Prologue

Hijacked

excerpted from the book

Rogue State

America at War with the World

by T. D. Allman

Nation Books, 2004, paper

p1
The Most Dangerous Man in the World

Life is a comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those who feel. That's why the spectacle of the George W. Bush presidency makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.

The reasons this unelected president has given us to cry are as numberless as the sands of the Iraqi desert. He's done more than Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein to endanger America. All by himself, he's destabilized a fragile, emerging world order. He's poisoned alliances; he's torn up treaties. He has convinced foes they had better get nuclear weapons, and get them quick. He's made America the global enemy of law and order. No enemy of human rights, or of the environment, or of a realistic approach to dealing with the problems of living sanely on this planet is friendless so long as George W. Bush is in the White House.

George Bush has destroyed belief in America's goodness and America's wisdom among hundreds of millions of people. Gratuitously, with his trademark smirk, he's turned a friendly world into a hostile world. Nations and people who once saw America as a global protector now see the United States as the greatest threat to civilized human values currently at large in the world.

Important, worthwhile allies, people whose help we need and whose judgment we should respect-the Canadians, the Germans, the Turks, and, yes, the French - have complete contempt for the president of the United States, as do the Russians and Chinese. Every nation in Africa explicitly opposed his attack on Iraq. Every one of Iraq's neighbors-Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran-warned that catastrophe would be the result. But George W. Bush, a C student at Yale and Harvard, sneers at wisdom. Facts don't mailer. Reality can take a walk. You're either for us or against us, he announces. Among those George Bush has turned against us include Nelson Mandela. According to Mandela, "the president of the United States does not know how to think. His attitude is a threat to world peace."

In a world where the technology of death is a mouse-click away, it's the hatred Bush has sown in countless unknown hearts that, sooner or later, may harm America most. Right now, in many places-including, it is reasonable to assume, inside the United States itself-smart, angry kids are on the Internet, amassing information on nuclear fission and biological warfare. In the world they know, George W. Bush, not some swarthy terrorist, personifies evil. Meanwhile, intelligent people everywhere ask themselves: How can the American people go on supporting this peculiar man? Why did they let him grab the presidency in the first place?

p14
Vice President Dick ... Cheney has spent his career in Washington promoting wars for others to fight. Yet he himself, like Bush and virtually all Bush's closest advisers with the exception of Secretary of State Cohn Powell, avoided fighting in the Vietnam War. In fact Cheney, the fiercest hawk in the Bush Administration, has never carried so much as a slingshot in his nation's defense. Along with Adelman and Perle, he escaped the draft altogether.

p40
Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, August 2000

"The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States."

p42
First under Nixon and then, with utter mastery, under Ronald Reagan, Republicans adroitly changed their spots. Deliberately, as part of a well-executed strategy, they made themselves the party of the fears and resentments, though not of the social and economic well-being, of middle- and working-class white Southerners. They became what earlier the Dixiecrats and Democrats had been, the party of white supremacy.

p53
Just as George W. Bush would promise the rich tax breaks and provide his favorite corporations with new weapons contracts and the wars to go with them in return for their millions of dollars in campaign donations, so Supreme Court justices became what the party of privilege and special interests offered the little guys in return for their votes. The Republicans weren't about give the people in the trailer parks and decaying old neighborhoods-or the families whose kids would do the dying in Iraq-decent health care or public education. But militant antiabortionists and religious fundamentalists could have Supreme Court justices to their heart's content, if they stood up for America, against the liberals, and helped the Republicans win. Such an approach brought political benefits, but it corrupted the very spirit of federalism by corrupting the independence of the judiciary. As Americans discovered in 2000, it also turned the supposedly independent judicial branch of the US government into a partisan weapon of political warfare.

This process of degrading the Supreme Court by degrading the process of choosing Supreme Court justices reached its most ludicrous point in the 1991 battle over the nomination of Clarence Thomas as associate justice. What had begun with the appointment of Rehnquist, a Northerner whose prejudices were those of a stereotypical white Southerner, culminated in the appointment of a black who, so far as his voting record on the Supreme Court was concerned, might in many cases just as well have been a crossburning member in good standing of the Ku Klux Klan. Later, black Americans would joke that in the 2000 election, they finally made a difference: A single black vote-Thomas's-had made George W. Bush the winner.

p63
When the US Constitution was written, slaveowners not only insisted that their right to own slaves be guaranteed. They insisted on being politically rewarded for practicing slavery. The Founding Fathers, the most eminent of them being slaveowners themselves, obliged. They created a federal system in which slaves were treated as property, not human beings, except for certain explicitly defined political purposes. In those cases, and those cases only, our Founding Fathers decided, would slaves be treated as human beings-though only partial ones. As the very first article of the US Constitution put it, each state's representation in the House of Representatives "shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons."

