and the King of Crawford-- on the primal issue of National Security. And like the Mordecais of old, those who refuse to do so will be strung up on the gallows— or, in its modern-day equivalent— face a barrage of swiftboat style advertisements portraying the malcontents as ‘soft on terror’.

Not exactly new material for the Large Foreheaded One. After all, this ploy was played out to perfection during the 2002 races and was reprised to rave reviews in the Schrum-mired 2004 presidential race as well. Indeed, the bedwetter wing of the DLC has already climbed aboard this ramshackle rovian bandwagon cautioning their cowering hoards to avoid even the appearance of challenging Bush on the Iraq War, domestic spying, or any other issues which Rove deigns to describe as ‘national security’ issues.

So if you’re Rove, what’s not to like about this gambit? Why not try to horse whip this sway-backed, shabby old nag across the finish line once more? What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for one thing, both he and his party could be exposed as deceitful, contemptible frauds... and they could face an informed electorate in November that pins their national security hopes on the Democrats.

And for the Democrats, this can be easy as pie; all they need to do is to tell the whole truth about Bush’s abysmal national security record...over and over and over. And trust me, Dear Reader, there’s no big trick to it. Just follow along and you too, can string Karl Rove up on his own little Haman’s gallows.

First— and this is the biggie— 9/11 could have been stopped or greatly mitigated if the Bush administration would have shown even a scintilla of leadership. The recent release of "Flight 93" demonstrates that America is now ready to re-evaluate the personal side of the 9/11 tragedy. It is now up to the Democrats to assist America in re-evaluating the political background of that tragic day as well.

The Bush administration utterly ignored numerous, specific warnings about al Queda’s intentions during the months before 9/11. They smugly brushed aside Richard Clarke’s urgent entreaties. Field agents in Arizona and Minnesota who passed along information about arab flight students were dismissed with a yawn (and their detractors eventually promoted). Instead, in June 2001, they rolled out a budget that actually cut counter terrorist spending. When they established their administration's defense priorities they had only one principle innovation in mind: nearly doubling spending for their ill-conceived Star Wars missle defense shield.

While this dismal record bespeakes a breathtaking level of reckless incompetence, it has never been communicated to the American public by anyone with anything resembling a national microphone. If national candidates and high-profile Democrats begin speaking in unison on this topic, it will be hard for even the corporate media to ignore. And remember, we will not have to bring up the topic. Bush always-- always-- invokes 9/11 to justify his latest mis-step. Our leadership merely needs to point out these frailties as follows: "(Ahem)...Mister President...while you're on the subject of 9/11...".

Second, even after 9/11, the Bush Administration failed to defend us from the anthrax attacks. As Tom Englehardt wrote last year: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=43459

"The anthrax attacks of 2001 are now so out of memory that it's hard to recall the panic and fear caused by the appearance of those first envelopes, spilling deadly powder and containing threatening letters. But according to a LexisNexis search, between Oct. 4 and Dec. 4, 2001, 389 stories appeared in the New York Times with "anthrax" in the headline. In that same period, 238 such stories appeared in the Washington Post. That's the news equivalent of an unending, high-pitched scream of horror...Looked at with a cool eye, this buried nightmare could be seen as the more threatening of the two attacks that year.... The 9/11 assaults were, of course, vastly more costly in lives -- almost 3,000 dead against just 5 from anthrax inhalation. On the other hand, the al-Qaeda strike only simulated a weapon-of-mass-destruction attack....With the anthrax killer, no sci-fi imaginings were necessary. He (she, them) used an actual weapon of mass destruction -- highly refined anthrax, the Ames strain that almost certainly fell out of the not-so-perfectly guarded American Cold War weapons labs. ...Had the anthrax attacks been -- as the threatening letters, ominously dated "9/11/01," that accompanied them implied -- the work of an Islamic terrorist group, we would probably still be talking about it -- and we would have no control group to measure 9/11 against..."

Of course, there have been absolutely no arrests for the anthrax attacks and the investigation thus far has closely resembled a Keystone Cops routine. Yet this open-ended story has largely been spiked: it simply does not fit in to the Rovian frame of: "Thanks to President Bush's strong leadership, we haven't been hit again." From now on until forever, Democrats need to stop the loudmouths who claim we "haven't been hit again"-- in mid-sentence if necessary-- and remind them of the anthrax attacks.

Third, they have allowed tawdry politics to expose at least two ongoing, successful anti- terror covert operations: Vallerie Plame's Brewster-Jennings Group and Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. By now, Vallerie Plame has become a household word: shorthand for the Bush Administration's unscrupulous misuse of our country's security apparatus for partisan political purposes. And who knows? She may yet be the undoing of He-Of-The-Large-Forehead. But nobody's talking about Mohammad Naeem Noor Kahn.

Flashback to August 1, 2004-- on the last day of the Democratic convention. U.S.Officials called a news conference to announce the raising of the terror alert level. The increased terror alert was supposedly attributed to three year old information on Kahn's computer. Kahn had been secretly arrested several weeks earlier in Pakistan. However, it is now generally concluded in world intelligence circles that Kahn's curiously-timed arrest leak may have shut down an important source of intelligence that had already led to a series of al Qaeda arrests, and which showed promise to dismember the entire al Qaeda cell in Pakistan. As Juan Cole has observed, Kahn had been "flipped" and was now working for us. http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?articleid=3382

Until U.S. officials leaked the arrest of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, intelligence officials had been using him in a sting operation to track down al Qaeda operatives around the world. Khan was a computer expert who officials said helped Osama bin Laden communicate with his terror network. The intelligence gleaned from the arrest of Khan had yielded phone numbers and e-mail addresses that the FBI and other agencies were surreptitiously using to try to track down al Qaeda operatives in the United States and elsewhere. After Khan's name was revealed, counterterrorism officials observed a drop in intercepted communications among suspected terrorists.

In other words, the premature leaking of Kahn's arrest-- as part of a terror alert announced during the Democratic convention-- unraveled an apparently successful, ongoing sting operation aimed at exposing al Qaeda communications between bin Laden's cell in Pakistan...and the United States.

And all this time I thought that if someone from al Qaeda was calling into the US...Bush wanted to know about it. Or maybe not so much...if it will keep his poll numbers up.

The foregoing is anything but an exhaustive litany of the Bush Administration's national security blunders. The list is substantial and growing, as evidenced by the recent outspokenness of retired generals who have enjoyed the uncertain honor of serving their country under an administration that has consistently put politics above patriotism. The myth of Bush's strong national security credentials needs to be exposed, and Democrats need look no further than Bush's own record to expose it.

The story of Haman's gallows is a sweet and relevant analogy for today's Democrats who will inevitably face rote accusations of being soft on terror. Yet if they keep their heads and give as well as they get, it may be the Bush Administration which finds itself on the defensive on the issue of protecting America.

In the words of the great post-modern philosopher, Buck Murdock of Airplane II, "sometines irony can be pretty ironic."