Mother of All Wedge Issues

excerpted from the book

Rogue State

America at War with the World

by T. D. Allman

Nation Books, 2004, paper

p132
Almost everybody wanted to know two things about 9/11: How did it happen? How can we make sure it won't happen again? You have to say "almost everybody" because from the beginning George W. Bush had a reverse agenda. His goal was to block any meaningful inquiry into this latest stupendous failure of US intelligence. He had good reason for wanting a cover-up. Any honest inquiry into the failure of the CIA and the FBI to provide forewarning of the Al Qaeda attacks was sure to lead directly and inevitably to a consideration of George W. Bush's own incompetence and dishonesty. So he engaged in a vast diversionary exercise to prevent people from understanding what actually happened that morning of September 11, 2001, and why. This is the fundamental reason why his ensuing "war on terror" was so wildly off-target. How can you fight something you refuse to understand?

Iraq would become the most spectacular of George W. Bush's diversionary exercises.

p133
The aftermath of September ii revealed George W. Bush's moral vacuity and the depravity of his world view. In response to such an event, what kind of leader-what kind of American would allocate more for Halliburton-style boondoggles in Iraq than for homeland security? George W. Bush's inadequacy was more fundamentally the product of a philosophy of government that always puts the American people last.

p135
It's not as though George W. Bush had no warning advance. There were a number of attempts to warn the administration of the danger. All were spurned. One important warning came from former Senators Gary Hart, a Democrat, and Warren Rudman, a Republican. Hart and Rudman were co-chairmen of an official task force called the United States Commission on National Security. The commission was established by act of Congress specifically to analyze unconventional threats to America's safety. This was no ploy to embarrass a Republican president. Among the commission's members was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives. As early as September 1999, two years before the attacks, the Commission on National Security issued the first of a series of prescient warnings. Unless there were major changes in the way the United States defended itself, it warned, "Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers" as the result of the federal government's unpreparedness to deal with terrorism. Then, at the end of January 2001, just as George W. Bush was taking office, Hart and Rudman issued a detailed, 150-page set of proposals for making America safer. Their report was called Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change. In it they wrote: "We need orders-of-magnitude improvements in planning, coordination, and exercise." Among their many useful and prescient suggestions was a proposal to create a new National Homeland Security Agency to coordinate efforts to protect America from Al Qaeda-style attacks-a proposal George W. Bush would continue to oppose even after September ii.

Less than a week before the September ii attacks, Hart met with George W. Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice. He urged her to start focusing on what, only days later, would be proven to be the greatest security threat to the United States since World War II. One of Hart's concerns was the total lack of preparedness for acts involving "a weapon of mass destruction in a high-rise building." As usual, Rice was heedless as well as clueless. The national security adviser did nothing, either then or after the attacks, to act on Hart's warning. Hart's attempt to communicate with Rice was a preview of later futile attempts by people like Hans Blix, the chief United Nations weapons inspector for Iraq, to put Rice in touch with reality. The vain hope was that she somehow might, then, bring a ray of reality into George W. Bush's view of the world. But Rice herself is one of the symptoms of George W. Bush's strategic autism: Why else choose a person of such mediocrity to be your national security adviser, if your goal isn't to isolate yourself from useful information and honest thinking?

Hart met Rice in the White House on Thursday, September 6. The following Tuesday the twin towers would be collapsing. The Pentagon itself would be ablaze. As Harold Evans, former editor of the London Sunday Times, has observed, the White House deliberately stymied efforts to alert Americans to the danger that, in the end, would burst upon the country so unexpectedly. In early May 2001, Congress had actually planned hearings aimed at publicizing the Hart-Rudman proposals. The exact date scheduled was May 6, but the White House scuttled the effort the day before by announcing it would not even be considering the proposals.

The Commission on National Security had conducted its inquiries with admirable objectivity, in a completely bipartisan way. It had been established, with both Democratic and Republican support, specifically to advise the White House and educate the nation on new kinds of threats to America's safety. Both liberals like Hart and right-wingers like Gingrich supported the commission's proposals, yet the George W. Bush administration was refusing even to consider them. "It did not want Congress out front on the issue," noted Evans. "On May , the administration announced that, rather than adopting Hart-Rudman, it was forming its own committee headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, who was expected to report in October."

