If things continue on their present course there will be more people distancing themselves from junior than did the same from Clinton before the last election. I thought at the time and I still think those who distanced themselves from Clinton made a mistake though.
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Horrid Thoughts About Horrid Leaders
By Bernard Weiner, Co-Editor,
The Crisis Papers
May 4, 2004
Maybe you've forgotten John DiIulio. An early ranking member of the Bush Administration -- in charge of faith-based programs -- he was the first to leave and tell us what really went on inside the White House.
Basically, he said, virtually every initiative of the Bush Administration was taken for partisan political reasons. There was precious little, if any, loftier discussion of whether something might be good for the American people. Everything flowed from the top down, from the cynical, manipulative minds of Rove and Cheney and their ilk. The major question dealt with was: How could this policy benefit Bush&Co. and their friends?
"This gave rise," wrote Dilulio "to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis — staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible."
Later, we heard variations on a similar theme by other, more highly-placed insiders -- such as Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Anti-Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke and Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV -- that confirmed that Bush and his inner-circle are not especially curious about the real world and are not interested in hearing unwelcome truths. Politics and power are what really matter.
Once Bush&Co. make up their minds, it's full speed ahead; if they run into a brick wall, all attempts are made to deny the existence of the wall-like obstacle in front of them. If there is no way to escape that impediment, they'll back and fill and try to go around another way, but the ultimate goal remains to get to where they wanted to get to originally and, by golly, they will get there -- even if it requires them, stealth-like, to pretend for awhile that they're changing their destination.
THE IRAQ DEBACLE
What's happening in Iraq is a good example. The neocons in charge of American foreign/military policy -- hard-rightists from The Project for The New American Century like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Feith -- wanted to get a U.S. military foothold in Iraq, and to bend the existing Arab culture in the Middle East to its "democratic"/"free market" will. To effect this U.S. presence, the Bush Administration had to invent a rationale to justify an invasion and hyped an "imminent" danger posed by Saddam Hussein with his supposed terrifying biochemical and nuclear weapons. None of it was true, of course, and thousands of Americans and Iraqis are paying the ultimate price for those gross lies and deceptions -- and U.S. taxpayers, and their descendants, are paying the humongous financial price.
The ongoing conflict in Iraq has turned into an embarrassing disaster for the U.S., as it gets sucked into the kind of war Saddam and his military planners wanted to fight: an urban insurgency against the American occupiers. Comparisons with Vietnam and the Battle of Algiers are being made even by conservative pundits. Support at home for Bush's bumbling war policies is melting away. Unless Rove can find some way to get Iraq off the front pages of voters' minds, Bush conceivably could lose the election in November.
And so, Bush&Co. are desperate enough to do anything to get the U.S. out of the death zones in Iraq. The aim is to take American voters' attention off the war long enough to get Bush elected. Once that happens, all bets and restrictions are off; it's back to moving toward those original neo-con goals.
In Iraq, the goal is to have a military presence in the country -- the U.S. already has set up 14 bases inside Iraq -- so as to have leverage as the U.S. attempts to reshape the Middle Eastern geopolitical map, and to have effective control of the natural resources of the area at a time when oil reserves worldwide are running down. If Bush were to win in November, the original agenda would come into play: moving hard on Iran and Syria and others to toe the U.S. line, or face the consequences -- with the example of "shock-and-awe" and "regime change" in Iraq to help focus the minds of leaders who might object to American hegemony.
THE LOGIC OF TORTURE
How history delights in irony. Bush claims that because of U.S. "liberation" of Iraq, America has taken the country beyond the Saddam horrors and brutalities and tortures of the past and into a bright new present and glowing future. At virtually that same moment, what many Iraqis and human rights groups already knew was revealed to the public: the U.S. and U.K. have been involved in systematic humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners -- sometimes to the point of death -- and often at the same jails that Saddam's thugs used for the same purposes.
