New York Perspectives

ROBERT MACNEIL:

And those come from Gail Collins, who was a columnist until recently, when she became the editorial page and op-ed page editor of the New York Times. William Safire, who writes the essay column for the Times, and Frank Rich, whose column is called Journal. Gail Collins, over the weekend and today, a lot of government spokesmen have had something to say about bioterrorism, either warnings or reassurance. Collectively, how does that leave you feeling?

GAIL COLLINS:

It leaves me feeling that they should come up with one standard line about this. It's difficult, I think, for people to hear the President at one minute telling them to get on a plane and go to a play and just take a vacation quickly, and then at the next minute to hear the attorney general telling them that terror could strike at any minute and they have to be very, very cautious and so on and so forth. You can't really use that kind of conflicting information. I think the Administration needs to tell people what's possible, what they can react to.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

Ari Fleischer today, refused to be drawn into whether people should buy gas masks or buy chemicals or antibiotics. And he referred them to local authorities, medical authorities or police authorities. How do you feel about that?

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

Well, nobody wants to say, "don't take precautions." Because if something happens, you look like an idiot or worse. But the fact is, biowar is far more threatening than any other kind of threat we face, and the place it exists, the capacities it produces, is in Iraq. And we all know that, and we all know that Saddam Hussein has an inclination to use it, the capacity to produce it, and he's already used poison gas on his own people, so he has the motive. Now, the question then becomes, do we let the war on terrorism end with getting Osama bin Laden or do we carry it out, following all this rhetoric that we've heard, and go to the root of the terror in Iraq?

ROBERT MACNEIL:

I'm going to come back to that point on retaliation, but just on the bioterrorism since it's been so much the subject of discussion, how are you left feeling by the government's various statements?

FRANK RICH:

Well, obviously the government, as Gail says, doesn't quite know what to say. They don't want to throw people into a full-fled panic. But let's face it, as terrorism has shown the weaknesses of many systems in the United States, our response in dealing with bioterrorism will show, if it happens, will show the holes in our public health system. Different hospitals, different medical systems throughout the country have different abilities in dealing with this. Each kind of threat is different. Some of them aren't instantly recognizable. For people to run out and just buy antibiotics willy-nilly and hope that they can medicate themselves and discover the symptoms or gas masks, those are not necessarily solutions.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

Bill Safire, you've used the phrase "catch-up alarmism" to label what you call warnings from agencies that, before September 11, failed to protect us. Does this fall in that category?

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

Yes. Everybody now is so sensitized and they want to cover up their previous complacency. And so they want to flail out. I don't think we should flail out at all. I think, curiously, one of the good things that can come from this scare of the biowar is increased spending on public health, which is a good thing, and even more important, perhaps, increased basic research and vaccines and immunology, which could be a defense.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

Last week, the Washington Post poll showed that 64% of the American people trust government to do what's right, the federal government, to do what's right most of the time, which is the highest rate of trust in government since 1966, which, of course, the time was when the Vietnam War kind of turned… began to turn negative in the eyes of many people. What does it say to you, that there is that much trust in the government at the moment?

FRANK RICH:

I think that there is a will to believe. I think it's very comparable to the trust that people feel about President Bush. In a time of crisis, we want to believe in these institutions. We love these institutions. We may not love all the agencies and all their vehicles of influence, but we're hoping for the best. We want to believe the FBI and the CIA and public health system and all this are up to the job. I'm not sure it has much of an ideological basis as people's fundamental feelings about government would change that much, say, if it was April 15 and tax time and the rest of it. But I think it's more of a sentimental feeling right now. We want them to succeed.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

You mentioned the FBI. Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says these big bureaucracies– the FBI and the CIA — have a lot of history, pride and political influence that resist change. Do you think September 11 is enough of a shock to the American bureaucratic system that these agencies are going to work differently in the future? That there is going to be big change, that they will be responsive to the efforts of the new director of homeland security?

GAIL COLLINS:

Well, I think it will at the military. Let's see how the military does at transforming itself from sort of a World War II-oriented, big- invasion kind of force into something that is leaner and meaner and has less weapons, less big, huge, hunky weapons, at any rate, than it had before. It's very, very hard, and the people who are running these things are people who know how to do one system. There was a story in the "New Yorker" that quotes this week about these are people who live in the suburbs of Virginia. You know, they're not going to go and get dysentery for six months.