That "three-fifths of all other Persons" provision of the US Constitution meant that the more slaves a state had, the more members of Congress it got. How many more? The US Constitution set up a mathematical formula right out of grade-school arithmetic class. Count up all your slaves, boys and girls. Now multiply them by three, and divide by five, and there is your answer. This grotesque calculus was the first of the great North/South compromises over slavery that, for more than seventy years, would defer the American Civil War, but never remove its causes.

Treating slaves as "Persons" when it came to representation in Congress complicated an even more nettlesome problem: How to select the president (and vice president) of the United States, under the new Constitution? The slave states wanted their slave property to confer on them added political advantages when it came to choosing the president, too. Again they got their way. Since the idea of letting slaves line up to vote for president, even if it was only three-fifths of a vote each slave would cast, was intolerable by the standards of the era, the framers, in Article II of the Constitution, sidestepped the question of a direct popular vote for president. They decided the President would be chosen indirectly, by an Electoral College.

This only rephrased the underlying question. Who would elect the electors, and how many votes in the Electoral College would each state get? The number of electoral votes each state got, once again, was determined by a formula that rewarded slavery. The more slaves it had, the bigger the state's say in the choice of the president would be. Each state's number of presidential electors, it was decided, would be equal to its total membership in Congress-that is, the sum of its Representatives, which varied according to the population, including the slave population of each state, plus its senators, of which each state had two. This gave a decided political advantage to the slave states of the South in presidential politics-and it amounted to a bonanza for Virginia and its favorite sons when it came to electing America's first presidents. Virginia at the time was by far the most populous state. The extra representation it got in Congress as a result of its immense slave population made it even more powerful. At the time, Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, and Madison were indisputably the most esteemed public men in American. The added votes Virginia's slave property gave them in the Electoral College enhanced their political power even further. It also introduced an unpredictable wild card into the choice of the president.

One of the curiosities of the outcome of the American Civil War was that while it did away with slavery, it kept the most important American political institution designed to enhance the electoral power of slaveholders, the Electoral College. This meant that even when Constitutional procedure was followed faithfully and the presidential vote was counted accurately and honestly in each state, there still remained the possibility of an American president being elected constitutionally, but not democratically.

p66
During that century-the American Century-most of the world had been transformed by the appeal and power of democracy, as epitomized by the United States of America. Yet one thing had not changed. As it entered the twenty-first century, America still had an eighteenth-century electoral system [electoral college] that could, and now suddenly did, make it possible for the candidate who lost a democratic election to win the presidency.

p68
In 2000, the nationwide apathy was ... a revelation ... Following George W. Bush's installation as president, there was no significant effort to improve national election procedures-no movement to reform, let alone abolish, the Electoral College either. In 2000 the American people watched the courtroom drama that followed the election the same way they earlier had watched the O.J. Simpson trial. They were avid TV spectators of a legal drama whose outcome left them...

Presidential politics had become something Americans watched, not did. About fifty percent of those eligible hadn't voted at all. Now, even to those who had voted, the outcome evidently did not matter enough for them to use their constitutionally indisputable rights of assembly and free speech to protest the usurpation of the American presidency. This was a response that understandably might be construed by a man such as George W. Bush, who had been installed in office in the manner he had, as a sign that once in the White House, he could do anything he wanted without fear of the law or rebuke from the American people.

"Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law," Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, in another dissenting opinion. Breyer was wrong on both counts. The nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law had vanished much earlier and thanks in part to Florida's freedom of information laws, it eventually did become known with virtual certainty that in the voting of November 7, 2000, Al Gore had defeated George W. Bush in Florida, and thereby won the presidency.

