Flight Path to Disaster

Even Michael Moore has never accused George Bush of being involved in a plan to kill the governor of Kentucky. But we now know that the American military came within minutes of blowing Gov Ernie Fletcher out of the sky as his state plane prepared to land at Reagan National in Washington for the funeral of the president for whom the airport is named.

Like many political mishaps, this one resulted from a small misunderstanding happening against a background of raised sensitivity. Because of fears that al-Qaida would use the Reagan rites to give a mourning America more to weep for, extra flying restrictions had been imposed above the capital. But the plane from Kentucky had a problem with the transponder - which speaks to the ground - and so a governor coming to pay his respects was mistaken for a potential terrorist incursion. A general was on the telephone to order the downing of the jet but cloud cover delayed a sighting for long enough for innocence to be established.

Imagine if the sky had been clear. And while it's the governor who will be most prone to cold sweats in the early hours - contemplating how close he came to death - President Bush also has cause to consider his proximity to political death. While the military would doubtless have been blamed for the mistake, accidental gubernatorial executions are unlikely to raise a president's poll ratings.

While Governor Fletcher's survival makes the incident seem a joke, it touches on serious issues: for example, political decision-making. Although much of Michael Moore's attack on Bush in Fahrenheit 9/11 is predictable - imbecilic, dynastic, wrong on Iraq - many viewers may be surprised by the documentary-maker's emphasis on the administration's slowness to react. The president is shown idling in a primary school after receiving news of the World Trade Centre attacks and is criticised for delaying the invasion of Afghanistan.

But the Kentucky governor's near-escape shows that slowness to act can have its virtues. And the dilemma faced on that day can not be regarded as a horrible one-off. The spooks in Washington and London have suggested that further al-Qaida atrocities are more or less inevitable, but a catastrophic false response to a perceived terrorist threat is probably just as unavoidable. It seems horribly likely that at some point either America or Britain is going to have to give the order to destroy a plane which has deviated from its flight plan.

This is the toughest call a leader has to make outside of war-time and, as Michael Moore flies restlessly around the globe for the promotion of his films, he might hope that his president is taking this decision slowly. Especially as the science of destroying civilian aviation is so fresh that the chances of hitting a jet which is innocent except for an electronics problem are high, as Kentucky just almost discovered.

You don't need an NOP poll to suspect that a president or prime minister who blew up an airbus which turned out to hold only voters and no terrorists would lose the next election.

But the incident in which the bluegrass state almost needed a new leader also raises the question of the general impact of 9/11 on this November's US election. It was almost certainly no coincidence that the Bush administration chose the day that Congress investigated Governor Fletcher's near-miss to announce that it had "credible" information of a large Islamist terrorist attack before polling day. A high public sense of peril would help to excuse any excessive zeal in homeland security.

Tact prevents the presidential candidates from discussing the likely impact of an American equivalent of the Madrid attack but you can bet that it's the subject of much private chatter among aides. Travelling in the US recently, I asked most Americans I met what they thought the effect on the election of an October spectacular would be.

All, whatever their politics, believed that a second 9/11 would buy Bush a landslide second term. The experience of civil war, consolidated by cold war, leads Americans to support the centre when the edges blur. (In Britain, where any conditioned loyalty is to the crown not Downing Street, and a war-victorious Churchill was kicked out, an atrocity aimed at the ballot would probably be bad for Blair.)

This sense that national fear is an electoral asset has led the Bushites to suggest that John Kerry's VP nominee, John Edwards, is too inexperienced to be risked in a country at war. Apart from the fact that the Republicans offer as Bush's emergency replacement a 61-year-old man who has suffered four heart-attacks and several cardiac surgeries, the incident of the plane over Reagan warns Bush that the attempt to prevent terrorism could affect the election as much as its recurrence.