Independence Day Revisited or Tail of Two
Dogs
by David Rabin
Gather round, all ye conspiracy addicts and other interested parties, and listen to a July 4th
tale that should be setting-off some serious fireworks, if only folks were paying attention. Mind
you, we don't have a smoking firearm here, nor are we likely to ever have one. But indulge us
in this round of substantiated speculation.
On or about Independence Day, 2002, things were getting rather nasty for President Bush. If
you remember, enormous scandals at Enron, WorldCom et. al. were grabbing headlines. Bush
was beginning to get tarred. The Washington press corps was finally recovering from its
post-9-11 servility. The question was (and, for that matter, still is), why should Bush, a former
Harken Energy officer, a man implicated in an insider trading scheme four times the size of
Martha Stewart's boo-boo, be trusted to ride in on a white horse and protect us all from evil
corporate dirty-doers?
The New York Time's Paul Krugman poised the question on July 2nd. By July 8th, Bush was
badgered with Harken queries at one of his rare press conferences. A Nexus search reveals
that, during the week of July 6th., about 300 major news stories and opinion pieces were
generated in the U.S. media on either the Bush-Harken issue or the questionable actions of
Dick Cheney during his tenure as C.E.O. at Halliburton. Not a happy time for the White
House, and a November election was looming.
What to do? It's clear from innumerable sources that Bush and his cronies wanted to go after
Iraq from way back, that 9-11 provided the opportunity, that once the Taliban was thrown out of
power in Afghanistan, the propaganda mill, with virtually no evidence, could wrap Saddam in
9-11 finery. Crank it up in September, just in time to scare the be-jesus out of every Joe six-
pack and soccer mom on election day in 2002. You ideally don't want to start any earlier than
that. As Andrew Card, Bush's chief of staff, said last summer, you don't begin a sales
campaign in August.
But then those pesky Enron/WorldCom irritants forced the issue, so the White House appears
to have sped-up its scheme by wagging-the-dog on July 4th. That's when the Pentagon leaked
its Iraq war plans to the New York Times. Although some say the spill was done by those
opposed to a war, Bush and company clearly had ample motivation to distract the public from
the burgeoning corporate tempests. They had a long lineage of switcher-roos to draw on: the
Monica-gate Iraq attack by Clinton in '98 and Reagan's invasion of Grenada in 1983, close on
the heels of the massacre of some 240 Marines in Beirut, to mention just two examples.
The leak, along with a few other choice moves, seems to have worked like a charm. Soon after
July 4th, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz visited Ankora to talk turkey about
invasion plans, and Tony Blair was invited to Camp David to meet Bush and discuss war
strategy. By the end of July, the Bush-Harken stories were down to a trickle, apparently
drowned out by the growing title wave of pieces on a possible invasion of Iraq. Nexus shows us
that while there were a small number of stories on a possible U.S. attack on Iraq before July,
by early August there were close to 300. By the middle of September, the number more than
doubled. It can be argued that Bush-Harken stories would have died anyway, that correlation is
not necessarily causation. But Bush certainly had a motive to up-the-anti on Iraq.
Nor is this discussion idle historical chatter, bent on remembering Bush's purely
political/electoral expediency in going to war, something that's been lost in all the clammer
about wmd, oil, lucrative contracts for friends, smashing support for the Palestinians,
reconfiguring the Middle East, getting revenge for Poppy, etc.
Our wagging dog could take another bow (wow!). The president is increasingly weakened by
awol wmd in Iraq, along with growing numbers of body bags and a failed occupation. Add in
the other occupational mess in Afghanistan, a stagnant U.S. economy, an enormous deficit,
sinking state budgets, and you've got trouble in (Potomac) River City.
If you were George Bush, or more accurately, Karl Rove, what would you do? Changing the
subject worked beautifully last year. Why not try it again? Let's pick on another Axis of Evil
country, or perhaps go out and actually arrest/kill Osama-Been-Forgotten. With all that
intelligence at their disposal, they have to know where some guy hooked up to a dialysis
machine is hiding out. Or why not make an early announcement of Condi Rice as your 2004
running-mate. That would really confuse everybody. They just need to decide which bone to
pull out of the bag and when to wag it. Wait till September 2004? Maybe sooner if things get
too shaky? Stay tuned.
Who knows? Maybe Bush's opponents can start chatting this up, something they were, for the
most part, too afraid to do last year. Then perhaps we can declare some real independence on
November 2, 2004.
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