Cato Daily Dispatch for December 12, 2003
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Report: Bioterror Preparedness Still LackingCongress Pushes for Larger Military
Push Out the Door for Iraqi Governor
Report: Bioterror Preparedness Still Lacking
"One year after President Bush sought to energize the nation's bioterrorism preparations with an unprecedented smallpox vaccination campaign, the program has all but ground to a halt," the Washington Post reports. "A report released yesterday, meanwhile, finds that only two states -- Florida and Illinois -- are prepared to distribute and administer vaccines or medicines that would be needed in the event of a major outbreak or attack."
In "Smallpox and Bioterrorism: Why the Plan to Protect the Nation Is Stalled and What to Do", William J. Bicknell, M.D., and Kenneth D. Bloem argue that "we have not yet realized the complexity and difficulty of vaccinating millions of Americans rapidly after an attack. Nor have we come to grips with the need to make rapid, possibly draconian, post-attack decisions based on limited data of uncertain quality. That type of decisionmaking runs counter to the culture of public health. The Bush administration needs to revitalize our preparations for a smallpox bioterrorist event."
Congress Pushes for Larger Military
"Members of Congress from both parties are pushing for the first significant increase in the size of the active-duty military in 16 years, despite resistance from the Pentagon," USA Today reports.
Congress should consider that there is much more to an effective military than just troop numbers, Cato scholars maintain. "Defense transformation," a concept that President Bush campaigned on, involves making ground forces--heavy-artillery and troop-based--into nimbler, high-technology units. "To allow the U.S. military to deal with new threats -- for example, the war against terrorists--more effectively and efficiently, the relative mix of air, land, and sea forces must be changed and the military services trimmed and restructured," Cato adjunct scholar David Isenberg and former director of defense policy studies Ivan Eland write in "Empty Promises: Why the Bush Administration's Half-Hearted Attempts at Defense Reform Have Failed". "Transformation must also eliminate troublesome, unneeded, or Cold War-era weapons and reallocate the savings accrued into neglected areas (such as bombers, special forces and satellite systems) and futuristic weapons technologies."
Push Out the Door for Iraqi Governor
According to the Los Angeles Times, "The U.S.-led occupation of Iraq sustained hits on its military and civilian flanks Tuesday when 62 Americans were injured in three attacks and the Iraqi Governing Council defiantly announced the firing of a governor chosen by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer III."
The ongoing American experiment in establishing Iraqi democracy, in all likelihood, will fail, according to Cato research fellow Leon Hadar. In "Pull the Plug on Iraq Fantasy" he writes: "By continuing to depict the ouster of Mr. Hussein as part of a grand imperial American plan to make Iraq and the Middle East safe for democracy, Mr. Bush will only dig himself into a deeper hole. Mr. Bush should recognize before it's too late that, not unlike other dogmatic ideologues in history, the neo-conservative intellectuals who argue that Iraq could be turned into a shining model of democracy for the Middle East are advancing their own wishful thinking and political agendas. They are not advancing the interests of the rest of America.
"Now that the war is over, the United States should declare victory and use its power to secure limited, core U.S. interests. Those are that a new government in Baghdad doesn't maintain ties with anti-American terrorist groups and doesn't try to develop or acquire weapons of mass destruction."
Wyatt Dubois, editor, wdubois@cato.org
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