As usual the media spun the story beyond recognition. Even when it became clear that a complete Florida recount-that is to say, an accurate count of how people in Florida actually had voted in the first place-would have shown Gore to be the winner, the news flashes and soundbites focused on the possibility that if only the votes in Palm Beach and Dade counties had been recounted, Bush still might have won, though, they conceded, Gore might have, as well. The revelation that Gore actually had gotten the most votes in Florida was spun into another Gore the Chump news day. In fact Gore had not only gotten the most votes in Florida, he'd won more votes for president-more than fifty million votes in all-than any other candidate in history except for Ronald Reagan in his run for a second term. Nationwide, he'd defeated Bush by nearly 600,000 votes. This was a lot wider than Kennedy's margin over Nixon in 1960, though slightly narrower than Nixon's own slender win over Humphrey in 1968. In the only thing that counts in real democracy-votes-Gore not only had bested both of the Bushes, historically speaking. He'd outpolled landslide winners like Johnson and Eisenhower.

Jeffrey Toobin was one of the very few journalists reporting the Florida dispute to show any appreciation for the tragedy of American values that was unfolding. "In the cynical calculus of contemporary politics," he later wrote, "it is easy to dismiss Gore's putative victory. But if more people intended to vote for Gore than for Bush in Florida-as they surely did-then it is a crime against democracy that he did not win the state and thus the presidency." He described Rehnquist's choice as "a Supreme Court opinion that is doomed to infamy," and concluded: "The bell of this election can never be unrung, and the sound will haunt us for some time."

p107
[Paul] Wolfowitz had been a longtime protégé of Dick Cheney just as Cheney had started out as Rumsfeld's protégé. All three had become fixated on the idea of invading and occupying Iraq long before George W. Bush decided to use 9/n as the pretext for an attack. Wolfowitz's official title in George W. Bush's administration was Deputy Secretary of Defense, but WARNING TO THE WORLD should have been stenciled on the door of his Pentagon office. He personified the deep need of the Bush crowd, above all of George W. Bush himself to start a war. Like Bush, Wolfowitz was a chip-on-the-shoulder Ivy Leaguer (not some Sunbelt cowboy), in his case from Cornell. In addition, Wolfowitz had that tell-tale qualification shared by so many of George W. Bush's most trusted pro-war appointees-avoidance of service in the US military. Like Dick Cheney and almost all of the George W. Bush war hawks, he had been a persistent and successful Vietnam war draft-dodger.

Once in the saddle, George W. Bush would rough-ride across the globe like a tourist atop one of those coin-operated broncos in a Texas theme park. Then, in Iraq, he would embark on the most juvenile and unjustified overseas US military adventure since the 1970 Cambodia invasion. Wolfowitz, backed by Rumsfeld and encouraged by Cheney, came up with the strategic gobbledygook used to rationalize Bush's recklessness.

In the Bush-generated crises to come, Wolfowitz would be to the doctrine of "pre-emption" what Ptolemy had been to the idea that the sun revolved around the earth: chief theoretician of a system that defied reality. Secretary of State Cohn Powell would play the Galileo figure. He knew how the world really moved, but when called before the Oval Office curia, Powell, the only one of them with any firsthand knowledge of war, and much else-would mumble acquiescently, letting Cardinal Cheney, Archbishop Rumsfeld, and Monsignor Wolfowitz have their way. Did Powell imagine that, in the end, reason and reality would prevail, once George W. Bush thought things over? If so, that was his illusion.

Power to shape the strategic thinking of a president of the United States had been a long time coming for Paul Wolfowitz. As early as 1992, he had urged that the United States adopt as strategic doctrine the notion that world law and world order counted for nothing when the United States wished to violate the one and overturn the other. This made him quite a thinker so far as the ultraradical neocon pamphleteers were concerned. According to the media propagandist William Kristol, Wolfowitz was "ahead of his time," "prophetic," and "vindicated by history" for having been among the first to propose a unilateral US invasion of Iraq.

George W. Bush's father knew better. When Wolfowitz's boss and mentor during that first Bush administration, then-secretary of defense Dick Cheney, presented Wolfowitz's policy proposals to him for approval, Bush the elder rejected this first draft of what later would become the blueprint for his son's "for-us-or-against-us" foreign policy. Then, tellingly, he ordered Cheney, not Wolfowitz, to rewrite it. Cheney retailored the words to fit the prevailing expediency. A less offensive approach to military policy, for the time being, remained in force, but Cheney never would have slipped Wolfowitz's document onto the president's desk if Wolfowitz's vision hadn't reflected his own views, as would become clear eight years later, when he became vice president...

