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BOOK REVIEW — The homeland in homeland security |
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Written by asap
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Saturday, 24 March 2007 |
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Americans have fear fatigue. The government has told us for five and a half years to be afraid of terrorist attacks on airplanes, ports, power plants. Seasons have turned, elections have come and gone, we’ve all aged by a half-decade — and still no new attack.
As Sept. 11 recedes in our rearview mirror, we go about our business, shrugging off the warnings and watching as the government “takes the fight to the enemy” overseas.
At the same time, Stephen Flynn is trying to sound an alarm at home: Our infrastructure is rotting from government neglect and public apathy.
“The United States has become a brittle superpower,” he writes in his new book “The Edge of Disaster.”
“We are the world’s economic and cultural 900-pound gorilla and spend more on our military muscle than the rest of the world combined,” Flynn warns. “Yet we increasingly behave like the occupants of a grand old mansion who have given up on investing in its upkeep.”
It’s a familiar theme with a slightly new twist: The war in Iraq has diverted government resources from bolstering the homeland, and left Americans feeling helpless or willfully ignorant of the risks in their own backyards.
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NIGHTMARE FODDER
Flynn is a former Coast Guard officer and is now a senior fellow at the prestigious think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, and this slender volume sometimes feels like the product of a think tank. For one thing, it is heavy on statistics (“In the 1990s, 198,000 hospital beds were eliminated to reduce overhead costs”).
At times, the author’s tone is a bit breathless, as if he is huffing and puffing to persuade the reader of his argument.
The strength of this nonfiction book’s warning is in the fiction — Flynn’s imagined scenarios of terrorist attack or natural disaster that paint color into the drab outlines of hypothetical terror plots we’ve all heard.
He draws the reader into these nightmare scenarios, like one in which terrorists drive a tanker truck into a refinery, touching off huge explosions and unleashing a toxic plume that sickens thousands at a nearby baseball game.
Another scenario, described in chilling detail: a dual attack on a tanker ship hauling liquefied natural gas into Boston and an oil rig sailing into the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.
In still another, he raises the prospect of an earthquake damaging the fragile levees that protect cities and farms along California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which supplies millions with drinking water and nourishes the nation’s most fertile fields.
Each scenario is informed by real-world vulnerabilities and highly plausible assumptions.
Flynn’s argument is that the government has spent hundreds of billions on overseas military campaigns on and fortifying military bases stateside, while leaving critical infrastructure here decaying and vulnerable. Mostly, he blames a lack of political will.
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BE PREPARED
Flynn also tries to jostle Americans to prepare themselves for the inevitable earthquakes, hurricanes and terrorist attacks to come.
“America needs to make building national resiliency from within as important a public policy imperative as confronting dangers from without,” he writes.
Mostly, the book is an attempt to spur government to spend more — much more — on vulnerable and decaying infrastructure at home. But there are also some smart new ideas here. Chief among them: An “Infrastructure Resiliency Commission” patterned after the military’s Base Closure and Realignment Commission.
The military’s commission is supposed to take the politics out of the base-closure process, to do what Congress cannot bring itself to do: set aside parochial interests and act in the larger national interest by mothballing unnecessary installations.
Flynn’s infrastructure commission would similarly be made up of outside experts who would “identify the investments that need to be made most urgently, regardless of which congressional district a project will reside in.”
To finance the necessary upgrades, Flynn sets his sights on the estate tax, which channels money from rich dead people into government coffers. He also raises the possibility of increasing the federal gasoline tax by $1 a gallon.
They are expensive remedies for problems most Americans are blithely unaware of. But, Flynn writes, the costs of inaction are higher:
“A society that can match its strength to deliver a punch with the means to take one makes an unattractive target.”
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asap contributor Scott Lindlaw covers homeland security in the AP’s San Francisco bureau. | Only registered users can write comments.
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