Wag The Dog

On August 7^th, 1998 as my father was boarding a plane to fly out of N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, two car bombs blew apart the embassies of two other central African nations – Kenya and Tanzania. This was an opening salvo in the Terror Wars. President Clinton responded by unloading 70 Tomahawk cruise missiles into bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan and 13 missiles a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan.

Republicans complain today that this use of force was too feeble to be effective – bin Laden was left alive (he faked his location by using phones he knew were tapped and escaped). This wasn’t the criticism leveled at the time though. Back then it was that Clinton was merely “waging the dog,” as the term for using military force to get headlines in times of presidential trouble came to be known. A Republican Senator from Indiana, Dan Coats, was heard to say that the decision to strike was “made because it was necessary to save the president's job and distract attention away" from the perpetually spun Lewinsky scandal. It begs the question if the Lewinsky scandal was meant save the “Republican Revolution” and distract attention away from the real issues – like a growing terrorism specter.

Today, however, I feel we can more confidently say that it is this president who is “wagging the dog.” It’s always been a creeping suspicion of mine that the White House has been using terror threat alerts to keep an unnecessary and endless war-mentality that protects his job. There have been too many coincidences of late, though, to show that the President is using his position to keep unflattering news out of the headlines.

In the days after the Democratic Convention, the White House began talking of new and specific terrorist threats to against five financial institutions in the mid-Atlantic seaboard. The newspaper began reporting less on the anticipated bounce for Kerry and instead state focused on the security preparations around DC and New York. We then had the pleasure of learning that this was based on intelligence gathered prior to 9/11.

That was just the first obvious time. On the night of the debates, we learned that the US military was gathering tens of thousands of US troops outside of Summara, one of the “no-go” areas for the occupation forces. They proceeded to launch a three day assault that robbed headlines of the Kerry debate victory. It’s not that I don’t feel this attack was justified, but the timing is suspicious at best – sinister at worse. This wasn’t a random firefight, but a well planned and timed offensive. The timing couldn’t have been better for Bush if his staff had planned it – wait, the Presidents’ appointee’s do run the Pentagon who planned this…