Why Bush and Blair would be "shocked, shocked" to discover that the troops serving under their command would behave in an uncivilized manner is a mystery. For nearly four years now, Bush, for example, has behaved like a king who answers to no-one; his administration's behavior across the globe -- strutting and swaggering unimpeded like an arrogant bully, taking what it wants, demeaning its enemies as "uncivilized," claiming a dichotomy of God on our side & the Other as thoroughly "evil" -- almost invites ordinary U.S. soldiers to see their Iraqi enemy as lesser mortals, somehow unworthy of normal human consideration.
It's what the world witnessed in Stalinist Russia, Hitlerian Germany, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Israel in Palestine, France in Algeria, the U.S. in Vietnam. We are the good guys with God on our side ("Gott mit Uns"), our enemies are some barbaric sub-humans whose God is inferior to ours; even with international rules of war and treatment of POWs in place, there naturally will be officers and troops who go over the line with great regularity. Once the war genie is let out of the bottle, we shouldn't be surprised by the inhumanity that follows.
The rationales justifying this Iraq adventure were, and remain, rotten. The post-"Mission Accomplished" war is a disaster. The commander-in-chief, looking through rosy-colored glasses, maintains that all is well, just a few malcontent natives and "foreign terrorists" to deal with.
When an entire war enterprise is based on faulty foundations, as in Vietnam, as in Iraq, one should expect the troops -- many, if not most, of whom come from moral, religious backgrounds -- to recognize, on some level, that what they're being asked to do varies from what they've been taught is right.
Some soldiers can't handle that kind of emotional/ethical warping and psychologically snap, performing ghastly acts of torture and violence. That is an expected part of warfare; if the war seems to be lasting forever, if your own country doesn't armor and protect you enough, if you as a soldier learn you can't trust anyone in the native population, and if the required changes aren't made from the top down, the entire war policy and behavior can slide off the moral tracks. It happened in Vietnam, it's happening increasingly in Iraq.
But, since the Bush neocons want Iraq and what it represents -- political greed, don't forget, is their middle name -- they will do anything necessary to stick to their goal of using Iraq to "transform" the energy-rich Middle East. They will do so even if it means temporarily contradicting their own best interests on the ground in order to reduce the number of Americans dying -- for one reason and one reason only: to win the election in November.
This attitude helps explain the U.S. rush to hand over the reins of "sovereignty" -- to someone, anyone, please -- even though the Americans will continue to maintain their bases and pull the strings from behind the scenery; and why the U.S. is even willing to pay out huge amounts of "protection money" to Iraqi militias (often made up of the same insurgents who were firing on them previously) in order to buy their way out of deadly firefights.
THE ISRAEL/PALESTINE DISCONNECT
There clearly is a disconnect in the White House between what's happening in Israel/Palestine and what's happening in the Arabic Middle East and, in general, throughout the Islamic world. Since Bush&Co. have placed all their chips on Israel in that Middle East struggle, Sharon's Likud-led government considers that it has carte blanche to pacify and control that area however it wants. Bush&Co. simply refuse to comprehend (or care) that the U.S. and Israel are pouring gasoline on the smoldering fire of Arabic and Islamic resentment across the globe.
If they really wanted to win hearts and minds in the Islamic world, the U.S. would engineer and work tirelessly for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East: Arab-wide recognition of Israel within secure pre-1967 borders, a geographically and economically viable Palestinian state, withdrawal of Israel from most of the occupied territories and settlements. But Bush has now moved the U.S. away from its traditional "honest broker" role between the two warring parties, and placed America squarely in the Likud camp, thus ensuring that Muslims worldwide see little or no difference between the two most powerful countries in the area. Both Israel and the United States increasingly are seen by Muslims these days as a common enemy -- occupying powers who employ similarly brutal, inhumane acts in trying to control the local populations.
In short, Bush -- the same guy who infuriated the Islamic world when he used the term "crusade" to define his initial anti-terrorist policy -- has become the best recruiter for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And, most importantly in terms of domestic American security, Bush has become the best recruiter for Al Qaida.
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