The White House delaying tactics worked. "States, terrorists, and other disaffected groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction, and some will use them. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers," Hart and the others had warned. But, just as Bush and Cheney wished, Americans remained oblivious to the potential threat until the morning of September ii, after which Cheney quickly filled the new hole the administration had dug for itself with his own bland, authoritative persona. "The administration actually slowed down response to Hart-Rudman when momentum was building in the spring," former Speaker Newt Gingrich told Evans. After September ii, there was no longer any need for the administration to steal Hart's thunder. Osama bin Laden had seen to that...

p147
As they had with the Hart-Rudman warning earlier, Bush and his capos began to figure the angles, to calculate the spin. They treated 9/11 as an event to be exploited politically, to be turned to their ideological purposes. Between September 2001 and March 2003 when he invaded Iraq, George W. Bush did what his administration earlier had done with Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change. He tore up the road map; he ignored the imperative for change. The trajectory from 9/11 to Bombs Over Baghdad would be the predictable one: Whatever happens, keep pursuing our hidden agenda. Usurp every issue, turn every legitimate concern about the safety and prosperity of the American people to our purposes. And what are those purposes? Privilege and war, war and privilege, as George W. Bush's response to every issue invariably would show.

p149
For George W. Bush and his ilk, the US Constitution has no Preamble. They don't want a "more perfect union." Their goal is not to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility," let alone "promote the general welfare." As he showed before and after 9/11 it is not on George W. Bush's agenda to "provide for the common defense." His agenda is to secure "the blessings of liberty to ourselves"-but only provided the words "blessings," "liberty," and especially, "ourselves," are given very privileged definitions.

p153
Starting in January 2001, George W. Bush launched a series of attacks on the structures of international peace. He, Cheney, and Rumsfeld crashed into the towering monuments of nuclear arms control, solidarity with our allies, and international respect for human rights, human justice, and the rule of law. Target after target was subjected to the assault-the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the International Criminal Court, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and their Destruction, the Chemical Weapons Convention. In matter of months, George W. Bush trashed the work of decades. - -

What triumph of negativity awaited him next? The answer was the Anti-Ballistic Missile, or ABM, Treaty. In the months leading up to 9/11, Bush strove hard to start a new Cold War. The centerpiece of his campaign ... was his insistence on renouncing the ABM Treaty.

p168
More than anything else, 9/11 illustrated the perils of George W. Bush's absolute refusal to do anything serious about reducing America's dependence on imported oil. After 9/11 the addiction only got worse. The problem is not, as his critics in the 2004 political campaign contend, that George W. Bush has refused to have an energy policy. The problem is that he does have one: a policy that aims to needlessly consume as much energy as possible, regardless of the consequences-while falsely portraying advocates of rational energy use as shirkers in the "war on terrorism."

The malign effects of America's prodigal use of energy, especially of energy derived from petroleum production, are economic, environmental, social, political, and military. But as with most addictions, the consequences go deeper. US overdependence on oil affects Americans in their bodies and in some ways can be said to affect their souls. It has worked its way into the neurons and viscera of American life.

An America that depended less on cars, for example, might be a nation in which chronic obesity is less of a problem. An America less dependent on car payments might not have become a nation where personal debt overhangs the country's prosperity like an impending avalanche. A nation of people who walk more, use less air-conditioning and rub up a little more against their neighbors in shared public spaces, might also conceivably be an America where the politics of paranoia plays a smaller role. It's also conceivable that if Americans spent less of their lives sitting in isolated cubicles-some stationary, others mobile-they might be less divorced from the realities of the world, and not so apathetic about misuses of power by their own government.

But as George W. Bush proclaimed after 9/11, the American Way of Life is "nonnegotiable." For him forests are for snowmobiling, not thoughtful walks in the snow. What the Conestoga wagon once was to America, the SUV is to George W. Bush's oil-addicted idea of the American Way of Life. Enclosed in a climate-controlled, tinted-windowed, surround-sound gas-guzzler, the driver of the SUV is a little like George W. Bush aboard Air Force One: free to imagine himself master of the universe. Who cares that the SUV is only a station wagon pretending to be a tough guy, that the strategic objective is the mall, not Baghdad? As for those news reports that some of that gas money you pay at the pump goes to people who kill Americans, no problem there, either. Grab the remote. Press "Mute." By the way, that great 4X4 traction means you don't have to shovel the driveway.

Before 9/11 the SUV was already the symptom vehicle of America's energy addiction. After the invasion of Iraq, it proved-like America's weapons systems-not to be sufficiently expensive to acquire and run. Something even larger, something that consumed even more money and energy, was needed now that George W. Bush's widening wars and deepening deficits were providing the template for Americans and their approach to life.

