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Mugging the NeedyBy BOB HERBERT
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had wanted today's column to be about the events in Tulia, Tex.,
where a criminal justice atrocity is at long last beginning to be
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The budget passed by the House is particularly gruesome. It mugs the poor and the helpless while giving unstintingly to the rich. This blueprint for domestic disaster has even moderate Republicans running for cover.
The House plan offers the well-to-do $1.4 trillion in tax cuts, while demanding billions of dollars in cuts from programs that provide food stamps, school lunches, health care for the poor and the disabled, temporary assistance to needy families ‹ even veterans' benefits and student loans.
An analysis of the House budget by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that its proposed cuts in child nutrition programs threaten to eliminate school lunches for 2.4 million low-income children.
Under the House plan, Congress would be required to cut $265 billion from entitlement programs over 10 years. About $165 billion would come from programs that assist low-income Americans.
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This assault on society's weakest elements has been almost totally camouflaged by the war, which has an iron grip on the nation's attention.
The House budget does not dictate the specific cuts that Congress would be required to make. In its analysis, the center assumed (as did the House Budget Committee) that the various entitlement programs would be cut by roughly the same percentages. If one program were to be cut by a somewhat smaller percentage, another would have to be cut more.
The analysis found that in the year in which the budget sliced deepest:
"The cut in Medicaid, if achieved entirely by reducing the number of children covered, would lead to the elimination of health coverage for 13.6 million children."
"The cut in foster care and adoption programs, if achieved by reducing the number of children eligible for foster care assistance payments, would lead to the elimination of benefits for 65,000 abused and neglected children."
"The cut in the food stamp program, if achieved by lowering the maximum benefit, would lead to a reduction in the average benefit from an already lean 91 cents per meal to 84 cents."
When's the last time one of the plutocrats in Congress waded through a meal that cost 84 cents?
The Senate budget is not as egregious. It calls for a total of about $900 billion in tax cuts, and there is no demand for cuts in entitlement programs. But it is not a reasonable budget. In fact, there's something obscene about a millionaires' club like the Senate proposing close to a trillion dollars in tax cuts for the rich while the country is already cutting social programs, running up huge budget deficits and fighting a war in the Middle East.
At least in the House budget the first ‹ if not the worst ‹ of the cuts are in plain view. In the Senate plan the inevitable pain of the Bush budget policies remains concealed.
"There is a significant human toll in the Senate budget, but it's in the future," said Robert Greenstein, the center's executive director. "What I mean is that given the deficits we're already in, you can't keep doing tax cuts like this ‹ you can't keep cutting your revenue base ‹ without it inevitably leading to sharp budget cuts."
House and Senate conferees are now trying to resolve the differences in the two budget proposals. They will do all they can to minimize the public relations hit that is bound to come when you're handing trainloads of money to the rich while taking food off the tables of the poor. So you can expect some dismantling of the House proposal.
But no matter what they do, the day of reckoning is not far off.
The budget cuts are coming. In voodoo economics, the transfer of
wealth is from the poor and the working classes to the rich. It
may not be pretty, but it's the law.
There may well have been interaction between Mr. Hussein's intelligence apparatus and various terrorist networks, including that of Osama bin Laden. But it was Mr. bin Laden's network that brought about the Sept. 11 attacks, and his agents did not come from Iraq. There is no credible public information to indicate that Iraq was significantly involved.
It is, indeed, characteristic of Mr. bin Laden's network that it does not entirely depend on a state sponsor like Iraq. What makes Al Qaeda so dangerous is not Mr. bin Laden ‹ although his death or capture would remove a great, evil talent from the leadership of terrorism ‹ but his development of the concept of using a network as a vehicle for leveraging many individuals and groups, each weak on its own, into an engine of destruction powerful enough to hurt the United States.
The capacity to network, as described by a growing number of scholars, means an ability to create ad hoc patterns of activity among widely distributed cells: to communicate, pass resources, move key personnel and maintain the initiative through audacious planning. It is the network that gives what Mr. bin Laden created the means to adapt even to his demise, taking advantage of an organizational pattern that resembles that of a global multinational corporation.
After the dislocation of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the next phase needs to be a sustained assault on the broader network: attacking its individual cells by working in concert with intelligence and police services around the world. Multilateral cooperation is of the essence, as it was in the Afghanistan campaign. Anything that distracts us from relentless pursuit of the system by which terrorist groups can operate as networked entities ‹ and anything that detracts from the willingness of other governments to work alongside us ‹ is at the expense of our national security.
An immediate attack on Saddam Hussein carries a very high risk of constituting just such a fatal diversion. Arguments that his fall would require little American military investment are reckless in the extreme. Claims that the Iraqi National Congress, or the two main Kurdish groups, are ready to be Iraq's version of the Northern Alliance are misapplied analogies. Assurances that Iraq's neighbors would be happy to see Mr. Hussein eliminated are dangerous simplifications. Claims that we can either hold the coalition together if we promptly attack Saddam Hussein or that we no longer need a coalition are simply guesses.
America's choices are not limited to attack or neglect. There can be an interim program for Iraq. We should reheat the demand for international inspectors and return to the Security Council for "smart" sanctions. We should take the position that if Mr. Hussein blocks inspection of facilities suspected of being used for manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, the United States will destroy those sites.
Further, we should develop the capabilities of the Iraqi National Congress, help the Kurds while making clear that we are not supporting a Kurdish state, and use covert action across its full potential. We should also develop homeland defense as an absolute priority, to hedge against the risk that Saddam Hussein ‹ or any other opponent ‹ might try to reach us with a weapon of mass destruction or mass disruption.
Our hand could be forced by convincing evidence that Saddam Hussein
was a central actor in the use of anthrax as a weapon against us
or by some new move on his part that threatens his neighbors. Absent
such developments, the United States should focus on destroying
what threatens us most: the ability of terrorist organizations to
organize and to attack through a dispersed network; literally, the
globalization of terror.
Leon Fuerth, visiting professor of international relations at George Washington University, was national security adviser to Vice President Al Gore.
Peace Action of New York State
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