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Jewish World Review Sept. 7, 2005 / 3 Elul, 5765 Complacency and survival By Tony Blankley
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Putting aside, for the moment only, which individuals are guilty
of malfeasance in office, it is undeniable that the system America
established for disaster relief failed miserably last week — and thousands
of Americans died because of it.
In varying degrees, the responsibility for the calamity runs
from the president of the United States, to state and local officials, to
bureaucrats, to individual citizens of the Gulf who were able to but didn't
evacuate, to current and prior presidents and Congresses who failed to fund
projects, to the media prior to the event, which failed to adequately
chastise politicians and inform the public of the coming danger.
While officials high and low must — and will — be held
accountable for their share of the fault, the big lesson learned is that the
American system, with all its wealth, capacity, checks and balances, and
vigorous free speech, failed to avoid the disaster.
Many individuals shouted loudly, in advance (sometimes for
years), about the coming danger, but one can distill America's overall,
collective failure to a number of misjudgments.
Collectively, the country: 1) failed to listen to credible
warnings, 2) assumed that our good luck would continue unabated, 3) failed
to adequately assess the magnitude and likelihood of the danger, and 4)
permitted the compelling pressures and benefits of business as usual to
drive from its mind a serious consideration of a radical, bad change from
the status quo.
In short, we were complacent. Actually preparing — and paying
for — prevention or protection from a likely calamitous event was so
appalling that we simply ignored it. Psychologists call it denial. The news
calls it 10,000 or more dead Americans.
Many commentators, and members of the public, have quickly noted
that if emergency services are so rotten for a hurricane or flood, what does
this say about our preparations for terrorist attacks in the future. They
rightly ask what the federal government has been doing these last four years
since Sept. 11.
These thoughts about the terrorist threat have been troubling me
for some time, as my regular readers are aware. And by chance,
my book on this topic, "The West's Last Chance" (Regnery Publishing), is to
be published this weekend, Sept. 11. But the danger of muddled thinking and
preparation for the terrorist threat goes far beyond even the major
responsibilities and failures of FEMA.
Complacency is easy to spot after the fact. Today, we are all
indignant with the complacency of our governments concerning the conditions
in New Orleans. And yet, how many of us, honestly, had given a moment's
thought to this until sometime last Tuesday morning? Perhaps we assumed our
governments were handling such matters? We were wrong.
We Americans are proud of our self-reliance. But today, that
self-reliance requires each citizen to think for himself or herself about
other dangers, such as the Islamist terrorist threat, and to inquire whether
our government is complacent or seized with a sense of urgency to protect
America.
I happen to think that regarding the Islamist threat, President
Bush has shown more concern and provided more action than most of
politicians and journalists. But even the president's actions and thoughts
are very dangerously short of what is needed. As much as he has done, it
still falls within the category of complacency if one seriously thinks about
the threat.
The mortal danger we face comes not merely from Osama bin Laden
and a few thousand terrorists. Rather, we are confronted with the Islamic
world — one-fifth of mankind — in turmoil and insurgent as it has not been
in at least 500 (if not 1,500) years.
We don't yet know whether this passion has touched 1 percent, 10
percent or 50 percent of over a billion souls. But combined with the sudden
and untimely availability of weapons of mass destruction to any sufficiently
determined large group of people — and facilitated by the dangerously
interconnected globalized world — the threat to us all must be as urgently
dealt with today, as New Orleans should have been last week and last year
and last decade.
I argue that across the board — from cargo containers searched,
to Arab translators hired, to borders guarded, to domestic and foreign
intelligence collected, to rational scrutiny of Arab and Muslim young men,
to political correctness snubbed, to the size of our military, to our (and
Europe's) willingness to defend our culture from Islamist intimidation, to
our international diplomacy — we remain as complacent and exposed to mortal
threat today as were the poor dead souls of New Orleans last week.
But at least we, the still-living, have been given a providential
warning.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.
© 2005, Creators Syndicate |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||||||
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