An elite press consortium made up of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and CNN also apparently handed the Bush administration another big favor this week when it indefinitely delayed making public the results of its Florida election recount. The long-awaited analysis of 200,000 disputed ballots from the presidential election was supposed to be published on Monday, but the Times quietly informed its readers in a Sunday essay by political reporter Richard Berke that the "move might have stoked the partisan tensions" and "now seems utterly irrelevant." A journalist involved in the project later told Inside.com, "There's a sense that now is not the time to be writing about something that might make it look like someone else should have been elected president."
The Times' decision to withhold information that is clearly the public's right to know is a startling one, and in its desire to avoid reopening potential wounds, more therapeutic than journalistic. In 1971, a much more divisive time in the nation's history, the Times was motivated more by First Amendment considerations than by appeals to a narrow patriotism when it pressed to publish the Pentagon Papers. In lifting the restraining order that the Nixon administration had brought against the Times, U.S. District Judge Murray Gurfein, a Nixon appointee, agreed that the paramount value for the press -- even in a time of heightened national security concerns -- must be the public's right to know. "The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone," declared Gurfein in his surprisingly passionate decision. "Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know." It would be wise of the Times and the rest of the press to keep these words in mind during these fearful times as the government feels emboldened to clamp down on the flow of information.
Some smaller newspapers were much more blatant in their hurry to abandon the First Amendment. Earlier this week, the Daily Courier in Grants Pass, Ore., fired a columnist who criticized Bush for "skedaddling" on Sept. 11 and "hiding in a Nebraska hole." The paper's editor, Dennis Roler, announced that only "responsible and appropriate" criticism of the president would now be allowed. Perhaps he hasn't read the Walter Lippman quote emblazoned on the top of his own Web site: "The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account."
Les Daughtry Jr., publisher of the Texas City Sun, showed an equally uncertain grasp of the principle of free speech when he promptly fired city editor Tom Gutting for writing a similar opinion piece about Bush. Daughtry then felt compelled to engage in a humiliating bout of Maoist-style abnegation, apologizing not only to his readers but to "all our country's leaders and especially President George W. Bush" for temporarily allowing his city editor to exercise his First Amendment rights. Feeling he had not gone quite far enough in his exaltation of the president, Daughtry penned a second letter to his readers. declaring that Bush has "the full support of virtually every citizen in the United States, except, of course, Tom."
America suffered grievous, unprovoked injuries on Sept. 11 that no nation should passively endure. A vast majority of the American people ardently supports President Bush's vow to bring the organizers of this terror "to justice, or justice to them." But maintaining this consensus as Bush leads the country into battle will not be easy. To do this the administration must convey a clarity of purpose and an honesty which have thus far been in short supply. When White House vizier Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer feed an egregious lie to the public about why the president did not immediately return to the White House on Sept. 11 -- insisting that Air Force One and the White House were under threat -- and then try to spin their way out of it when the story unravels, that does not inspire confidence. When Colin Powell promises that the administration's evidence against Osama bin Laden will be shortly revealed to the world and the next day this evidence is suddenly declared classified information, it only adds to the skepticism about the government's anti-terror operation, even among our allies.
Franklin Roosevelt proved a master at building support for last century's epic struggle against fascism. Before Pearl Harbor, he faced strong isolationist and anti-draft sentiment; afterwards, he had to grapple with a press and public prone to marked mood swings, rising and falling with the country's fortunes on the battlefield, and a home front that was often torn by racial and labor conflicts. Yet he reached out to the Republican Party to build bipartisanship, cultivated the press, and most importantly eloquently conveyed to the American people why we were fighting and the enormous significance of the outcome. He mobilized the country for its historic conflict without resorting to the totalitarian measures of our enemies -- with the glaring exception of the internment of Japanese Americans, a tragic misstep that some of our current paranoid fringe are now clamoring to inflict on Arab-Americans. "Though the United States was miserably unprepared for war in the spring of 1940," observed Doris Kearns Goodwin in "No Ordinary Time," her study of FDR's wartime White House, "Roosevelt never doubted that the American people would eventually win the war, that the uncoerced energies of a free people could overcome the most efficient totalitarian regime."
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, in contrast, utterly failed to build a winning consensus for the Vietnam war. This was partly due to the two presidents' paranoid and autocratic style. But, more significantly, Johnson and Nixon were in charge of a war that was vastly more difficult to justify than World War II. While a case could certainly be made that defeating a communist takeover of the country was a noble cause, it was much harder to convince Americans that the North Vietnamese were a threat to their way of life. And the U.S. military, despite its strenuous efforts to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, never succeeded in uncoupling the communist dictatorship of Hanoi from the legitimate nationalist aspirations of the country's majority.
America's latest war has already opened many of the old Vietnam wounds, with conservative critics charging that the current voices of "appeasement" are the same ones that stabbed the U.S. in the back in Southeast Asia. But this is not the right lesson to take from Vietnam. It was not the antiwar movement that blocked an American victory over Hanoi; the war itself was unwinnable without escalating it to a level that would have risked nuclear war with China and the Soviet Union. It was unwinnable because most Vietnamese, who we were ostensibly fighting for, did not want us to win it. The lesson, then, to be learned from Vietnam as we confront our latest totalitarian foe is that the American soldiers must never again be sent to countries where their mission is impossible and the majority of people regard them as the enemy.
Peter Feaver in the conservative Weekly Standard persuasively argues that the best analogy to "America's New War," in CNN's horrid marketing phrase, is the Cold War. Like the global war against communism, the war against terrorism must be fought on an ideological as well as military level, and much of it will be carried out through diplomacy, espionage and "shadow conflicts."
Considering that our enemy is a fanatical strain of Islam that has taken deep root in a burgeoning, youthful generation throughout much of the Muslim world, the struggle is also likely to be protracted, lasting much longer than one presidential term. "If fundamentalism seems particularly rife in the Muslim world this is because of the population explosion," observes religious scholar Karen Armstrong. "To give just one telling example, there were only 9 million Iranians before World War II; today there are 57 million and their average age is 17. Radical Islam, with its extreme and black and white solutions, is a young person's faith."
Our "war" on terrorism, then, only fits the definition in a metaphorical sense. It will be vastly harder to conduct such a struggle, because the enemy is a belief system, not a nation state. And our first goal must be to understand why Western culture -- with all its consumer toys, action movies and seemingly unlimited freedoms -- is not as compelling to these millions of young people as a religious mission whose greatest expression of faith is martyrdom.
In light of the complexity and likely duration of this conflict, it is essential for the Bush administration to build a deeply entrenched public consensus -- and this can't be done by lying, hiding information, short-circuiting civil liberties or any of the other old "national security" techniques of suspending democracy. Consensus, instead, must come over time from thorough and open debates, as Feaver recognizes: "Many of these debates will be specious, but not all will be. Indeed, the Second Cold War may be harder to fight than the last one, leaving ample room for responsible disagreements among reasonable people. We will have to nurture those debates, learn from them, and forge the best possible policy in an extraordinarily difficult political climate."
In the end, it won't be military superiority that determines the outcome of this war. As our implacable fundamentalist foes have told the world, this is a war of values. We cannot win by sacrificing ours. If democracy and freedom are to win over the forces of terror and theocracy, they first must flourish at home.
About the writer
David Talbot is Salon's founder and editor in chief.
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