As in Iraq, so on our Interstates: Defense Department spending came to the rescue. The even bigger and more cumbersome vehicle Americans needed at home turned out to be the Hummer. Adapted by General Motors, this was a civilianized version of the ... Humvee military vehicle ...

p171
Though "built on a modified( GM midsize truck platform," snazz had not been sacrificed to some liberal concept of frugality. The prototype, according to AP, was "powered by a 35o-horsepower, five-cylinder turbocharged engine," and featured "a power-operated folding canvas sunroof and drop-down rear window to offer open-air driving." In order to bolster the illusion that driving around in this still-enormous vehicle with the power-operated sunroof open was actually a form of exercise, "designers from sports apparel giant Nike Inc. collaborated on several aspects of the vehicle, including its tires and seats."

The Iraq invasion is the prime example of how Bush defended America abroad. The midsized Hummer perfectly illustrated how the George W. Bush consumer chain was supposed to operate, right here at home. Step One: Invading foreign countries with bad roads requires the Defense Department to develop Hummer-like vehicles for our troops to use. Step Two: Giant corporations like General Motors ("What's good for GM is good for America") translate that military equipment into consumer items for civilians to buy. Step Three: American taxpayers get to pay for these gargantuan, polluting, dangerous behemoths all over again, but this time they get to keep them in their garages.

There remains the subliminal concern (spread by the liberal think tanks and news networks) that driving to the corner Seven-Eleven in gigantic converted trucks is unhealthful for the people who buy them, and that it pollutes America too. Step Four: Healthy cross-branding with sports marketers like Nike takes care of that. Suppose this dangerous elitist toy actually gets produced? Wouldn't even a midsize Hummer break the budget of most middle-class Americans?

This is where George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" enters the big picture. He'll give you a tax break for buying a Hummer. In fact George W. Bush already has done his part by exempting the Hummer from taxes imposed on more affordable cars that consume less gas more efficiently. Like his financial rewards ("vouchers") for families who take their kids out of public schools, like his zero-tolerance policy toward inheritance taxes for the sons of wealthy, famous fathers, and like his legislation forbidding federal health care agencies from bargaining for lower prices with the giant pharmaceutical corporations, it's part of George W. Bush's economic stimulus plan to help the average, hard-working people of America by getting government off their backs. In fact the more expensive your vehicle, and the more gas it consumes, the bigger the tax break you get. But wait, things get even better. Since 9/11, George W. Bush has actually increased the tax exemption you get for buying such wasteful vehicles, and with your support he will make even more tax breaks for people who pay almost no taxes anyway part of his 2004 election campaign.

How did the Hummer tax break slip through? This tax break for road hogs was sold to Congress as part of George W. Bush's compassionate commitment to encouraging the survival of our endangered American family farms. The spin was that tax exemptions for small trucks, such as the kind used to haul around farm equipment, would encourage free enterprise in our rural communities. Things did not turn out that way. The reason, according to a Taxpayers for Common Sense white paper titled "A Hummer Of A Tax Break," is that "The tax code defines industrial vehicles by weight instead of function."

If the SUV you buy weighs more than 6,000 pounds, you're entitled to a George W. Bush tax break, even if your use of it is entirely recreational. It's not just Hummers. "Currently," the white paper notes, "there are 38 different luxury passenger SUVs, vans and trucks including the Lincoln Navigator, Cadillac Escalade, and the new Hummer H2, which weigh more than 6,000 pounds and therefore qualify for tax breaks."

p193
... as early as 1998, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and a number of other like-minded agitators did something that in and of itself signaled a generalized cognitive instability in their ranks. These Republican ultraradicals got together and wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton, pleading with him to adopt their strategic hallucination as his own, although a Democratic president was hardly likely to adopt a policy approach that a Republican president had already rejected. Their letter was symptomatic in other ways, notably in its wild-eyed grandiosity. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the others impetuously urged Clinton not merely to reverse US policy totally, but to do it dramatically and without warning-without consulting either Congress or America's allies. Specifically, they proposed that he use his annual State of the Union address to suddenly announce that the United States was unilaterally rejecting the multilateral, United Nations-sanctioned policy of containing Saddam, and instead, making "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power" America's new policy. To put it another way, they were proposing that the United States unilaterally reject all the international agreements that had ended the first Gulf War in 1991, and resume the march on Baghdad that the first President Bush had ordered halted after the liberation of Kuwait. Why? If he did not immediately do as Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the others demanded, terrible unspecified things would happen.

