Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century - Steve Chapman

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war on terrorism is still to be won, but they are not about to let such matters spoil a good birthday party. We all know what Spud Melin could have told us: Having fun is the best revenge.

       With Bush’s approach, Washington is likely to get downright obese

       Sunday, September 15, 2002

      Like many a president before him, George W. Bush sees an urgent national problem and offers an interior-decorating solution: adding another chair to the Cabinet table.

      He proposes to create a federal department to protect the homeland from attack — which apparently is too much to expect from a Defense Department that is supposed to get $369 billion next year. With 170,000 employees, the new Department of Homeland Security would be large enough to have its own National Basketball Association franchise. Bush says this change will yield better coordination, more accountability, greater effectiveness and no increase in expenditures.

      Somehow I don’t think Osama bin Laden is sitting in a cave somewhere fretting that if we create a Department of Homeland Security, he may be in a real pickle. And anytime someone from the government tells you this won’t cost anything, you’re advised to hold onto your wallet with a pair of Vise-Grips.

      But let’s assume that a new department is justified. Let’s assume it will greatly enhance our safety. And let’s assume it won’t further balloon the budget deficit. Does that mean we need yet another department in the federal government?

      Of course not. If your doctor said you need more fruits and vegetables in your diet, you wouldn’t start eating four meals a day to manage the necessary increase in consumption. You’d stick with three meals and eat less of other foods — meat, pasta, french fries, Krispy Kremes, or something. Otherwise, you could expect to add a lot of pounds eventually.

      With Bush’s approach, Washington is also likely to get fatter and fatter over the long run. That’s what comes of failing to take measures to restrict growth. So I propose anew rule: Upon creating a new bureaucracy, our leaders have to get rid of at least one existing agency. You want a department focused on homeland security? Fine, but first, decide which of the ones we’ve already got are no longer needed.

      No one doubts that terrorism is an urgent problem demanding government action. But a national emergency, more than any other time, requires setting priorities. If saving Americans from attack is a higher priority than before, then something else must be a lower priority than it used to be.

      So we ought to admit as much and reconfigure the federal government to reflect the changes in our world. We’ve got 14 Cabinet departments, after all. Surely we could dispense with at least one of them.

      Policymakers, however, assume that once an issue has been elevated to the top of the national agenda, it must stay there forever, no matter how crowded the higher rungs of the ladder may get. The Education Department was created two decades ago to show our deep commitment to improving schools. The Energy Department sprang up in response to the energy crisis of the 1970s.

      In 2002, though, it’s not so easy to justify these bureaucracies. The Education Department today accounts for only 7 percent of all the money the nation spends on schools. The energy crisis, meanwhile, was consigned to the history books as soon as President Ronald Reagan junked price controls on oil and gasoline, ushering in a long and continuing era of energy non-crisis.

      Either or both of these agencies could be closed down, with their non-essential programs scrapped and their essential ones — let’s be generous and assume there are some — transferred to other departments.

      Or we might get rid of the Commerce Department, which rests on the mystifying notion that American capitalism can’t flourish without active government support and assistance. Someone could also take a good hard look at the Department of Agriculture, which was created at a time when 25 percent of Americans lived on farms but endures today, when less than 2 percent do.

      The USDA’s persistence brings to mind the joke about the civil servant found weeping at his desk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “What’s wrong?” someone asked. “My Indian died,” he answered. At worst, Agriculture and Commerce could be merged into a single agency dedicated to wasting money on people who are perfectly capable of supporting themselves.

      There’s a precedent for making reorganization something other than a euphemism for expanding government. Bush says his plan is modeled on President Harry Truman’s 1947 National Security Act, which united all the military services in a new Department of Defense. But when Truman created a new Cabinet department, he got rid of two old ones — the Navy Department and the War Department, both of which had been around for more than 150 years.

      Bush says we need to bring the DHS into being to “secure our homeland” from ruthless enemies. But it wouldn’t hurt to also protect us all from too much government.

       Sunday, October 6, 2002

      Should we go to war to stop Hitler? That question may surprise you — at least if you operate on the assumption that Hitler is dead and not about to go anywhere.

      But conservatives insist that Hitler has been reincarnated in the form of Saddam Hussein. They say that like the British of the 1930s, who had to choose between the concessions offered by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the military action urged by Winston Churchill, we have to decide between cowardice and courage.

      The Weekly Standard magazine labels all the opponents of this pre-emptive war “the axis of appeasement.” The Daily Telegraph of London sneers, “Just as the prospect of invading Iraq provokes clerical and secular hand-wringing now, so did the prospect of taking up arms against Nazism then.” When Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin announced he would vote against a resolution authorizing the president to invade Iraq, his Republican opponent Jim Durkin immediately detected the stench of “appeasement.”

      Exhuming the Nazis to justify war is not a tactic unique to conservatives. Liberals accused the United States of shameless appeasement in refusing to send troops to stop the war in Bosnia. Both sides claim to have learned the lessons of history, but the only episode they can ever seem to remember is the rise of the Third Reich.

      But they don’t even know much of that history. Anyone trying to apply the experience of Nazi Germany to the case of Iraq can see two obvious things: Saddam Hussein is no Hitler, and our policy over the last 11 years looks nothing like appeasement.

      Hitler had been in power just five years when he annexed Austria in 1938. Before that year was over, he had coerced Britain and France to surrender part of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, he invaded Poland. Denmark, Norway, Belgium and France soon followed. In 1941, he marched on Moscow.

      It was a plan of conquest breathtaking in its speed and scope. Just eight years after gaining power, Hitler was on the verge of controlling an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

      And where is Saddam’s imperial plan? He has been in charge of Iraq for some 30 years, and so far he’s initiated hostilities with only two countries, Iran and Kuwait. Hitler dreamed of ruling the world. Hussein’s grand vision was to control the whole of the Shatt al Arab waterway and some oil fields to his south.

      For all his vicious nature, he has shown no interest in building an empire. In any case, that would be an impossibility for Iraq, which has just 23 million people and is surrounded by bigger nations.

      As for his domestic realm, Hussein is unquestionably a ruthless despot willing to kill anyone who stands in his way. But that description would not begin to capture Hitler, who slaughtered innocents across the continent on a gargantuan scale. To equate Hussein with Hitler is like equating a snow flurry with an ice age.

      If finding someone to impersonate the Fuhrer is tough, finding a modern-day Neville Chamberlain is even harder. When Hitler demanded the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, Britain and France meekly gave it to him. When he proceeded to

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