It's going just fine

By Lawrence Henry
web posted November 12, 2001

My son Bud asked me one night a few weeks back what they
were saying on the news.

"Not much real information," I told him. "I just turned it on to see
if there was anything worthwhile, but it's just people talking."

"Why do they do that?" Bud wanted to know. "If they don't have
any real news, why don't they just put up a picture of the
American flag and play music?"

Inquiring minds want to know.

Well, all the news is printed to fit, as I did my best to explain.
There are a certain number of newspapers printed every day and
news magazines printed every week. Television and radio news
shows air for a specific number of hours, selling a specific
number of minutes of advertising, and they have to keep going,
or else maybe their listeners won't come back when something
really happens. And if their listeners don't come back, their
advertisers won't either, and then their advertising rates will drop.

Or something like that. As Bob Dylan once sang, "A lot of folks
have a lot of forks and a lot of knives, and they gotta cut
something."

Listen. This war on terrorism is going just fine. In fact, it's going
very well indeed. Here is the real information. There's not much
of it, but what there is is important. When I'm done, you can
hoist the American flag and play some music. That's what I'm
going to do. (I've got a tough saxophone part to master in Benny
Goodman's "Let's Dance.")

The United States has deployed powerful military assets, fast, in
the region of Afghanistan, and brought our might to bear on Al
Qaeda and the Taliban. We have destroyed most of the
Taliban's mechanized military equipment - airplanes, trucks,
armored personnel carriers, and tanks, of which there were not
many. We have destroyed most of their antiaircraft capability.
We can go anywhere we want to go and do just about anything
we want to do. Anything or anybody we can find, we can
destroy. And we're getting a whole lot closer to finding Osama
bin Laden and the higher-ups of the Taliban. The over-under on
dead or alive for that bunch is three weeks.

Osama bin Laden cannot communicate effectively with his
followers. He can't issue orders, he can't send money, he can't
release materials of war to them. He can't move, and he can't use
a telephone or any other electronic device. His followers were
always spread extremely thin. Now they have been cut off,
isolated, and scattered by a combination of American military
actions in Afghanistan, the aggressive policing of suspects in
Europe and the United States and by the freezing of financial
assets world-wide.

Without declaring so, the United States and our European allies
have suspended conventional civil rights for certain people,
namely youngish, unattached Middle Eastern men. We now
arrest these men on no more evidence than a policeman's hunch,
which is generally pretty good. It's called preventive detention.
That detention (of more than 1,100 suspects in the U.S. alone)
has probably spared us another serious terrorist attack.

The best evidence for this? The puny propagation of anthrax. It
is obvously the work of a very few agents, perhaps even only
one, and of agents, moreover, who don't have much of the stuff -
or are afraid to disseminate any more of it any more widely. The
more letters, the more clues.

Attorney General John Ashcroft's vague, if emphatic, warnings of
potential terrorist attacks in fact confirm how well we're doing.
He can't say this, but I can; it's the best guess: We have
thoroughly penetrated the communications channels of world-
wide terrorist organizations. We have not decoded the content of
those channels. But we can monitor the volume and direction of
traffic, which offer significant clues. That signals volume is what
Ashcroft means by a "credible threat."

We have no human intelligence assets in Afghanistan, but we
knew that going in. The Northern Alliance is a weak,
underarmed clutch of bandits, not dependable, and not especially
motivated, and we can't count on them. We suspected this might
be the case; now we know it. No matter. Our Special Forces'
initial expeditions will be to carry laser bomb sites (they're
already doing it; thus the daisy cutter), which will make our
targeting of Taliban and Al Qaeda assets even more accurate.
We'll do some man-to-man fighting, but only that necessary, and
that will work flawlessly.

Iraq? We'll get to it. For now, the administration is soft-pedaling
what they know about the anthrax situation because of a long-
standing U.S. policy: that we will respond to weapons of mass
destruction with a nuclear attack. James Baker told that to Iraqi
foreign minister Tareq Aziz during the Gulf War. There's no need
to repeat it - not just yet.

World politics (i.e., "nation-building") can come later. Right now,
our business is to fight, and we're doing that quite well.

Don't believe me? Every two weeks or so, Henry Kissinger
writes something extremely sensible and realistic in the
Washington Post. His latest appeared November 6.

Read Henry the K. Take it easy. No enemy can stand up to the
might of an aroused democracy. Take a deep breath.

I'm going to go practice the saxophone.

Lawrence Henry is a senior writer for Enter Stage Right.

Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com