The key paragraphs of the 1998 letter follow. They outline the exact same policy that many of the same signers of the letter, having been empowered by George W. Bush, would adopt in 2001. That is to say, they demonstrate that the terrorist attacks of September ii later would be used as a pretext for implementing a plan-some would go so far as to say a plot-that was hatched years earlier. As this 1998 letter shows, the proposed invasion of Iraq was from the outset like "Star Wars"-a nonnegotiable doctrinal demand, not a rational response to the security needs of the American people.

"Dear Mr. President," the letter began: "We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union

Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the US and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." Why undertake such a melodramatic reversal of policy in such a theatrical way? "Mr. President," the letter continued, "the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat." End of explanation, though as in the future Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle, and the others argued that the United States must act unilaterally not only because Saddam was evil, but because our allies were worthless. In their exact words: "Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate."

From there, they plunged straight into the "for-us-or-against-us" syllogism that would become the centerpiece of George W. Bush's conduct of US foreign policy later. "The only acceptable strategy," they announced, "is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."

On one level, the image of these neocon ultras urging Clinton to embrace their paranoid misinterpretation of events in the Middle East seems simply daffy-a little like a crowd of protesters thrusting an antiwar petition on George W. Bush, and expecting him to sign it. But it's also sort of creepy-the "policy guidance" equivalent of being accosted by a neighbor who normally glares at you. Only today he doesn't just glare. He grabs you by the shirt collar and - eyes dilated, face red - shouts that unless you do what he wants, and do it right now, a great unnamed cataclysm will occur. (In fact, catastrophe did lie ahead, though, as 9/11 showed, Saddam Hussein wasn't the source.)

Here, as in the later arguments heard in Congress and at the United Nations for actually launching the Iraq war, the key verbs are "convinced" and "must," used to connect bald assertions like "dangerously inadequate" and "only acceptable strategy." These guys are convinced. Therefore the United States must "enunciate a new strategy." And this must done immediately, in the most dramatic way, which is exactly how George W. Bush and his capos actually would proceed, five years later, as they steamrollered America into the conquest and occupation of an entire foreign nation.

President Clinton ignored the "Get Saddam" letter for the same reason George W. Bush's father had rejected "Defense Guidance Policy" earlier. It was hysterical baloney. Yet the "Get Saddam" letter is nonetheless enormously revealing. For one thing, there is the recklessness. Here, as later, a president of the United States was being told he had no choice but to embark on a series of highly disruptive and dangerous actions solely because a crowd of Washington apparatchiks from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, whose chief intellectual activity is pounding out pro-war op-ed pieces, said so.

There was also the gratuitous disregard for fact. Here, as in the later debates over the invasion of Iraq, no actual evidence was provided to support any of the letter's contentions, including the key assertion that "current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding." Your neighborhood bowling team could have come up with a better-sourced strategic prospectus using the local high school library. Yet somehow Wolfowitz and his buddies imagined themselves entitled to dictate US foreign policy. Once installed in the White House, that's exactly what George W. Bush, the supposed outsider and champion of ordinary common sense, would give these "Inside the Beltway" critters free rein to do.

The "Get Saddam" letter shows us what the neocon fantasy was in 1998. Since then, the exact same fantasy has been acted out on our TV screens, though with real American and Iraqi blood. But what was the reality?

p206
When US military operations fail to achieve their objectives, they tend to get transformed into generalized crusades for freedom. This happened in Afghanistan, where Operation Infinite justice was rechristened Operation Enduring Freedom. Meanwhile, months, and then years passed, in the empty fastness of Afghanistan, with no sign of Osama and, from the White House, scarcely any further mention of his name. Would Osama bin Laden someday slip into the net, the same way Saddam Hussein eventually did? Every platoon, night-vision sniper scope and billion dollars expended on the war on Iraq is a diversion from the real war on terrorism, including the successful pursuit and apprehension of terrorist leaders. American intelligence remained so defective that, on those occasions when US forces still did go out Osama-hunting, all they unfortunately seemed to do was kill lots of little Afghan children.

In any event, bringing Osama bin Laden to justice ceased being a priority for George W. Bush within months of the arrival of US forces in Afghanistan at the end of 2001. It was demoted, instead, to a potential news option for the 2004 election year.

Rogue State

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