Beyond Duct Tape: The Best Defense Is A Strong Offense

WASHINGTON -- It's been just a week since Homeland Security officials advised Americans to prepare their home emergency kits, and already "duct tape" is the punch line to a thousand jokes. David Letterman even suggested that 3M adopt a new corporate motto: "Defending America Since 1903."

Now it's time to enter a dissent. In many ways, the duct-tape episode showed America at its best.

The episode showed that a government that had been caught off guard on Sept. 11 had learned its lesson: It was sharing information with the people and giving useful guidance on how that information should be used. I live in Washington, D.C., and I'm very glad to know that people in the government are thinking hard about what citizens should do in case of a chemical or radiological attack.

The episode reflected well on the American people too. The newspapers reported "panic buying," but I didn't see any panic at my grocery store -- only citizens heeding warnings from their government and taking practical steps to protect themselves and their families. Back in the 1990s, political scientists used to worry about Americans' loss of trust in their institutions. Those emptied-out aisles where bottled-water used to be are the best evidence to date of trust regained.

Nevertheless, it's plain that the government cannot put Americans through too many more experiences like last week's without undermining that trust. If the incident proved in the end to be the stuff of comedy, it contained some serious lessons about the potential weakness in our new Department of Homeland Security.

-- Fascination with disaster. People who study terrorism often worry so much about the disasters that might happen that they end up believing that these disasters will happen. For them, it is only a matter of time before bombs go off in lower Manhattan and nerve gas seeps under the front doors of Brentwood. I worked with some of these experts during my time in government. I can attest to their frustration with the complacency they perceive all around them -- and to the allure of the temptation to jolt the complacent into greater alertness.

After Sept. 11 we have to assume that anything is possible. But it's still not true that everything is equally probable. There's an almost infinite list of terrorist disasters that might occur -- but before officials go frightening the public by discussing any particular one of them, they ought to be very sure that this risk is significantly larger than the others. They may think they are just speculating aloud. But scary talk is not risk free. Some early reports indicate that the people who panicked in the Chicago nightclub disaster early Monday morning feared that terrorists were spewing poison gas at them.

-- Fear of controversy. Personal emergency kits rank pretty far down the list of things America needs to safeguard itself against Middle Eastern terror. It would be much more useful to enforce immigration laws more tightly, expand police surveillance powers, send more terror suspects to military rather than civilian tribunals, and modernize and extend the laws against criminal conspiracy. All of those steps, however, are bitterly controversial -- and so politicians and bureaucrats alike prefer to avoid mentioning them.

-- The chatter option. Talking about emergency kits and evacuation routes can be a way to talk tough about terror without actually having to take the risks of being tough. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called a press conference last week to call for greater federal aid to state and local governments in the name of, yes, "homeland security." Next you'll hear that she wants reduced Medicare copayments in the name of counter-terrorism.

But it's not just congressional Democrats who shy away from the hard business of counter-terrorism. Duct-tape may be funny. But a federal official who called for muscular IRS investigation of Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorists would have to brace himself for a more vigorous response than laughter.

-- Creeping bureaucratization. Middle Eastern terrorism originates in the Middle East -- and the Middle East is where it will have to be defeated. All that can be done in the U.S. is, at best, to thwart terror, at worst to care for terrorism's victims. A Homeland Security failure can produce a catastrophic defeat in the War on Terror -- but Homeland Security will never win it.

Most people in the new Department of Homeland Security will cheerfully acknowledge their limited role. But the human mind can acknowledge something without fully accepting it. It would be natural for Homeland Security to begin perceiving the CIA and the armed services less as America's striking force in the War on Terror and more as competitors and rivals for funding and attention. Just this past weekend, the Washington Post ran a lengthy story full of not-for-attribution complaints that the Bush budget for 2004 allotted a bigger percentage increase to the Pentagon than to Homeland Security.

The large public response to the duct-tape press conference reminds us of the potential for bureaucratic rivalry between departments to bias judgments about the balance between the two fronts -- home, where the war on terror cannot be won, and overseas, where it can.

We're still learning how to fight the War on Terror. The duct-tape binge gave us a good lesson. Now let's put that lesson to good use.