No. Thank God the anthrax campaign has been largely ineffective. It's clearly much less organized than the Sept. 11 attacks. So I don't think we're looking at a government operation or al-Qaida, who were lethally well organized. So it does seem like a case of domestic terrorism. But who exactly did it? Nobody knows for sure. It's premature to speculate.
There was a story in the New York Times today about an anti-government zealot named Timothy Tobiason, who goes around the gun-show circuit selling do-it-yourself anthrax terrorism manuals. Do you think the Justice Department is being sufficiently aggressive in monitoring people like this?
Well, even right-wing nuts have rights too. But there clearly seems to be as much or more reason to pull in someone like this for questioning as there is for rounding up 5,000 young guys for being Muslim.
Are you concerned about the Justice Department's anti-terror tactics?
Some of them. I think secretly listening in on lawyer-client conversations is terrible. And while we might need military tribunals for some of the people we capture in Afghanistan, I think the argument that our legal system can't deal with terrorists is simply not true. We've convicted a number of terrorists in our courts, including the first World Trade Center bombers. Our problem is not that we're unable to successfully try and convict these people, it's more a problem of finding out who they are and where they're hiding. Once we find them, our legal system has performed very effectively.
I'm afraid that the administration's anti-terror measures, along with the Justice Department's recent attacks on medical marijuana in California and assisted suicide in Oregon, show that they've decided to let [Attorney General] Ashcroft be Ashcroft. They think the war on terror gives them the cover to push through their agenda.
What lessons should the country learn from the war in Afghanistan?
Number one, our military has performed superbly. There has been all this huffing and puffing in the Republican Party about how Clinton weakened our military. Well, that's ridiculous. George Bush just pulverized the Taliban with the military that he inherited from Bill Clinton.
Number two, Bush has learned that you have to be engaged in the world or you're going to pay a price. When his administration took over, they were so eager to pull back from the Clinton peace process in the Middle East. And after Sept. 11, that disengagement policy put them in a box. They clearly had to restart the peace process, but it made them look like they were being pushed into it by the terrorist attacks, which in effect they were. Clinton didn't succeed in the Mideast but it wasn't for lack of trying, and he won legitimacy in the Muslim world for his efforts.
[Secretary of State] Colin Powell is now trying to get the peace process going again, which is very important. Since Sept. 11 Powell has been taken off bureaucratic life support. He is being allowed to be the secretary of state. Of course if Wolfowitz takes control of foreign policy, we're in big trouble.
We now realize that it's in America's interests to alleviate the poverty and despair in the Muslim world. Bush-style unvarnished capitalism is not going to lift that world. We need an international New Deal. And guess what, that means nation-building in places like Afghanistan -- that dread policy that Bush denigrated throughout the presidential race.
We know that nation-building works. Just look at the Balkans. After American bombing helped bring down the Milosevic regime, he ended up in The Hague and democracy is flourishing in the old Yugoslavia. Kosovo, Bosnia and Serbia are success stories. The Republicans fought Clinton's policies there, but of course now they embrace Bush's bombing and nation-building in Afghanistan. They're totally hypocritical. Bush senior's secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, kept him from going into Yugoslavia, so we had to deal with the catastrophe that developed there after he left the White House.
The current Bush administration pulled back from another area of the globe that could cause us a lot of trouble -- North Korea. After its crazy old dictator (Kim Il Sung) finally died, his son took over. He's no prize, but he seems a little less crazy. And [South Korean President] Kim Dae Jung's efforts to build peace between the two countries was a heroic effort. But then the Bush people decided to get hawkish and we deserted Kim, we pulled the rug out from under him. This problem has the potential to blow up in our face. We've got to engage again there.
Will the U.S. have the economic resources to rebuild Afghanistan?
Well, that's a good question. We would have under Clinton, with his tax increase and big surplus. But Bush has aggressively denuded the federal government of money with his tax cut. Now we have the slipping economy and the higher costs of security and our ability to help Afghanistan will impinge on our domestic spending. Of course this was the GOP's strategy all along -- they philosophically don't want the federal government to have money to spend. But now we're in a bind, because New York needs financial aid to rebuild and homelessness is on the rise and we need to hire airport security workers and we can't just walk away from Afghanistan without creating another foreign policy disaster there.
Bush senior used to say that we have more will than wallet. So he urged the country to attack poverty with a thousand points of light, none of which could be eaten. The Republicans don't want Washington to have a wallet. But if we don't spend money wisely now, it will cost us more in the future.
About the writer
David Talbot is Salon's founder and editor in chief.
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