From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
A Week of Fire
Pretending there isn't a problem gave us 9/11 and California fires.
Television is an electronic faucet, always on, always dripping images, and sometimes it floods the brain. This week the flood came. It began Sunday with images of blown-apart buildings in Baghdad and continued with the sight of California fiercely burning.
For all the immediacy, TV most of the time remains a distancing medium. It keeps us at arm's length. We can watch bodies carried from bombed buildings in Iraq and switch, no problem, to the NFL game on Fox. Commercials provide time to get an update on the survivors, then back for the point after. This is just more of the modern condition, and however discomfiting television's anesthetic effect, there's little to do other than stack it atop all the other unexplained mysteries.
But this week's outpouring of fire and death was different. TV news is addicted to the visually dramatic, and so the scenes from Baghdad were circulated adjacent to sights of fire burning California's homes, towns and forests with power and ferocity. And the scenes from California were not the same thing replayed over and over but were new and ever more stunning--a photo of flames for miles along the horizon, or of one man picking through the embers of his mother's house. And the constant was the too-vivid color--the hellish orange hues of Halloween.
Say this: Between Baghdad and California it has been harder this week than it normally is to watch people in distress somewhere else, and then drop one's head onto a cool linen pillow and fall asleep. This time, semi-numbness was not an option.
Besides, we have learned as well in recent years that the bringer of these images won't let you hide from them, but in its relentless and contentious way, the media will force a reaction, most often a reaction that is political and partisan. Even as the Baghdad news was sinking in Sunday evening, the Democratic presidential candidates mounted a stage together to lay blame for it all on President Bush.
John Kerry: "He broke every promise. He's done it wrong. . . . What he ought to be doing is internationalizing this effort, going to the United Nations, asking the United Nations to take part in a larger way, which they would be willing to do if he was prepared to shift real authority to them." Al Sharpton: "We need to go to the U.N., we need to say that we are working a multilateral commitment." Wesley Clark: "What he didn't do was he didn't use diplomacy. He didn't use leadership."
Setting aside the new phenomenon of unrestrained partisanship in wartime, and setting aside yesterday's decision by the U.N. to withdraw from Baghdad, there is indeed an important issue here of public leadership. The convergence of Baghdad's violence and the great destruction to property done by the fires allows us to raise similar issues of public leadership. Neither world terrorism nor those wildfires are merely the product of man's fate or bad luck. The degree and breadth of these disasters can be mitigated if the people we elect to positions of public leadership are willing, or able, to see clearly and make a decision.
Wildfires are not like tornadoes, something beyond human ken. The scale of these wildfires is in part a consequence of the failure to act. Back in 1994, the National Commission on Wildfire Disasters warned that "millions of acres of forest in the western United States pose an extreme fire hazard from the extensive build-up of dry, highly flammable forest fuels." The commission's chairman told Congress that year: "The message we are trying to bring to you today is that there are millions of acres of federal forest in the inland west that need immediate intervention, to prevent an environmental and economic disaster."
In nine years, nothing was done. Politics of course had a role. In Congress, the dominant Democratic model of environmentalism is stasis; it won't allow any policy that would "favor logging interests." As well, these lands are subject to the authority of many federal bureaucracies and several famous federal environmental laws. Forest policy has been
It is too late for Southern California. Forest policy has become such a "diffuse, bureaucratic thing" that the addition of status quo environmental opposition made public leadership impossible. If we have learned anything, again, from this awful catastrophe, it is that not making a decision amid imminent threat is the worst form of public leadership.
With terrorism, it is not too late to avoid the same mistake. With next November's election, the American people have a chance to express their preference for a style of leadership in a complicated and dangerous world.
Ample room exists for disagreement and debate about terrorism and Iraq. But there is a real question to be asked whether modern liberalism has become so tied to belief in the benefits of bureaucratic "process" that the process itself has become an impediment to acting or a pretext for doing nothing, as it did with the fires. The result in either case has proven to be mortal risk for Americans.
When John Kerry, Wesley Clark and the rest are asked what they would have decided differently after September 11, and when in virtual unison they say they would work in partnership and cooperation with the United Nations, we are entitled to wonder why their foreign policy, like their forestry policy, would not place the war on terror into the hands of the exact equivalent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Fall asleep on that.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