In the interval between the two Bush administrations, Wolfowitz remained a little-noticed figure outside ultraradical circles. Then George W. Bush rebestowed presidential favor upon him. Like the resuscitated Rumsfeld, he acquired cult status in Washington. The proposals that had been rejected earlier received the scrutiny normally reserved for Dead Sea Scrolls. The hr-document in the Wolfowitz dossier, however, is his official Defense Department curriculum vitae. It's the résumé of a life as dangerously divorced from the world's realities as the Bush foreign policy has turned out to be.

p113
Whoever was President, Wolfowitz's approach to power remained simplistically arithmetical: The more weapons America had, and the more it used them, the better (whether or not there was any strategic or moral justification). It is this inflexible approach to America's "national security," unchanging over the decades and impervious to geopolitical reality, which, like some harmless hamster in a sci-fi film, would grow into an earththreatening monster once bombarded by the radioactive attention of George W. Bush.

p117
The liberation of Kuwait in February 1991, kick-started what, back then, even Republicans proudly called the New World Order. As well as a military victory, the Kuwait war was a historic diplomatic triumph for the United States. Both the elder Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, had seen to that. They understood that, in order to succeed, any new, post-Cold War international order would have to be based on right as well as might, and they had organized the United Nations-sanctioned, US-led effort to reverse Saddam's aggression on that basis. That was why George H.W. Bush in 1991, unlike George W. Bush in 2003, was able to assemble a genuine coalition of the willing. Nations ranging from Argentina to Syria, and from France to Turkey enthusiastically helped fight, and also to pay for that first Iraq war because it was fought for reasons they understood, to defend principles they shared-and because then, unlike later, the United States didn't act like a bully. A decade later, the same countries would keep their wallets closed and sit on their hands. There was an additional reason US efforts were so successful in 1991. Back then, the United States treated other countries with respect.

The swift totality of that first Iraq victory was stunning, but nothing impressed the world more than the principled approach the United States took once Saddam was defeated. US forces could have surged on to Baghdad. Instead, the first President Bush won the world's admiration with his decision not to transform the United Nations-authorized liberation of Kuwait into an American conquest of Iraq. It was a painful as well as principled decision to stop the war before Saddam Hussein was toppled, but Bush the elder understood that upholding the rule of law among nations was more important than settling scores with an unsavory dictator. Unlike George W. Bush later, he also understood that a unilateral, unauthorized US assault on Iraq, followed by a US military occupation of the country, would undermine American security by turning most of the Arab and Muslim world against the United States.

Wolfowitz and his 700 paper-pushers played no role in the stunning Kuwait victory. While they'd been churning up strategic "doctrine," the actual war was planned, run, and won by military professionals like Cohn Powell. That didn't stop Wolfowitz from deciding that he should be the one to ordain what US national security policy should be in light of that decisive victory. More than a year after Operation Desert Storm had already demonstrated the best way for the United States to fight, and win wars in the post-Cold War era, Wolfowitz weighed in with a radically different counterproposal. It was the same blueprint for disaster that eleven years later would play itself out under George W. Bush.

Wolfowitz's war plan bore an innocuous-sounding label. He called his prescription for destroying the postwar international security system "Defense Planning Guidance." Even had its contents not been pernicious, its existence would have been redundant. In the form of Operation Desert Storm, Powell and the others had already created and successfully tested the paradigm of successful US action that, following the 9/11 attacks ten years later, would serve the United States as well in Afghanistan as it had in Kuwait. The key to both the 1991 Kuwait triumph and the 2002 success in Afghanistan was not America's overwhelming technological superiority in modern warfare. The key to success was that America's overwhelming superiority was used legitimately, in pursuit of a worthwhile objective, supported by the overwhelming majority of the nations of the earth.

