This long-awaited announcement, made last week by the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, George Frampton, gives Gore and Clinton the opportunity to finesse a political firestorm in an election year by opting for the well-worn moral low road. As opposed to the road less traveled, this, sadly, is a road marked by neck-deep ruts cut by an administration that never spared a political expense so long as someone else was picking up the tab.

In this case, the expedience is transparent: Back away from breaching the dams, take the pressure off Gore, and let the tribes run the gauntlet of political opinion.

The administration's non-decision decision has given the Columbia River tribes, tribes whose cultural identity is inextricably linked to salmon, no choice now but to sue the federal government for non-compliance with the Endangered Species Act and for failing to safeguard the provisions in their treaties. Provisions in the 1855 treaties that control the Columbia River have been upheld at least six times by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Don Sampson, executive director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, said simply, "Their position is legally indefensible." Once again, an American president is asking Indian tribes to bear the brunt of his own self-serving political agenda.

This request comes from a man whose great promise, whose commanding intellect and leadership abilities, were squandered at the expense of his personal foibles and flaws of character. Now, he's running around like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow on next year's crop in order to secure a legacy worth writing about five years from now.

What the administration has failed to realize on the Snake River is that political solutions to this vexing scientific and legal Gettysburg will prove to be irrelevant. The unanswered, billion-dollar question that will remain after Clinton has finessed the issue, is simply this: How many fish will be left when the dams come down?

Last year, Bruce Babbitt made a great show of breaching the Edwards Dam in Maine, a dam that had blocked anadramous fish runs on the Kennebec River for 162 years. In a flicker of time, a river that was choking to death is now seeing fish species in quantities and varieties no one alive has ever seen in that river. This is not good news for dam advocates, particularly in areas where native fish stocks are coming under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, as are the salmon in the Columbia River basin. But findings from the Kennebec were nowhere to be found in the testimony presented to Congress by the Clinton administration last week. No one dared.

In study after study, simple economics have been shown to argue forcefully in favor of breaching the dams. But economics pale when measured against the weight of another factor: the power of the treaty. American presidents, from Jefferson through Clinton, have been more than willing to leverage their political agendas on the backs of tribes, not to mention the beasts, fishes and fowl. When Chief Justice John Marshall lectured Andrew Jackson on constitutional law and the supremacy of treaties 180 years ago, Jackson scoffed defiantly, "If that's his opinion, let Mr. Marshall enforce it." Jackson then sent 4,000 Cherokee to their death on the Trail of Tears.

The great social philosopher Michel Foucault posited the argument that by the late 19th century, the language of madness was invented by the state to cover for its own failure to secure the very values it claimed to live by. This was Justice Marshall's point in his rebuke of Jackson, and he would do the same to Bill Clinton. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., would rise in a shudder of outrage to ask that most unsettling of all rhetorical questions: "Are not great nations, as great men, good to their word?"

That question was answered in the state of Washington just three weeks ago. The state Republican convention passed a resolution calling for an end to all tribal governments. Supporters of the resolution, including GOP gubernatorial candidate Harold Hochstatter, called for the federal government to "send in the U.S. Army and the Air Force and the Marines and the National Guard to battle back," if the tribes resist.

I called the front desk to find out what country I was in.

The cultural hard-wiring of Manifest Destiny continues to give us a metaphorical blank check of approval from our storied ancestors, permission to dispatch anything and anyone that gets in the way of what we happen to want so long as they do not look, or sound, like us.

While he was traveling through the new American republic 170 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed this characteristic of American society when he made the following observation: "The European [in America] is to other races of men what man in general is to the rest of animate nature. When he cannot bend them to his use or make them indirectly serve his well-being, he destroys them and makes them vanish little by little before him."

Until we find a way to shatter the political fun house mirror that shapes our identity and history, we are condemned to live inside de Tocqueville's grim prediction. Non-decision decisions mean that nothing that gets in our way is safe. And sadly, we are only too willing to let the tribes, and the beasts and the fishes, and the birds and the insects, pay the ultimate price for the politics of denial.

Paul VanDevelder reports on the U.S. Supreme Court, public lands, and natural-resource issues for numerous periodicals and newspapers.

Copyright © 2000 The Seattle Times Company

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