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

That was Sy Hirsh's piece, and I think he has a point. The institutional mindset of the CIA is stuck in the Cold War. It doesn't recognize the need to penetrate with agents these terrorist organizations. And in order to do that, you have to have Muslims, Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Indonesians working for us or our consultants, and getting inside and exposing it and passing back the information.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

Is this shock going to transform the behavior of those agencies among sharing information with each other and transform the country, do you think?

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

Well, I'm concerned that we're going to accept the… What seems to be the Ridge approach, which is an office in or near the White House?

ROBERT MACNEIL:

Which is Governor Ridge who is now the head of the agency for homeland security.

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

But it's not an agency, it's just a coordinating office. If he says you've got to do this, they don't got to do that.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

There are some in congress would like to make it an agency.

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

Right. And Gary Hart and Warren Rudman came up six months ago with a pretty good plan for forming a homeland defense agency. It has not yet been formed. Let's see what develops on that.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

President Bush said today we are a patient nation. How patient will the nation… How much time does he have before he has to appear to do something in Afghanistan against the bin Laden… Against the Taliban, and what is the pressure on him to do it quickly?

FRANK RICH:

I don't know how much time he has. I think that the country has been amazingly patient, perhaps more patient than one would have expected, and I think President Bush has helped encourage that patience by public pronouncements, such as the one today. But who knows? I mean, my guess is that something is going to happen, and this may become moot from our side. I can't imagine that it will be indefinite. But I don't… How can you judge when it's going to run out? What is going to be the thing that pulls the trigger?

GAIL COLLINS:

I do think we're really lucky to have George W. Bush there right now, if it's sort of a Nixon/China kind of thing. If we'd had Bill Clinton still, by now the cries of, you know, you're being….

WILLIAM SAFRE:

Vituperative right-wingers.

GAIL COLLINS:

Yes… They've always had it. They're terrible those vituperative right-wingers. By now he would have done something in response.

FRANK RICH:

By the way, the drumbeat is on the rise, is steadily increasing, even as we speak. We see, you know, certain columnists– not necessarily in here– but there is, definitely, a drumbeat on the right much more than on the left.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

You've argued, without characterizing you, Mr. Safire, you've argued in one of your columns that waiting for absolute proof of culpability in the terrorist attack is dangerous. Why is that?

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

Because this is not a situation where you want justice. This is a war. This is not where you get information for a trial, and conflicting evidence and all that. In a kind of wartime, you have to go and kill before trial. Now, you try to get as sound as information as you can, and you try to avoid collateral damage or killing innocent people, but you have an objective. It is war. You know that your people have been killed and are like likely to get killed again. So you've got to stop it.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

And one of the places where you would stop it, along with a number of others in Washington, would be to attack Iraq.

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

Definitely. If we stop with bin Laden, we've done a quarter of a war.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

How do you feel about that?

GAIL COLLINS:

All of these things sound perfectly reasonable. I mean, we would like to go into Iraq and just grab this guy and take him out… I mean, Afghanistan. But we've learned how difficult it is to get into Afghanistan. We learned from the last war, how difficult it is to get Saddam Hussein, even if you are bombing his country.

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

It wasn't… We could have gotten… We could have marched on Baghdad and taken it, easily. It was right there. That was a great mistake that President Bush's father made and Colin Powell made. And I hope they learn their lesson.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

Let me just ask each of you before we close this: Do you have a hunch of when we're going to see the Bush administration do something? Do you have a feeling in your bones about it? Frank Rich?

FRANK RICH:

My feeling is the snows are coming to Afghanistan. It's going to have to be before that, but I have no other hunch.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

Do you have a hunch?

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

I don't see this as any long, protracted war like the Russians fought, or the Khyber Pass like the British. I think the Taliban will crack or will be able to get information that will lead to the killing of the Al Qaeda leaders.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

Are we talking within a weeks or two weeks?

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

You want a date? ( Laughing )

GAIL COLLINS:

He knows; he's just not going to tell you.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

Do you have a purer sense of this, Gail Collins? Do you have a sense?

GAIL COLLINS:

I think they're already there. I think we have people already there somehow doing something, and when it will blow beyond that, I don't know.

WILLIAM SAFIRE:

How much we don't know is fascinating.

ROBERT MACNEIL:

And we are there too. Thank you all very much.