"Defense Planning Guidance" took the form of a forty-six page pamphlet that repudiated both the proven military-diplomatic success of the Desert Storm model of warfare and the democratic ideals and strategic conceptions-from the Four Freedoms to containment-which had, through all the follies and dangers, managed to save America and the world from utter disaster during the first half-century of the nuclear age. The Kuwait victory had been a victory for the internationalists and multilateralists within the Republican Party-for all those wimps, ranging from Kissinger to Powell, that Rumsfeld and Cheney had first tried to purge from power during their 1975 Halloween Massacre. "Defense Planning Guidance" was the opening gambit in a campaign which would only achieve success in 2001, when George W. Bush, deftly guided by Dick Cheney, brought Donald Rumsfeld back from the political wilderness, and Rumsfeld, in turn, put Wolfowitz in charge of putting an intellectual gloss on their nutty policy of ceaseless provocation all over the world.

p122
Americans grow up believing it's their destiny to save everyone else from the bully on the block. The strategic objective Wolfowitz put forth in "Defense Planning Guidance" was to turn America into the global bully. The first step to permanent global domination, according to Wolfowitz, was to make sure no one got in America's way, ever. Over the next decade, America's most dangerous enemies would turn out to be infiltrating viruses (as AIDS had already shown), and groups of fanatics acting independent of any national authority (as 9/11 would show). Yet Wolfowitz was fixated on fighting a new Cold War against a new Soviet Union. Only this time the war wouldn't be cold, and America wouldn't settle for containment.

"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival," Wolfowitz announced. (Throughout "Defense Planning Guidance," he writes "is," not "should be.") "This is," he continued, "a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power." Here as throughout "Defense Planning Guidance," people don't count. Like George W. Bush later, he equates domination of "resources," notably oil, with "power," and the potential loss of control over those resources as defeat. People don't count, nor does rightful ownership of the resources the United States might decide to control. Also absent is the idea that the United States might eliminate "threats" to its national security by modifying its own behavior-for example, by consuming less imported oil-rather than by dominating others or resorting to military force. This approach, too, would become the George W. Bush approach. Not once during the invasion of Iraq, for example, would Americans be asked to support the war effort by driving fewer SUVs. George W. Bush's Iraq war would be a struggle in which Americans would be expected to sacrifice their lives, but not turn down their air-conditioners, give up their tax cuts, or buy less gas.

The overall US goal, Wolfowitz emphasizes in "Defense Planning Guidance," is not merely to retain control over oil supplies. Nor is the strategic objective to deter aggression, or even to contain it, as had been US strategy under every US president, Republican or Democrat, since the end of World War II. The goal, instead, is to impose a "new order" that will make it impossible for any country other than the United States "to generate global power" under any circumstances, for any reason.

Later, George W. Bush's petulance, as well as the arrogance he and those around him displayed, mystified many. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's outbursts against the "old Europe" especially startled people. Why did they get so ticked off simply because members of the United Nations Security Council, including America's allies on the council, disagreed with them? One reason Bush and those around him treated America's allies so contemptuously was that, by then, the ideas expressed in "Defense Planning Guidance" had been an ingrained part of their shared world view for years. As Wolfowitz himself had put it, "even aspiring to a larger regional or global role" on the part of "potential competitors," including America's allies, was not to be tolerated.

Combine this intolerant world view with George W. Bush's for-us-or-against-us approach and you have what, ten years after Wolfowitz wrote "Defense Policy Guidance," has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. By the time Bush invaded Iraq, it wasn't just the Russians and the Chinese, and all those Africans and Asians, and, as usual, the French who were "against us." Even Canada had turned into a "competitor."

Having defined the US objective as eliminating even the possibility of others aspiring to provide an alternative to American leadership, or even supplementing it on a regional basis, Wolfowitz then proposed that the United States do away with the entire post-World War II system of collective security, epitomized by US cooperation with NATO and the United Nations. In his own words: "First the US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests."

Ann then? "Second, in the non-defense areas, Wolfowitz continued, "we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order." After pausing to consider what that last sentence actually means, it's hard, even now, to think of a statement by a US official more profoundly contemptuous and ignorant-of the human and cultural, as well as military and strategic, realities of Europe, and of the rest of the world. Here we have, in words, what the Bush Doctrine became in deeds ten years later. While the United States decides what to do, where to do it, when to do it, and who will do it, the United States nonetheless will be magnanimous enough to "account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership."

p127
Wolfowitz not only proposed preventing China's emergence as "another rival" but proposed precluding such an eventuality, or even the possibility of it ever arising, in "Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia" as well. But how to lobotomize the rest of the world? Strategically speaking, that more or less was the grand global policy "Defense Planning Guidance" ordained.

"Finally," Wolfowitz wrote, "we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."

Rogue State

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